Case #003 – Addictive Gambling
September 5th, 2026 :-
Hey, you wanna bet on the sports line? Want to bet if Donald Trump shits his pants on national television? Oh, how about we place bets on which Russian slave inside of a barren room wins a table tennis match? We have all of that and MORE, in the world of Online Gambling!
I decided to do a deep dive into this after I saw about sixteen gambling advertisements pop up on a wordpress website. It disgusted me to my core. Spinning slot machines, “Deposit $20 and get $200 Credits!”, and other such things that would make a gambling addict salivate more than a fat man at a buffet.
These gambling advertisements extend far beyond the scope of who they should be targeting. Short form content creators frequently make videos for gambling websites. A guy will proudly proclaim that he’s bet his rent on this airplane game, and the airplane lands on an aircraft carrier. He gets really excited and you see his account go up in balance. The UK has stats saying 88% of “Youth” have watched YouTube, specifically saying many watch YouTube shorts. In the US, 64% of children age 8-12 watch videos every day.
Gambling ad laws are designed around the idea that advertisements are going to only target adults, but advertising has changed. Now the creators themselves are the advertisements. Banners for gambling websites are proudly displayed at sporting events. It goes beyond just exposing children to gambling.
1 in 3 Young Adults in Canada (18 to 29) have done online gambling in the past year. There doesn’t seem to be any public studies available (more on that later) on the rise of online gambling addiction, but the current numbers are around 1% for adults at risk of gambling addiction. That’s for the older way gambling worked. Going into a casino, a backroom card shark den, or a bookie. It was considerably harder to “enter” into that gambling space than online gambling is.
Just myself I know several young men who are so addicted to gambling, they spend their entire paycheques on it. They keep chasing that win, dreaming that today will be the day that Steph Curry breaks his leg on the court and they win a million bucks. I don’t care about Statistics Canada, or America, or the UK. Quite frankly, all of these governments have skin in the game.
Let the poors keep wasting their money on stupid nonsense gambling games, which are most likely all rigged, so we can extract wealth from them. That’s all this is. Sure, the AGCO claims they test these “regulated” casinos regularly. They still warn that unregulated online casinos are not subject to these regulations. 9% of gamblers use these “unregulated” casinos, where there are no safeguards to determine if a game is rigged or not. As for the regulated casinos, the AGCO will test if a game is rigged online. However, I can think of about a thousand workarounds to that if I was a casino operator. I’m sure that an actual casino operator has more know-how than me in regards to loopholes, getting through regulations, etc.
In Ontario, and Canada at large, these gambling websites and operators heavily politically lobby. It doesn’t matter if it’s the federal liberals, or the provincial conservatives. They aggressively pursue relationships with politicians, in an attempt to loosen restrictions so they can rob the youth of their money. These politicians turn a blind eye towards it, because why wouldn’t they? When the Vice President of the Progressive Conservatives is a registered lobbyist for the Canadian Online Gaming Alliance!
If it isn’t apparent, I’ll tell it to you straight. You’re a paypig for the state, and they’re extracting your wealth for their friends. Anytime you place a bet on a game, you’re contributing to the rot of our society. It isn’t lost on me that the numbers for gambling were once publicized by Statistics Canada, but now you need to register with them to see these stats. I wonder who wanted that pushed?
The iGaming Ontario Act 2024 claims that the purpose of the act is to generate revenue for Ontario. These are all nice words, until you remember that the profit they’ve generated (3.2 billion dollars in 2025) comes from losses that everyday people experience when they gamble. It’s actually worse than that, since that’s just the profit. It doesn’t account for all the money spent on advertisements, upkeep, salaries, etc.
If we go off their numbers, roughly $1,116 was lost per person (on average) when they gambled over the year. That’s just in Ontario, where the market is heavily regulated. If we look to our southern neighbors, it gets much, much worse.
In 2025, the US Gambling Market generated $78.72 Billion Dollars in gross gaming revenue. Operators retained $16.96 Billion of that revenue as profit. Of course losses are not distributed evenly, but on average $1,281 USD is lost per gambler. Now, for both this and the last numbers, it includes people who buy lottery tickets and other things. Obviously losses range from the small to the massive. If one person lost $50 a year gambling on lottery, they’re added into the numbers the same as a young worker who lost $15,000 that year.
I think all these numbers are skewed anyway. Just from my own experience (anecdotal evidence incoming), I know a couple of degenerate gamblers. They will spend not hundreds, but thousands of dollars gambling per month. If they lose, they beg their family and friends for money. When they win, it’s only a matter of time before they lose it all.
Sure, the average guy might put $20 down on a lottery ticket every once in a while, lose it, but he got some entertainment out of it. These “professional” gamblers are on a whole other level, though. BossmanJack comes to mind, a Kick livestreamer who would bet thousands of dollars on whatever dumb new gambling game was out. These casinos would give him credits and incentivize him to keep playing, both as a way to take even more money from him – and as a way to advertise to his audience.
If you could inject heroin into your system via the internet, how many people would become junkies overnight? The same thing is happening with online gambling. You can literally bet on anything now. If a dildo will be thrown on the WNBA court, streakers, if WW3 will happen this year, or whatever else comes to mind.
I really appreciate how gambling websites are now making games specifically for children, too. Loud, colourful, and literally playing like a video game. That “airplane game” comes to mind, where you’re betting on if your plane will land or not. It looks like it takes skill, but it’s pure luck.
I watched a YouTuber for research, “IVANB”, on this game. Even he says that the advertisements for this game were all over his “For You Page” which led him to play the game. He has 1.1k subscribers as of writing this, but that plane video had 82,000 views. He laments how he has “tiktok brain” because he keeps increasing his bet. As an aside, he looks miserable too. Sunken eyes, depressed, etc. Like some sort of gambling ghoul raised from the dead.
“I should be saving up this money to pay off my debts, but why not use this as an opportunity to win money and pay off everything.”
He later clarifies he was totally “joking”, which, sure, I’m sure he was. When does selling hope become evil? I answer that it becomes evil when you’re forcing people into poverty to pursue happiness. That is evil.
If I was a political man, I’d say we should ban online gambling. Not restrict advertisements, but fully ban it as a practice. Heroin is illegal, alcohol has lots of safeguards in place, but not online gambling. The truth is, it doesn’t matter. It will never change. The people in power want it to be so, and it’ll be so. Anyone who is anti gambling will quickly change their tune the moment they come into office. The money is too lucrative for them.
The only thing you can do is STOP gambling. Stop clicking on advertisements. If you’re like me and have a website? DO NOT ALLOW ADVERTISEMENTS ON YOUR WEBSITE. I do not allow ANY ads on my website, and I certainly wouldn’t take money from gambling companies.
This is Philistine Review, signing off.
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