The University of Nevada has hosted the International Conference on Gambling and Risk-Taking every few years for the past several decades. Increasingly prominent on the agenda is problem gambling, and I attend many of these talks, since there aren’t as many talks on the mathematics of gambling.

While some of the speakers discuss treatment programs, many of the talks, surprisingly, are about identifying and defining problem gambling. At the 2009 conference, a speaker who worked for Harrah’s stated that their biggest challenge in tackling problem gambling was that they didn’t have any method to identify a problem gambler. “Oh well, I guess there’s nothing we can do then!” [shrug of shoulders] Continue reading The Real Problem with Problem Gambling