Responsible Gambling Tools. What Are They and How To Use Them?
Gambling can only be fun when people play responsibly. Otherwise, it can become a problem with potentially devastating consequences. Voluntarily or forced by regulations, casinos today offer certain tools that can prevent problem gambling from spiraling.
What Responsible Gambling Tools Are There?
One of the most widespread options is self exclusion. To take a break from gambling, players can activate self exclusion for a selected period of time. That would prevent them from accessing their casino accounts and operators would stop sending them promo emails.
Depending on a casino, players will be able to activate self exclusion themselves in their account settings or will have to contact customer support. Each operator can also specify their own minimum and maximum time periods for self exclusion. That can be from 1 week to 6 months or any other limits. Until the period you set is over, you won’t be able to play. Responsible operators won’t let you gamble even if you change your mind earlier.
This is a basic tool to keep gambling under control. But the problem is operators licensed in weak jurisdictions don’t always fulfill their responsibilities and requests to activate self exclusions get sometimes ignored. So you must be careful when choosing casinos.
Deposit Limits
With deposit limits enabled you won’t overspend. It’s a very useful tool that good casinos are expected to offer. Great thing is players can decrease their limits any time with immediate effect. But increasing maximum amount usually takes one week to take effect.
This is a very smart decision, because players sometimes go crazy and want to chase losses. In this state of mind they deposit numerous times and later regret doing that. When deposit limit is reached, they won’t be able to upload more money even after increasing the limit. This gives them time to cool off.
Wager/Loss/Time Limits
To prevent overspending there are other useful tools. Wager limit won’t allow betting more than you specified. Or you can set maximum amount of losses or maximum time per session. These responsible gambling tools aren’t common but very helpful.
Reality Checks
Unlike all other options, reality checks won’t stop you from playing and will just remind you of the time you’ve spent gambling. Once reality check message pops up, gambling stops and players can choose to continue or stop. It’s easy for players to lose track of time as playing casino games can be very immersive. Reality checks would prevent this from happening.
No Opportunity to Reverse Pending Withdrawals
One of the characteristics of problem gambling is reversing withdrawals. This behavior is profitable for casinos, but is bad for players as they spend more. That’s why reverse withdrawal is usually enabled by default, and sometimes there’s no option to disable it. Just like deposit limits, disabling reverse withdrawals will keep you from spending more than you think is acceptable.
Are Casinos Required to Offer Responsible Gambling Tools?
Reputable jurisdictions do require certain minimum set of responsible gambling tools. For example, United Kingdom and Malta have this rule. But countries with weak control over the industry do not care much about that. Curacao, one of the most popular gambling jurisdictions, does not require any of these tools. Most of the time Curacao licensed casinos can offer self exclusion and nothing more.
Help and Support for Problem Gamblers
Acting responsibly would also mean seeking help when you feel gambling spirals out of control. There are certain organizations like GambleAware that will help you overcome this problem. Links to these organizations can be found on Responsible Gambling page of a casino.
There are also different tools to block users from accessing casino sites. One of them is Gamban. UK players can use Gamstop to opt out of all UK licensed operators at the same time. You just need to provide Gamstop some of your info. Based on player comments, it doesn’t work in 100% of the cases, but is helpful anyway.
