Tracy Schrans, Principal and President, Focal Research Consultants, discusses her upcoming session at IAGR2022 in Melbourne

“Hello, my name is Tracy Schrans from Focal Research in Nova Scotia, Canada. 

Dr. Tony Schellinck and I are looking forward to sharing our latest research with you all in beautiful Melbourne, Australia, this October. 

We’re going to be presenting our paper, “Creating Smart Responsible Gambling EGM’s”, and it’s about the development of effective models for identifying at-risk play in real time.

In order to advance the effectiveness and efficiency of safer gambling regulation, you really need insight about insitu consumer behaviour, and it is very helpful to have evidence-based systems that can use all of that available data to flag the complex play behaviours and decisions that are going to more accurately pinpoint risky gambling practices. 

This in turn is going to help us design targeted safer gambling strategies that will be more effective in assisting at-risk customers. 

Over the past year we worked with operators from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, as well as the National Research Council in Canada to administer a Gold Standard risk measure to over 7,000 regular machine gamblers. The information was then linked to each player’s machine play sessions over a one-year period to create this massive database that we could use to develop and test in-play risk detection algorithms.

We’re going to be sharing the results for the first time at the conference in Melbourne, and we hope you can join us to explore how we can use these models to create what we are calling Smart RG EGMs and how they will help us deliver more effective and efficient safer gambling actions for protecting at-risk gamblers in the future. 

We are looking forward to seeing you all in Melbourne, and until then take care and stay safe.”