I'd agree with the notion suggested in the article it may not even be about getting mothers to gamble as much as it is an attempt at blackhat SEO. Recruiting a few new gamblers is small potatoes compared to redirecting a large amount of web traffic for gambling-related keywords on Google.

Several gambling firms are aggressively throwing money at the problem of trying to manipulate PageRank-like algorithms. I've seen examples of them sponsoring open source projects, ostensibly in order to purchase a link from a high ranking website.

Makes sense though when basically your entire budget goes to marketing.