The Brief Addiction Science Information Source (BASIS)

The WAGER, Vol. 3(43) - Gambling on Campus

The NCAA football season is well underway and basketball will begin in a matter of weeks. And, if past years provide any indication, collegiate betting continues. While much media coverage has been focused in recent years on large-scale betting rings, less attention has been given to the daily gambling activities in which college students participate. Two recent studies contribute to this discourse by shedding light on the gambling behaviors of enrolled students. The first employed a sample of 521 students at a community college in Canada. Because the student body included a significant proportion of non-traditional students, the demographics of... Read more →

The Wager, Vol. 3 (42) - Time Capsule

In March of this year the American Academy of Political and Social Science devoted an entire issue of its journal, The Annals, to the study.of gambling. That an established scholarly outlet would allocate 196 pages to gambling suggests that the field of gambling studies at last has established a niche in the spectrum of academic discourse. But the field is hardly nascent; in fact, the March special issue was the third TheAnnals had devoted to gambling. The first, published in May of 1950, provides a unique opportunity to learn how the post-war academic community viewed gambling. Of course, the social... Read more →

The WAGER 3(41) - Your Cheatin’ Hearts

Geneticists collect DNA samples. The Census Bureau collects demographic data. Philatelists collect postage stamps. Linguists collect words. Contrary to popular opinion, the discipline of linguistics involves consid­erably more than upside-down ‘e’s and odd-looking ‘a’s. In actuality, the scope of the linguist may include physiol­ogy, literary criticism, history, evolutionary biology, and ethnography. It is the latter method that Thomas Clark employed to gather the 20,000 entries of gambling-related lingo. Through interviews and participant-observation, Clark and colleague Thomas Martinet, who is a boxman in the craps pit at a club in Las Vegas, compiled a sizea ble list of “insider” gambling terms.... Read more →

The WAGER 3(40) - Getting Medieval, Spanish Style

Contrary to popular perception, the state regulation of gambling is not an exclusive product of Enlightenment-era classic liberalism. Some seven centuries before the first neon sign lit the Las Vegas Strip, Spanish dice throwers became subject to a set of royal mandates that severely curtailed their activities. The latter half of the thirteenth century bore witness to the sweeping reforms in laws concerning gambling, a change primar­ily promulgated by Alfonso el Sabio (1252-1284; (1). Redacted into a single treatise, the Ordenamiento de las tafure­rias, the scope and purpose of Alfonso’s legislation are not entirely dissimilar from those of contemporary gambling... Read more →