But despite both the efficiency and accessibility of gambling online, I still often found myself craving the inside of a poker club or a casino. The games offered in brick and mortar institutions were the same as the ones I could find online, so what then was the allure of these places that made me forgo the obvious comforts of gambling in my own room?

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For decades, those who tried to study the habits of gamblers have been frustrated by one crucial complication: a lack of reliable data. Studies often have to contend with unreliably small samples sizes and monitoring environments that don’t effectively simulate those of gambling establishments. The misreporting of statistics—both intentional and unintentional—by study subjects also compromises findings. But with the emergence of online gambling, researchers have an unprecedented opportunity to collect large amounts of unbiased data about gamblers as they operate in authentic gambling environments.

And they’ve unearthed one finding in particular that is noteworthy: Overwhelmingly, Internet gamblers exhibit a remarkable amount of restraint.

A series of studies conducted by the Harvard Medical School’s Division on Addiction, aimed at providing public policy makers with empirical research about Internet gambling, have reached a few general conclusions about the behavior of online gamblers. In partnership with bwin, a large European gambling site, the researchers were able to collect and analyze the data of tens of thousands sports bettors, online casino gamblers, and poker players over a period of two years.

From these studies, a prominent, unifying theme emerged: In each gambling category, the vast majority of players gambled infrequently and in moderation, while a small subset of players (between 1 percent and 5 percent) exhibited intense gambling behavior that far exceeded that of the rest of the sample.

Out of over 4,000 online casino gamblers examined, the median betting frequency over a period of nine months was once every two weeks, with a median outcome of around a 5.5 percent loss of all money wagered. One analysis of the roughly 40,000 sports bettors examined determined that participants placed a median of 2.5 bets of $5.50 every fourth day. And researchers at the University of Hamburg, in a study intended in part to supplement some of the work accomplished by the Harvard Medical School, found that from the over two million online poker identities they observed over a period of six months, the median player played only 4.88 hours and most players paid less than a dollar in rake fees per hour per table. (The separate studies placed emphasis on the median values, as they derived that the small group of intense gamblers drove up the mean values considerably.)

All this data suggests that broadly available online gambling won’t likely be an agent of wholesale societal destruction, as some have claimed. In fact, the effects of the vast increase in exposure to gambling that the Internet offers are, on a large scale, relatively mild. In 2011, Howard Shaffer and Ryan Martin, then staff members at Harvard’s Division on Addiction, wrote that “contrary to predictions derived from the exposure model, the prevalence of PG [pathological gambling] has remained stable or been influenced by adaptation during the past 35 years despite an unprecedented increase in opportunities and access to gambling.” According to Shaffer, when new opportunities to gamble are introduced into an area there is a short term increase in gambling behavior, but the frenzy eventually subsides and returns to normal levels. In the case of Internet gambling, many people simply acclimate to the increased availability of betting options or become quickly tired of it—sometimes in a matter of weeks.