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FOUR out of every five problem gamblers in South Australia are addicted to pokies - despite the growth of online and sports betting. A profile of problem gamblers treated by the Flinders University School of Medicine shows less than 1 per cent said they had a problem gambling online but 83.9 per cent admitted to poker machine addiction. Flinders University Professor of Psychiatry Malcolm Battersby said experts did not know why a boom in sports betting and online gambling had not yet translated to an increase in problem gamblers.

Although online poker is a gold mine of data, until now nobody knows where the players and their money come from. It seems that the knowledge about the online poker market has not been able to keep up with the speed of its evolution in the past years. This paper is the first to shed light on this matter. We use data of 4,591,342 poker identities from the Online Poker Database of the University of Hamburg (OPD-UHH) collected over a six months period from 09/2009 to 03/2010. We find that the USA is still by far the biggest market with 1,428,823 active players and 650.5 million US$ net revenues in 2009. However, with regard to the number of internet users in a country Hungary is the biggest relative market: One out of 57 Hungarians with internet access plays online poker for real money. The two main drivers of the proportion of online poker players per internet users are GDP per capita and culture. Using the data from the OPD-UHH, future research will be able to break down the market also on a regional level within countries and to examine inter and intra country differences in the playing habits of online poker players.