Newton Abbot should be top

Author: Simon Dexter

Ever since they hanged a monkey on suspicion of being a French spy during the Napoleonic Wars, the people of Hartlepool have been on the receiving end of a lot of jokes. This is a little unfair for the town that gave us greats such Sir Edward Mellanby, the man who, in 1916, discovered that a deficiency in vitamin D was the main cause of rickets and proposed cod liver oil as a preventative cure. He was born in Hartlepool in 1884. Reg Smythe, creator of the internationally renowned cartoon character Andy Capp, lived in the town until his death in 1998.

Having contended with the monkey jibes for years, it now transpires that according to Barclays Bank, Hartlepool, together with its near neighbour Darlington, has the highest concentration of gamblers in the land.

This comes as news to Peter Cowie, author of Poker & Gaming Stats, a quarterly report which determines where online poker players and people using online gaming sites originate.

“The north east has no significantly greater concentration of betting shops than any other,” he muses, “and in terms of online poker users, it’s pretty average too.”

When it comes to poker, Cowie maintains that the small town of Newton Abbot is top of the poker tree. This coincides with statistics first released by Google two years ago: the world’s largest internet search engine said that Newton Abbot could be described as the most poker-mad town in Britain.

Hidden deep within Google’s American headquarters, boffins at a research department, known as Google Trends, work on establishing exactly where specifically-named internet searches – in this case, prefaced by the word ‘poker’ – actually come from. Once Google has established the enquiry’s geographical location, it then calculates the ratio of searches for a term (ie poker) coming from each town / city and divides it by the total number of searches coming from the same town / city.

In other words, more folk from Newton Abbot search for the word poker as a percentage of their total online searches than any other place in the land.

Tags: Online Poker, poker popularity, poker search terms

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 10:31 am and is filed under News & Promotions Blog.