Everyt day we Post readers are treated to a sort of star letter: one reader’s effort which is singled out by getting a two-column headline and a blue background. Monday’s effort, by a Mr CB Lee, picked up a point made in an earlier news story. This stated that nine out of ten problem gamblers who sought help from a Caritas centre for such people were “debt-ridden”. This, said Mr Lee, came as no surprise. Well, I suppose people with a gambling problem tend to have debts, generally speaking. But Mr Lee said the original report did not get to the root of the problem, which was “the abundance of illagal gambling and the aggressive and glitzy marketing by Macau casinos”. Mr Lee concluded that the Caritas report “misses the point and did not really add value to the debate.”
This seemed a mite unkind, so I dug out the original story to see where Caritas had gone wrong. The story quoted a spokesman for Caritas, one Joe Tang Yiu-cho, as saying that “nine out of ten of the gamblers who sought its help were heavily indebted, compared to (note to subs: that should be “compared with”) only three to four out of ten a few years ago”. Mr Tang attributed the change to the appearance of companies willing to make loans quickly and with minimal or no collateral. He also noted that the Jockey Club’s “net margin” — which is what the club calls its profit from gambling — had increased by six per cent in the last financial year.
What are we to make of all this? Clearly Mr Tang is right in supposing that something has changed in his clientele. A jump from 30 per cent to 90 per cent does not look like a random fluctuation. On the other hand Mr Tang’s version of the cause must be considered a speculation. There are other possible explanations, after all. Anyone with a gambling problem is going to run into debt sooner or later, because in the long run the house always wins. Maybe people are waiting until later before seeking help. Or perhaps the public’s perception of what constitutes a problem is changing.
We can, though, I think safely exclude the explanations offered by Mr Lee, which are that gamblers are borrowing from illegal bookies or casinos. They of all people know how slim are their chances of getting their money back. No doubt gamblers can get loans through more traditional channels. I imagine serious gambling addicts are quite ingenious at conning people into financing their habit. But people who lend money have every incentive to be careful.
What really bothered me about Mr Lee’s offering, though, was his complaint about the abundance of illegal gambling and casino ads. Hong Kong does not suffer from an abundance of illegal gambling. It suffers from an abundance of legal gambling. Addicted gamblers do not care who is on the other end of their bets. Every estate has a betting shop. Losing money could not be easier. You can even do the whole thing by phone. Moreover the glitzy advertising by Macau casinoes, wherever it is, is totally outshouted by the free advertising provided by Hong Kong media for the Jockey Club.
In the newspaper which featured Mr Lee’s letter there were no advertisements, glitzy or otherwise, for Macau casinos. There were ads for the usual things: expensive watches, expensive flats, expensive clothes, expensive schools, but not a casino in sight. On the other hand there were two whole pages devoted to horse-racing, the Jockey Club’s traditional way of parting fools from their money, and a further whole page devoted to soccer, the new attraction for eager losers. The television companies are even more generous. Whole race meetings are televised live from nose to tail. Further hours of air time are devoted to advice for punters and post race analysis. News bulletins on the relevant days inform us that “now it’s time to check your Mark Six numbers” as if any viewer who had not bought a ticket in this particular lottery was some kind of freak.
Mr Lee thought that “gaming advertising” should be tightly restricted. Somehow I don’t think the relentless plugging of the Jockey Club was what he had in mind. He lives in Happy Valley. Perhaps he works there too.
tim's experiment 
You”re right about this. This is a real case of “the elephant in the room”. The Jockey Club advertises in all the media, and they daren’t say anything negative about it. It also hands out a vast amount of funds to charities (I wonder how much to those providing services for gambling addicts?), so no one connected with any charity will say a word against them. The JC has “battled” against online gambling and succeeded in making it more or less illegal, while at the same time jazzing up the image of its race meetings. If you’ve been recently you’ll have seen the younger, international crowd milling in with those old hardened gamblers. There is beer on tap and loud live pop music blaring between races. And it’s still a huge matter of pride to belong to the club, even if you can’t pay your way in as you used to now that committee members have been found guilty of taking bribes.
But there’s another, new phenomenon that worries me: those screaming ads for loans appearing on every bus and train telling you that you can just take out a huge loan and all your worries will be solved. I don’t know why no one has complained about these ads because this certainly isn’t truth in advertising.
You’ve pinned the nove (if you had a sub-editor, that’d be “nose”, I guess) on the right end of the donkey again, Tim. Jokes aside, it’s a shocking curse but people just go on dreaming.