Petr Houdek featured in Czech Television documentary

Doc. Ing. Petr Houdek, Ph.D. appears in the new Czech Television documentary Hazard v kapse (Gambling in Your Pocket), which explores online betting, digital forms of gambling, and their impact on individuals and society.

The documentary Hazard v kapse shows how gambling has been gradually moving from physical venues to the online environment. People no longer need to go to a casino, a smartphone is enough. The documentary by Bára Kopecká presents personal stories of people affected by online gambling and highlights how gambling is now accessible at any time via a mobile phone or computer.

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Petr Houdek contributes a behavioural economics perspective to the documentary, explaining why gambling games are so problematic for human decision-making. In the interview, he points out that people often struggle to correctly understand probability and randomness. In psychology and behavioural economics, this mechanism is known as the gambler’s fallacy: the tendency to believe that after a series of certain outcomes, the opposite outcome is “due” to occur. As Houdek explains in the documentary, however, no reliable pattern can be identified in games of chance.

This illusion of regularity is one of the key reasons why gambling can be so psychologically powerful. Players often do not feel that they are acting irrationally. On the contrary, they may believe they are recognising patterns, learning from previous outcomes, or that the next bet has a higher chance of compensating for previous losses. In reality, each new bet represents a new risk, not a way to “balance out” the past.

The documentary is available on Czech Television’s iVysílání platform and on YouTube in Czech.