The ultimate bottom line of Philippine gambling: cockfighting

After the legalization of PIGO, the Philippine gambling market gradually got on the right track, from Bingo, slot machines to local card games, online transformation has almost become mainstream. In this wave of liberalization, only one gambling content was collectively bypassed: cockfighting (Sabong).

Many laymen find it hard to understand: Cockfighting is clearly the most popular gambling entertainment in the Philippines, so why is it legal offline but never mentioned online? The answer is actually quite simple: because it's too popular, too frequent, and too easy to get out of control.

In the Philippines, cockfighting is akin to a mix of folk festivals, small casinos, and family social gatherings, with legal cockfighting venues almost everywhere in the country. Normally, it is a form of offline entertainment with cultural tolerance, limited by time, place, and participants, which society can accept. But once it goes online, it turns local enthusiasm into an endless betting addiction.

This is not an assumption, but a lesson recently experienced by the Philippines. In 2021, PAGCOR briefly issued 9 eSabong licenses, and electronic cockfighting overnight became a new national favorite, with traffic and betting amounts exploding, contributing over 600 million pesos in taxes each month. The platform operates 24/7, allowing users to bet on their phones and watch in real time, quickly becoming a major source of income for local platforms.

However, the craze quickly turned into a disaster: a large number of people became addicted to electronic cockfighting, leading to family breakdowns, heavy debts, and even reports of at least 30 users missing or kidnapped. The social shock was so great that it directly triggered the intervention of the president. Old Duterte personally ordered a complete halt to cockfighting during his last term, and Little Ma continued the ban after taking office, signing an executive order explicitly prohibiting any form of online cockfighting nationwide.

Cockfighting is more frequent than the lottery, more penetrating than slot machines, and more localized than local card games. It requires no manual, no teaching, no class distinction, no educational requirement; as long as you are Filipino, you know how to bet on cockfighting. Such content, with a natural cognitive threshold of zero, once put online, the addiction rate rises exponentially.

At the same time, most cockfighting bettors are from the lower social strata, making it extremely difficult to implement anti-addiction mechanisms, and involving a large number of minors and elderly people, with very low social tolerance. After the ban on cockfighting, opposition voices came not only from church media but also from 125 mayors who jointly petitioned for a permanent ban.

Is there a possibility of reopening in the future? From an industry perspective, cockfighting is undoubtedly a huge opportunity. If a controllable, compliant, and frequency-limited mechanism can be established, even if restarted, platforms, governments, and users would all benefit. But the question is, once cockfighting returns online, can it really be controlled?

Currently, PAGCOR and the government's attitude is to watch and block, while industry platforms dare not mention it openly; religious groups and local governments, on the other hand, generally hold a firm opposition stance. In this multi-party game, cockfighting has become the last line of the Philippine gambling industry.

Gambling, fundamentally, is a tool for society to manage risks. And the online transformation of cockfighting is a challenge to the entire society's risk baseline.

The Philippines can liberalize anything, but cockfighting is the bottom line.