Matthew Rockloff – the psychologist who studies gambling for a living

My name is Matthew Rockloff. I’m a professor of psychology at Central Queensland University, and I’ve spent the better part of 25 years trying to understand why people gamble – what draws them in, what keeps them there, and what the real costs look like when things go sideways. I lead the Experimental Gambling Research Laboratory (EGRL) at CQU, which is the largest independent gambling research centre in Australia. We don’t take industry money. That independence is something I’ve protected deliberately, because the moment research is funded by the people it scrutinises, the findings stop meaning much.

I was born in the United States and spent years in Florida and Texas before moving to Queensland in 2001. I arrived with alligator boots, a Stetson, and a freshly minted Ph.D. from Florida Atlantic University. Somewhere along the way the boots got replaced by Crocs and the hat became an Akubra – which feels like a fair trade for a country this good. I’ve been here ever since, and Queensland is home. My wife Susan is from Alice Springs, which means I married into a family with genuine outback credentials, and that keeps me honest.

Writing for Ripper Casino since 2026, I bring something to casino content that most reviewers don’t have: a research career built on understanding exactly how these environments work on the human brain, and what happens when the experience tips from recreation into something more costly.

The career in brief

I completed my Ph.D. in psychology at Florida Atlantic University in 1999. After arriving in Queensland in 2001, I joined CQUniversity’s Department of Psychology and eventually built the EGRL into what it is today – a team of researchers publishing peer-reviewed work on gambling behaviour, harm measurement, policy evaluation, and the psychology of risk.

The Ig Nobel Prize comes up in every introduction, so I’ll address it directly. In 2017, my colleague Nancy Greer and I were awarded the prize in economics at a ceremony at Harvard – alongside four actual Nobel laureates – for research testing whether physical contact with a live crocodile changes a person’s willingness to gamble. The study sounds like a joke. It isn’t. Our earlier research had identified four psychological factors that increase gambling risk: excitement, esteem, excess, and escape. We needed a controlled way to generate the “excitement” factor before participants played pokies. My wife Susan, who grew up in Alice Springs, suggested crocs. There’s a crocodile farm near the CQU campus in Bundaberg. The experiment ran, the data was real, and the results were published. The broader lesson, as I put it at the time, is that great science doesn’t need to be stuffy or boring – the incongruity that makes something funny is often the same incongruity that makes it scientifically interesting.

What the lab actually does

The EGRL is the largest team of gambling-focused researchers in Australia, and in 2026 we’re active across multiple ongoing projects. The work spans psychology, public health, and policy – often simultaneously, because gambling harm sits at the intersection of all three.

My personal research covers:

• Prevalence surveys – population-representative studies measuring how many Australians gamble, what they play, and how that’s changed over time
• Harm measurement – developing and validating instruments that capture the full range of gambling-related harm, grounded in health-related quality of life rather than just clinical diagnosis
• Online gambling behaviour – tracking how the shift to digital platforms changes patterns of play, session length, and risk indicators
• Cognitive distortions – the specific logical errors gamblers make: the gambler’s fallacy, near-miss effects, the illusion of control, and superstitious behaviour under uncertainty
• Youth and simulated gambling – the NSW Youth Gambling Study found that around 40% of NSW children aged 12-17 were playing video games with gambling-related content; that research directly informed Commonwealth consultations on regulation
• Affected others – population studies on how gambling harm extends to partners, family members, and wider social networks
• Policy evaluation – whether specific interventions – supply restrictions, marketing limits, stake caps – actually reduce harm at the population level

One number sits behind most of this work: Australia records the highest per-capita gambling losses in the world. The figure for 2022-23 was approximately A$1,527 lost per adult – the highest since 2001, and roughly twice the per-capita losses of Singapore, the next country on the list. A team of researchers can publish indefinitely about gambling harm, but if the structural conditions that produce those losses don’t change, the numbers don’t move. That’s what drives the policy side of what we do.

Three studies that shaped how I think

Research accumulates. Most of it confirms what the literature already suggested – necessary work, but not the kind that changes how you see things. Three studies over the course of my career actually did that. I’m going to walk through them here not because they’re my most-cited papers, but because they’re the ones I still think about when I’m assessing an operator or reading a new set of prevalence data. They shaped the lens. Everything I write for Ripper Casino goes through it.

The near-miss study and what it reveals about persistence

Near-misses – outcomes that come close to winning without actually winning – produce stronger physiological arousal than unambiguous losses, and they increase the motivation to keep playing. This is not a rational response. From an expected-value perspective, a near-miss is simply a loss. But the brain doesn’t process it that way. Pokie machines are designed to produce near-misses at a rate far above what random chance would generate, and that design choice has measurable effects on session length and expenditure. Understanding the mechanics of near-misses changed how I read machine design – and it’s a lens I bring to every product assessment I write.

The affected others research

The standard framing of gambling harm focuses on the individual gambler. Our population-representative research on affected others – the partners, children, parents, and friends of people with gambling problems – showed that the harm extends much further than the individual. For every person experiencing serious gambling harm, multiple people in their immediate network are also affected. This reframing, from individual problem to community-level public health issue, is one the Australian policy conversation has been slow to adopt – but it’s the framing that the evidence supports.

How I score a casino

Every review I write for Ripper Casino uses the same six-point framework. I developed it specifically to capture the dimensions that matter most to Australian players in 2026 – not a recycled checklist from five years ago.

I weight these criteria differently across player profiles. Someone depositing for the first time cares most about licensing and bonus transparency – those are the conditions shaping their first experience. A regular player’s biggest frustration is usually withdrawal reliability. Someone who’s noticed their gambling creeping beyond what they intended needs responsible gambling tools that are both accessible and genuinely functional, not performative.

One thing I pay close attention to is the gap between what an operator publishes on its promotional pages and what the terms and conditions actually say. That gap – sometimes a few clicks wide, sometimes a few thousand words wide – tells you more about an operator’s intentions than any marketing copy.

The commute from research to reviewing – why I made the move

I’ve had colleagues raise an eyebrow at the combination: a gambling harm researcher writing for a casino review platform. The concern is understandable, and I want to address it directly rather than sidestep it.

Information about online casinos exists in large quantities online. Most of it is written by people with a financial incentive to present operators favourably, no particular expertise in the subject matter, and no accountability to the people reading it. When someone in Australia in 2026 searches for information about an online casino before depositing, they’re navigating a landscape where the most prominent results are often affiliate content dressed as independent review. That’s a genuine problem – not a moral one, but a practical one for the person trying to make an informed decision.

I started writing for Ripper Casino because I think the space benefits from someone who brings a different set of tools: familiarity with the academic literature on gambling behaviour, an understanding of how RTP and variance actually work in practice, experience reading regulatory frameworks across multiple jurisdictions, and two decades of paying attention to the difference between what gambling operators say and what the evidence shows. I’m not trying to be the conscience of the industry. I’m trying to make the information better.

What I bring specifically:

• Understanding of how game mechanics – volatility, RTP, feature frequency – translate into the actual player experience over time
• Ability to read and interpret licence conditions, not just confirm a licence exists
• Familiarity with the Australian consumer protection framework and what it requires from operators
• Habit of checking whether responsible gambling commitments are substantive or cosmetic
• The practice of citing sources for factual claims rather than asserting them

What I’ve noticed about Australian online gambling in 2026

The landscape looks different from even three years ago. A few things stand out to me as someone who watches this space through both a research and a reviewing lens.

Bonus transparency has improved at the better operators. Wagering requirements, game exclusions, and expiry conditions are more often disclosed upfront rather than buried in terms – partly because regulators have applied pressure, partly because players have become harder to mislead. That’s a genuine improvement. The operators still playing games with disclosure are easier to identify now precisely because the standard has shifted.

The marketing problem hasn’t been solved. Sports betting advertising in particular reaches Australians at a volume and frequency that the evidence suggests is harmful, particularly for people in early stages of a gambling problem. The regulatory conversation about advertising restrictions has been ongoing for years without producing the supply-side changes that the harm data supports. I note this as a researcher, not as a moralist – the evidence is what it is.

Online-only gambling behaviour shows different patterns from venue-based gambling. Sessions can be longer, the social signals that sometimes prompt people to stop are absent, and the friction between the decision to place a bet and the act of placing it is lower. None of this means online gambling is inherently more harmful than venue gambling – the research on this is more nuanced than the headlines suggest – but it does mean that responsible gambling tools specific to the digital environment matter more than they’re usually given credit for.

Awards and recognition – the full picture

Recognition in academia takes a few different forms, and I’ve accumulated examples of most of them over 25 years at CQUniversity. What I notice looking back is that the awards I value most are the ones where I had the least control over the outcome – the student votes, the peer nominations, the committee decisions made without my involvement. You can work toward those indirectly by doing the job well, but you can’t engineer them. The ones listed below reflect that mix: institutional prizes, fellowship designations, public rankings, and one genuinely unusual evening in Cambridge.

Academic distinctions:

• Aurel B. Newell Fellowship (awarded twice)
• Jack Walker Scholar designation
• CQUniversity Bundaberg Prize for Excellence in Research, established researchers category (2012)
• CQUniversity Student Voice Commendation, Distance Educator of the Year (2014)

Public recognition:

• Top 15 UniJobs Lecturer of the Year: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
• Ranked #4 nationally among 4,000+ nominees (2013)
• Ranked #6 nationally (2014)
• Ig Nobel Prize in Economics, Harvard University (2017)

The Lecturer of the Year recognitions were voted on by students, and they matter to me for that reason. Teaching gambling psychology requires making counterintuitive ideas accessible – why people persist despite consistent losses, why near-misses increase motivation instead of reducing it, why someone can genuinely understand that the house edge is real and still believe their own session will be different. These are not failures of intelligence; they’re features of human cognition. Communicating that without condescension, and with enough nuance that students actually change how they think about the subject, is a challenge I’ve worked at for a long time.

Selected publications and policy contributions

Publishing research and influencing policy are two different things, and most academics are better at the first than the second. I’ve spent a deliberate amount of energy on both. The studies listed below represent areas where peer-reviewed findings crossed over into real regulatory conversations – submissions to Commonwealth consultations, briefings to state government agencies, contributions to harm measurement frameworks that are now used in population surveys across Australia. The gap between a journal article and a changed policy is wide, and crossing it requires a different kind of communication than academic writing. That gap is something my team has worked at consistently.

My full publication list is available through ResearchGate and the CQUniversity research profile system. The EGRL publishes regular updates on active projects and policy submissions at cqu.edu.au.

A note on editorial independence

My content on Ripper Casino represents my personal perspective as a researcher and informed observer of the Australian online gambling market. It is independent of my academic role at CQUniversity and does not constitute formal research output. I don’t accept payments contingent on positive assessments, and I flag relationships and limitations where they’re relevant. If I think something about an operator is worth noting – positive or negative – I note it. The value of a researcher’s perspective is only as good as the independence behind it. If you have questions about anything I’ve written here, or you’re a journalist or researcher looking for comment on gambling topics in Australia, you can reach me through the CQUniversity staff directory.