ESRI study finds four in ten Irish sports bettors move on to online slots and casino games

The report is precise about the figure behind the headline. Of the gamblers who first opened an online account to bet on horses or sport, 38% began betting on at least one of the more immediate products: casino games, slots, bingo or scratchcards.

The gap between why people sign up and what they end up playing is wide. Only 6% of respondents opened their account with the intention of playing casino games, and 4.5% to play slots, but an additional 12% and 9% respectively began playing these once the account was open. For scratchcards, 15% opened an account to use them and a further 13% started afterwards.

The authors’ reading is that online access tempts customers into forms of gambling they might otherwise have been unlikely to try.

Pete Lunn, one of the authors, argued that this cross-selling draws customers towards products where the risk of developing problems is higher, according to the Irish Times report on the launch. For anyone who signed up to back a horse at Leopardstown or put a few euro on a GAA match, that is the point worth sitting with: the same wallet sits one tap away from a slot machine.

Online accounts are now the norm among Irish gamblers. The ESRI found that 80% of gamblers hold at least one online account, and 53% of account holders have more than one.

Of those who had opened an online account, 54% went on to open a second one, citing good odds, easy registration and promotional offers among the most common reasons. Around 10% of online gamblers had four or more accounts.

Operator contact featured heavily. One in seven respondents said their most recent online session directly followed an email, app notification or gambling advertisement, and roughly one in five reported receiving notifications from operators every day.

Losses were reported more often online. In their most recent session, 26% of online gamblers said they lost “a lot”, compared with 17% of in-person gamblers. One in five online sessions interrupted another activity, with work and family time the most frequently reported.

The study also described an asymmetry: gamblers said opening accounts and depositing money was easier than closing accounts or withdrawing winnings.

Anne Marie Caulfield, chief executive of the GRAI, described the study at its launch as “the most detailed picture yet of gambling in Ireland”. The regulator, which is still rolling out its powers on a phased basis, said its focus will be on “practical and proportionate protections, including marketing standards, effective account controls and self-exclusion arrangements”.

The report points to one specific lever in the new gambling legislation. It suggested examining the part of the Act that would limit an online account to a single gambling activity, meaning a punter would need a separate account to bet on sport, play an online casino or buy scratchcards.

That provision has not been switched on.

The appetite for change among gamblers themselves is mixed. About one in four are trying to cut down or plan to do so, yet a third of those already trying to cut back reported gambling the same amount or more than a year earlier. Self-reported survey data has its limits, and the sample of 1,000 was designed to be representative of gamblers rather than of the adult population, so the figures describe people who gamble rather than Ireland as a whole.

The figures below are taken from the ESRI report and its launch release of 4 November 2026, based on a survey of 1,000 gamblers.