Gambling during lockdown: why the 2020 figures need context
Updated: Sep 28
When arcades shut and sporting fixtures disappeared from the calendar in 2020, gambling habits changed too. The question behind this post was whether people were moving online. The original answer was much more confident than the evidence justified.
Its claims of three percentage points of overall growth and a fifteen-point jump in live betting did not identify a clear dataset, comparison period or measure. Those figures have been withdrawn rather than repeated as established facts.
The Gambling Commission’s pandemic reporting separated active accounts, bets, session lengths and gross gambling yield. These measures answer different questions. An increase in betting revenue, for example, is not the same as an increase in the number of people gambling.
There is another reason to read old releases carefully. The Commission now flags its September 2020 operator-data release, published that November, because an operator supplied incorrect information. It directs readers to corrected data in later releases.
Even an accurate market total cannot show whether a particular person was coping well. Nor can it establish whether a public-health restriction was justified. The earlier headline blurred those separate issues.
This corrected archive note keeps the original subject—gambling behaviour during lockdown—while removing the unsupported conclusion and the invitation to respond to it by taking up casino offers.
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