Gambling Research Index

The Weekly Digest No. 2

A last care visit before suicide, self-exclusion that half of gamblers know about, and one Bundesliga matchday of advertising

October 26, 2026. By Chris Beerman, LCSW, CADC.

Most Finnish gambling-disorder suicides followed a care visit within a month, half of Canadian gamblers know self-exclusion exists, and one Bundesliga matchday carried 18,708 gambling references.

The week's most sobering paper is a Finnish register study of everyone who died with a gambling disorder diagnosis between 1996 and 2023: a quarter died by suicide, and most of them had seen a health service in the month before. The rest of the list is about the machinery around gambling, from deposit methods and self-exclusion to how much advertising one football matchday carries.

Studies worth reading

Rahapeliriippuvuus ja itsemurha – viimeinen käynti terveydenhuollossa ennen kuolemaa 1996–2023

Sosiaalilääketieteellinen Aikakauslehti, Finland.

From the national care register, the authors identified all 258 people aged 15 or over who died in Finland between 1996 and 2023 with a recorded gambling disorder diagnosis; 26 percent died by suicide. Their median age at death was 41 against 59 for other causes, all had at least one other psychiatric diagnosis, half had previously been treated for self-harm, and 62 percent had been in contact with health care in the 30 days before death, 14 percent on the day itself, mostly in specialised mental-health care. The sample is small and limited to people who had ever received the diagnosis, and the paper and its abstract are in Finnish. For anyone running a psychiatric service, it says the window for asking about gambling is often open shortly before a death.

Journal of Gambling Studies, Germany, Spain, Great Britain and France.

Transaction records for 72,494 newly registered customers of one European online sports betting operator, analysed with fixed-effects models that compare the same player across deposit methods. Against bank transfers, days funded by vouchers or e-wallets carried lower stakes, e-wallet deposits were followed by quicker withdrawal attempts and voucher deposits by slower ones, and cards made no difference; about 89 percent of deposits were never followed by a withdrawal, and a quarter of withdrawal requests, almost half by value, were later reversed. The operator is unnamed and the study period is not given in the abstract. Industry-funded: the work was done under a research contract between the Division on Addiction and Entain, which the authors say had no role in the questions or protocol; the Division also lists DraftKings among its current funders.

Casino and Online Self-Exclusion in Canada: Awareness, Uptake, and Compliance

Journal of Gambling Studies, Canada.

An online panel survey of 8,466 adults who had used electronic gaming machines, casino table games or online gambling in the past year. About 56 percent knew voluntary self-exclusion existed, with awareness highest in British Columbia and among people with problem gambling or a substance use disorder, and roughly a quarter of those aware had used it, most often people aged 18 to 29. Gambling during the exclusion period was common; advertising exposure was not associated with it after adjustment, but having received formal help for gambling was associated with lower odds of breaking the ban. A panel sample and self-reported compliance limit the estimates. The authors' suggestion, folding formal support into enrolment, is one I would like to see tested. Funded by the Alberta Gambling Research Institute; preregistered on OSF.

Preventing Gambling Among Adolescents: An Umbrella Review of School-Based Prevention Programmes

Journal of Prevention, Spain.

An umbrella review of seven systematic reviews and meta-analyses of school-based gambling prevention, resting on 38 primary studies that the reviews cite 107 times between them, which the authors call substantial overlap. Programmes reliably improved knowledge and beliefs about gambling, but effects on behaviour were modest, inconsistent and rarely sustained, and all seven reviews rated critically low on AMSTAR-2. For anyone buying a school programme, a change in attitudes is not yet evidence of a change in gambling. Funded by Spain's National Plan on Drugs.

The Prevalence of Gambling Advertising during a Matchday of the German Bundesliga: A Frequency and Content Analysis of Live TV Coverage, Sport Highlight Programmes and Social Media

Journal of Gambling Studies, Germany.

The authors recorded all nine matches of matchday 31 of the 2024/25 season, two public-broadcaster highlight programmes and the Facebook and Instagram accounts of the ten largest licensed sports betting providers, and counted 18,708 gambling references. In the live broadcasts gambling was on screen for 32.7 percent of the recording time, about 9.9 references a minute, two thirds of them pitchside hoardings; only 3.3 percent of references carried an age or harm-reduction message, and none on stadium structures. Paid social media advertising reached more than 10.3 million accounts and was targeted 90.8 percent at men, mostly aged 18 to 34. One matchday is a small sample; the comparison the authors want regulators to make is with the State Treaty's rule that advertising must not be excessive. Free full text.

Widespread Suspected Illegal Advertising of Paid Loot Boxes and Social Casino Games in Belgium: Empowered by the EU Digital Services Act to Assess Compliance Using Meta's Ad Repository

European Addiction Research, Belgium.

Belgium treats paid loot boxes as unlicensed gambling, so advertising the games that contain them is a separate offence. Using the ad library the Digital Services Act requires Meta to publish, the authors checked 372 games known to contain loot boxes or social casino mechanics and found 172 advertised to Belgian users between October 2024 and February 2025; 1,574 sampled ads were seen at least 4.5 million times, 72.5 percent were set to reach people under 21, and on the authors' own assumption about the 18 to 24 bracket, more than 544,000 views may have been by under-21s. Meta's figures cannot be independently checked and the under-21 estimate rests on that assumption, but the method is the transferable part. Funded by an Academic Forum for the Study of Gambling grant drawn from UK Gambling Commission regulatory settlements; free full text.

Policy and public health news

Trials and preregistrations

Also in the index

Thirty-nine studies entered the index this week, among them a Danish multi-site survey of gambling problems among forensic psychiatric patients, with free full text. All of them, with filters, at gambling-research.com/research; this week's legislative and court activity, including a new Kalshi complaint filed in the Western District of Louisiana on October 23, is at gambling-research.com/bills and gambling-research.com/courts.