We are interested in understanding Online Gambling's effect on impulsivity. For this study, you will be presented with information relevant to Online gambling and bipolar disorder. Then, you will be asked to answer some questions about it. Your responses will be kept completely confidential.




Here is the link: https://qualtricsxmr8k69n98z.qualtri...67jM7B7gexSicm

I greatly appreciate your participation, Thank You!

whats with the sketchy looking url?

I used the survey tool Qualtrics XM and they just gave me a link so I can distribute for my survey.

ok that seems reasonable, so i gave it a click


i looked it over, i think one of the problems you'll face with this is many of the people here gamble professionally and you're treating it purely as a negative because you're tying it to impulsive behavior and follow up questions are about gambling support groups

legitimately, over half the respondents could be professional gamblers so i don't think this is the correct venue for this kind of survey - or at least requires some more work to separate the recreational gamblers from those who do it for a living

Yeah, I concur. Especially as you haven't separated skill-based games from pure random chance games. As this is a poker forum that largely revolves around teaching people how to approach the game to maximize expected value (EV), I think you will suffer a worse bias than even usual with self-selected participation.

Though I have some doubts about your presumed hypothesis (based on the questions you are asking), it will get stomped into the ground if a large percentage of your respondents are those well trained in maximizing EV and playing poker or (much more rarely) sports betting (in which I presume you include fantasy sports competitions) for a living.

Bottom line: we can respond if you need to get up to a certain number to have the sample size count for your class, but be prepared to see no correlation in your data if we do. Do you still want the serious poker community to respond to this?

At this point I just really need the sample size count because I am running out of time as the school year is about to finish in a month, I will try to continue this research after school closes and redesign my methodology and correct my hypothesis and what I am looking for.


Thank You

„Have you experienced financial consequences as a result of your gambling?“

So a lot of ppl taking this survey will answer with yes, because they gamble for a living.

Fair enough. I'll go fill it out. You don't need to tell the AP instructor, but hopefully this helps you with concepts of survey design and participant selection.

FWIW, this is a real problem with all sorts of research. When your target group is niche, you pretty much have to rely on self-selection, and self-selected participants almost always have a bias towards the extremes on an issue, or they wouldn't bother to participate.

Oops. I lied. I can't participate unless you want me to lie about my age, as the survey only goes up to 35, and I'm older than that.

To paraphrase Stanford Wong, any game can be beaten under the right conditions. There are people who've beaten lottery games by skill.

TBF to our student, there was an academic here about a year ago making similar mistakes and it seemed as if that was the norm in the field. I'll fill out the thing.

oh no, I'm in the same age category as garick, rip

Man I hate when poker is conflated with other types of gambling. Honestly I don’t consider it gambling at all, the only random part of poker are the card distributions. All other variables, aside from weird scenarios that tend to happen in live games (dealer errors etc.), are akin to a chess move.

I understand why it happens but due to the stigmas surrounding gambling, people don’t care to listen to the reasons poker really is different. Bringing this up because as others have said what OP is trying to do is deeply flawed, poker is not the same as other gambling, and people on this site trend toward being better players.

Not surprising though, and can’t blame OP, given people have been selling books with bogus gambling “systems” for years, plus there are table “poker” games that casinos run like Ultimate Texas Holdem that people confuse with actual poker. These things contribute a lot to making people sound crazy when they talk about winning at poker.

The fact that poker is a skill game that is beatable over time does not affect even one bit that poker is a gambling game.

Poker. Is. Gambling.

If you cannot accept this, you are deluding yourself.

Moreover, there are more sources of randomness and unpredictability of results. The process that determines whether or not there is a whale in the game is stochastic. I mean, whales are more likely to be splashing chips around late on a Friday night than on a Tuesday afternoon, but there are no guarantees. And you don't always get seated at the whale's table, and getting on the seat change list is not going to help, because when the whale is throwing a party, no one in the game is ever going to want to leave. Table and seat draw in tournaments: random, and they have a big impact on ROI. If Bitcoin is up, the crypto bros have a lot of money to throw around at poker tables; but if Bitcoin is down what money the crypto bros have has to go to paying off their margin calls. Et cetera.

The factors you listed are within your control as a player. While you can’t control who is in a specific game, you can elect to not play a specific game … just like you can decide not to play a hand or put money in the pot. Find games you have an edge in and play those. This is a skill in and of itself.

Less true in MTTs but there is actionable data available to help determine if you have an edge in specific MTT fields.

Even if you play without knowing you have an edge that isn’t really gambling … it’s just plain stupid unless you’re playing solely for entertainment and can easily afford the losses.

A better example of actual gambling would be if you bet me $100 I can’t jump across a stream (without 1 or both parties knowing the answer). Even calling casino games “gambling” is kind of a misnomer … when you know full well the odds are against you (and specifically what the house edge is)

If you are playing any game that you don’t have an edge at (when your goal is to win and not just be entertained) that is just called being a sucker.

The scale that I gave out last year was one proposed by other researchers in the field, and where I specifically thought that the items did not differentiate between skilled and unskilled gambling formats. Obviously the experimental hypothesis cannot be given away to participants.

The resulting publication is here, on which I am very happy to listen to any informed criticism which I might look to build on in my future research (this is the academic ethos):

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/7h5pn

thank you for sharing

my lizard brain made it hard to follow - i think including a few laymans sentences devoid of technical jargon in the summary and conclusion would have done wonders but i got there in the end

100% agree with your premise as professional gamblers are far more likely to view "positive attitude" as "being in a good head space" as the mental game is a big thing we talk about - ie you don't go sit down at a high stakes game the same afternoon you walk in on a train being ran on your wife because you're going to tilt slightly easier than usual and make suboptimal decisions that day

100%