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The domestication of gambling over the past decade has been nothing short of astonishing. It's tempting to lay at least some of the blame at the door of that most subversive guardian of all that is good and wholesome in British life, John Major. So we will. It was, after all, John Major who, as prime minister, not only introduced the National Lottery but spoke glowingly of its moral imperatives.

In a sense (we were invited to believe), playing was very much like donating to charity in a slightly different form. Before the Lottery, gambling's hard core comprised minor aristos, the Queen Mum and a criminal underclass.

As such, it was, in the opinion of your average solid citizen, associated with much that was feckless or raffish.

Now, it is one of the more robust pillars of the economy. Witness the rise of the notion that casinos can revive the fortunes of ailing seaside resorts. Witness also the burgeoning growth of new forms of gambling: everything from spread-betting companies in the City to one-hundred-and-one internet poker and roulette operations.

When one such company, Party-Gaming, floated on the London Stock Exchange last month, its value soared immediately to £5 billion, making it the biggest flotation of the past five years. It is worth considerably more than many traditional blue-chip companies - British Airways, for instance.

This for a Gibraltar-based operation whose activities (one of its best-known is the PartyPoker website) are regarded as illegal in many countries, notably the US.

But there's money sloshing about here - so it's hardly surprising to see the media market respond. In fact, the only real surprise is the relative sluggishness of this response. True, there are lots of poker programmes on late-night TV, but until recently, there was only really one publication plugging into this phenomenon - Dennis Publishing's InsideEdge.

In recent weeks, however, something has been stirring. Not only has Dennis announced the imminent launch of the first mass-market gambling magazine, Total Gambler, but plans are also under way for the launch of a daily newspaper for inveterate (though entirely responsible) gamblers, called The Sportsman.

1. The traditional focus for high-stakes gambling in Britain - the horse-racing industry - was well served down the decades by two titles: Racing Post and Sporting Life. The latter is now no longer produced in the traditional paper-and-ink format (the final edition rolled off the presses in 1998) but has evolved into arguably the best UK-based general sports website.

Trinity Mirror sold the site to UKBetting, a publicly quoted "digital wagering" group, in 2001.

2. Racing Post, which has a daily circulation of 80,000, is a must-read for racing punters, but its primary focus is on horse-racing as a sport.

The same is more or less true of national daily newspapers - gambling is seen as a secondary activity, not the sport's whole raison d'etre.

3. Following the launch of the lottery and the subsequent liberalisation of gaming laws, gambling spend has grown steadily in the UK. Total UK betting revenues in 1990 stood at less than £500 million. By 2004, they were around £2.5 billion. The fastest-growing area is online gambling, which now accounts for 4 per cent of all e-commerce in the UK. Eighty per cent of Europe's online gamblers are British.

4. Inside Edge, launched last year by Dennis Publishing, offers strategy and tips to help its readers lose less money- be it in the field of sports, cards or financial markets. It is not yet audited, but has a print run of 30,000.

5. Dennis' Total Gambler will launch next month as the UK's first mass-market gambling magazine. Targeting 18- to 40-year-old men, it will be packaged as a free extra for readers of Maxim plus a handful of other Dennis publications in rotation, thus guaranteeing a 650,000 circulation.

6. The Sportsman is fronted by the former Telegraph Group chief executive Jeremy Deedes and is backed by Ben and Zac Goldsmith (the sons of the late financier James Goldsmith), the ex-Telegraph journalist Charlie Methven (who originally came up with the idea) and Max Aitken, a great-grandson of Lord Beaverbrook. A daily newspaper, The Sportsman will cover any event that can be given a gambling angle.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR ...

PUBLISHERS

- If there's a significantly large readership for gambling titles out there, then the benefits for these first movers could be substantial. But that readership is by no means assured, making this, appropriately enough, a real gamble for both new publications.

- Many punters see themselves as experts in their chosen gambling field (be it football, horse-racing or the financial markets) rather than career gamblers - and historically, they've tended to stick with the specialist press that covers their area of interest. Convincing this core target market could be tough - and expensive.

ADVERTISERS

- The prospect for advertisers (other than the internet gambling operations, which will presumably be queueing up to advertise in these publications) is that these new titles may offer a new means of reaching a young and relatively affluent male audience.

- The publishers will need to convince advertisers that they are serving up something slightly more interesting than a ghetto of dubious merit. For instance, this will not necessarily be seen as a prime environment in which to tout financial services such as insurance or savings.

GAMBLERS ANONYMOUS

- Very bad news indeed.