Online Gambling Community Proven With Twitch Live Stream

• Twitch.tv is a well known streaming service for online gaming.
• There is a thriving Twitch community of people streaming online slot gameplay.
• Many of these players are sponsored by online casinos, which presents potential conflicts of interest.

LAS VEGAS - Many gamblers are familiar with the streaming website Twitch.tv, as it hosts several sporting events that are large gambling draws.

It’s not only esports anymore, although a lot of early esports was viewable mostly on Twitch.

In fact, Thursday Night Football is streaming on Twitch each week, on the Amazon Prime Twitch channel. However, the interlink between Twitch and gambling goes deeper than just being a viewing platform.

Twitch is home to a variety of gambling streamers - and not just of games of skill like poker.

The Slots section of Twitch.tv is full of viewers, with over 25 thousand people watching slot machine streamers at 10:00 a.m. EST.

Many of these streamers have endorsement deals with online casinos, and Twitch itself does not seem interested in regulating the practice.

“A lot of what you see in those Twitch streams are people that are essentially affiliate marketers, they’re getting paid commission,” said Keith Whyte, Executive Director at the National Problem Gambling Helpline.

Indeed, the existence of the category itself shows that Twitch seems to have no objection to the content being provided.

This is certainly an interesting development in the further normalization of legal online gambling, but there are two major questions to be answered.

How long is this going to last? Is Twitch going to crack down at some point?’
How much does this help normalize online gambling, and can this help in legalization efforts?

Twitch has gone through the effort of cleaning up gambling scandals before, but only insofar as they involved games played by minors.

For example, in CS:GO, there was a famous skin gambling scandal in which famous streamers faked gambling wins to get people to use their websites for wagering in game items.

Twitch cracked down on those streamers, but allows this online casino and slots category to continue unabated, presumably because there is far less deception as to what is going on.

The answers to the second question is beyond any one person, as none of us can see the future.