UK Gambling Week in Review for August 8, 2013

There have been some very strange winds blowing in the world of UK gambling over the past week, with political hostilities between the UK and Spain now threatening to spill over and effect the online gaming industry in nearby Gibraltar –Gibraltar is ostensibly under the control of the UK, but Spain has never officially relinquished control of their former territory.

In addition to the Spain/UK fiasco I’ll also take a look at two other stories in this week’s installment of the UK Gambling Week in Review. In the first story I will detail a new executive hire for one of the biggest names in online gaming bwin.party, and in the second story I’ll look at some newly developed software that will allegedly detect and help identify problem gamblers.

bwin.party appoints Jeffrey Haas as Group Director of Poker

In the very near futire bwin.party will have a new Group Director of Poker, as the company named former PokerStars executive Jeffrey Haas as the replacement for outgoing Director of Poker Chris Welch this week. Haas will officially take over in September according to a pokerfuse.com article, with the two men working together in the interim.

Haas has been in the poker industry for many years, most recently as the Director of Strategy & Business Development, New Platforms for The Rational Group (the parent company of PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker) and before that he worked with Bwin when the company owned the OnGame Network prior to their merger with Party Poker.

UK and Spain Hostilities Seep into Gibraltar

As tensions flare across a number of geo-political lines between the UK and Spain the online gaming industry (specifically the online gaming industry in Gibraltar) is becoming the victim of collateral damage. The main issue between the countries as it relates to gambling seems to be the proposed 15% tax on online gaming companies that are headquartered overseas but doing business in the UK, but the problems run far deeper than that.

The recent hostilities between the two nations reads like something out of a bad comedy movie, with the sovereignty of Gibraltar called into question and the situation escalating when Gibraltar started construction on a man-made coral reef that threatened Spanish fishing areas (yeah, you can’t make this stud up).

In response to the coral reef Spain threatened a €50 toll for border crossings (many Spanish citizens work in Gibraltar) and even suspending all air travel to the British territory.

A number of gaming companies (888, William Hill, and Ladbrokes to name just three) have moved from the UK to Gibraltar in recent years to take advantage of the countries lax tax code, but the new initiative by the UK government to tax providers 15% even if they reside outside of the UK (currently this tax is a mere 1%) could see several major online gaming providers rethink their locations.

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Software to Detect Problem Gamblers Developed

Featurespace, a UK tech company that began as a University of Cambridge research project has apparently developed a software program that can identify potential problem gamblers, according to an article in The Guardian.

The program uses “machine learning techniques” to identify online gamblers who may show signs of problem gambling. Essentially the software uses the same data a casino’s Rewards Club would use, analyzing the time played, frequency and size of bets, and other metrics to build a profile of the player.

According to Featurescape, they can then use this information to identify a player’s normal betting patterns, and identify when abnormal or risky behavior is occurring.

The software was initially developed as a fraud protection measure for gaming sites, “… it was looking at one aspect of fraud – first party fraud – which is where a customer will charge back a transaction and say “well I didn’t make that”, though sometimes they actually did make that transaction but they may have been spending a lot more than they wanted to”, said David Excell, co-founder and CTO.

The shift to problem gambling detection occurred when Featurscape, “… decided since we’re harvesting so much data for our fraud solution work, how can we use some of that to try to understand the player from a corporate social responsibility point of view, to understand “is that player in control?” and so on”, said Excell.