When 28-year-old manual laborer Elshan Gulmammadov took to the slot machines in the Georgian town of Marneuli last year, all he wanted was money for the birth of his second child and some fun.Instead, he became a victim.

Gulmammadov earns only 10 laris ($4.03) for an eight-hour day toting flour and bread at a bakery in the village of Kizilajlo, about two hours to the west of Marneuli.Though he somehow managed to get a 2,500-lari ($1,010) bank loan to pay for caring for his newborn son, he needed to raise money to pay off the debt.

That’s not easy in his native Kvemo Kartli, ranked as Georgia’s lowest-income region. Gambling in the region’s central town of Marneuli, a predominantly ethnic Azerbaijani town of about 140,000, appeared to provide the answer.

First, Gulmammadov bet on soccer matches online. Eventually, he was spending most of each day at a local internet club to watch games and read predictions, he says. Every week, he spent all of his salary on slot machines.

Next, he sold his livestock, and borrowed $1,500 from friends. His father, a porter at the Marneuli bazar, took out a $3,500 loan to cover Gulmammadov’s losses.

“I tried to stop [gambling], but I couldn′t,” Gulmammadov says. “There was a voice in my brain telling me to play. İt is a kind of mental illness. But there is no medicine to cure it.”

In downtown Marneuli, there are, however, plenty of ways to keep gambling – casinos, totalizators and more provide much-needed jobs in this agricultural area, where over a third of the working-age population is either unemployed or economically inactive.

But as Georgian gambling has boomed - over the past two years, the state has received over 357 million laris ($139.3 million) in duties, according to the Revenue Service - rural consumers appear particularly vulnerable to the risks.

