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One recent weekday afternoon, hundreds of older gamblers lined up on the third floor of Bally's casino and hotel in Atlantic City, N.J., to receive a reward for their steady patronage. That day it was a bathrobe, but casinos routinely dish out blenders, lunches, pump-priming cash and bus trips right to their doors. The more you play, the better your comps—free nights at the hotel, for example, and dozens of drawings a week for jewelry or cars.
"Say something is free to a senior, and he's there," says Al Gesregan, a New Jersey social worker who treats compulsive gamblers.
It isn't just the freebies, of course. Like the general adult population, most older Americans gamble responsibly in one form or another, overwhelmingly for fun and in the hopes of winning money.
But older gamblers are especially vulnerable to wagering more than they can afford, experts say. The number of older problem gamblers is rising as boomers age, while programs that serve problem gamblers are already too few, overextended and underfunded.
The opportunities to gamble are multiplying, too. A wager of some type is now legal in every state except Utah and Hawaii. The boom in casino construction—on riverboats, Indian reservations and, of course, in Las Vegas—is still going strong. In December, for example, Pennsylvania issued its first 11 casino licenses.
And the Internet makes gambling available 24/7. As the percentage of people ages 50 to 64 using the Internet has grown—from less than 40 percent in 2000 to 69 percent in 2006—so has the share of older people's calls to gambling hotlines regarding addiction issues with online play.
According to a 2003 study commissioned by the Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling, 8 percent of Florida gamblers age 55 and older were at risk for problem gambling—meaning that increased time, thought and money devoted to gambling could interfere with other areas of their lives. (Of all adult gamblers in the state, 6.9 percent were at risk for problem gambling.) For pathological gambling—thinking of little else but slots and blackjack tables—0.8 percent of older gamblers are at risk compared with 0.5 percent of all adult gamblers.
"The situations that we encounter as we age—loneliness, death of a spouse, loss of mobility, loss of employment—make gambling a very attractive form of relief," says Pat Fowler, executive director of the Florida council. "It's a way for many people to anesthetize their pain."
That can be an expensive habit. New Jersey gamblers age 55-plus spend on average nearly $3,900 a year at casinos, $14,300 if they're problem players, according to a study released last year by the PublicMind Poll at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, N.J.
And many older gamblers don't have a lot of room for financial error. Gambling addicts often take out second mortgages; run up debt with credit cards, casinos and relatives; and squander their retirement savings. As Fowler points out, older addicts have "much less time to recoup losses or rebuild a nest egg."
For those who get in too deep, the resources are minimal, Fowler says. The federal government allocates no money to help problem gamblers. Many states require lottery and gambling commissions to publish educational and addiction prevention materials, but that's a far cry from paying for treatment.
Physicians could identify more gambling problems simply by asking patients if they are gamblers, says Laura Letson, program director for the Florida council. "It's not at all uncommon to see seniors being diagnosed with conditions ranging from cardiac to neurological to stomach-related illnesses, or with migraines, hypertension, ulcers or palpitations, the cause of which could be gambling."
Health insurance plans typically don't cover therapy for gambling addiction. Advocacy groups set up help lines that can refer callers to therapists, but they don't have funds to pay for treatment.
When gamblers seek help, therapist Gesregan says, it's because they've hit rock bottom. "These folks are just flat-out broke," says Gesregan, a board member of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey. In treatment, "first, we get the gambling under control. Then we move on to other issues of loneliness, isolation—the underlying addictive patterns."
The gaming industry makes no bones about the fact that older gamblers are its "bread-and-butter" business, as Christopher Jonic, spokesman for Harrah's Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, puts it.
Says Marty Goldman, vice president of marketing for the Atlantic City region of Harrah's Entertainment, "Our mission is to get a fair share of every player's gaming wallet. But we never want to extend that wallet beyond a player's means."
And when players do get in over their heads? "We train every one of our frontline people to recognize them," Goldman says, "and we're aggressive in weeding these players out."
Still, he says, "when you think about [older gamblers'] discretionary time and you think about times that would be slower in the casinos, such as midweek, that is the optimum time for us to attract a heavily older audience."
And the optimum time to give away freebies—but perhaps creating a problem in the process.
Emily Sachar, a journalist, author and website director, lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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