Self-exclusion and getting help

Read this first

There is nothing to sell on this page. No offers, no operator links, no affiliate disclosure at the bottom, because there is nothing here to disclose. If you are reading this because gambling has become a problem, you are not a lost customer to us. You are the reason the site exists.

Nothing here is a judgement. Gambling is designed — carefully, expensively, by people who are very good at it — to be difficult to stop. Finding it difficult to stop is not a character flaw. It is the intended behaviour of the product working on a human being, which is what you are.

What follows is practical. What self-exclusion is, exactly what it does and does not do, the gap that catches people out, and where to get help from someone who is not us.

What self-exclusion is

Self-exclusion is a decision, made by you and made binding by someone else, that you will not be allowed to gamble with a given operator or scheme for a fixed period.

It is not a promise. It is not a setting you can undo when you change your mind at eleven o'clock at night. That is the entire value of it: it takes the decision away from the version of you who will want to reverse it. A well-built self-exclusion is designed so that the person who set it cannot lift it, and that is a feature, not an obstacle.

When you self-exclude with an operator:

• The account is closed to play, usually immediately.
• Any remaining balance should be returned to you. Ask for it explicitly if it is not.
• Marketing must stop. You should be removed from every email, SMS and push list.
• The operator should not accept a new account from you during the period, and should be running checks against your details to prevent one.
• It runs for a fixed term — commonly six months, one year, or five years. Some schemes offer permanent exclusion.
• It does not end when the period does. In a well-run scheme the account stays closed until you actively ask to reopen it, after a cooling-off period, and after the operator has taken some care over the request.

How to do it

With a single operator. Account, then Responsible Gambling or Safer Gambling. There will be a self-exclusion option. Choose the longest period you can bring yourself to choose — and if you are hesitating between two lengths, the longer one is the right answer, because the version of you that is hesitating is the one you are protecting yourself from.

Cool-off first, if you are not ready. A 24-hour, one-week or one-month lock is not a lesser act. It is a real tool. Use it now and decide later, rather than deciding now and doing nothing.

With a national scheme. Many jurisdictions run a multi-operator scheme: one registration, and every operator licensed in that market is required to close your account and refuse a new one. This is enormously more effective than excluding brand by brand, because the failure mode of the brand-by-brand approach is that there is always another brand.

Your regulator's website is the place to find the scheme covering your market. If your country has one, use it. It is free, it is quick, and it is the single most effective action available on this page.

Blocking software. Available separately, and it works at a different layer: it blocks gambling sites on your devices. It is a good complement, not a replacement — devices are replaceable and you know that. Some banks also offer a gambling block on cards, which stops gambling transactions at the payment layer. Turning that on is often the fastest useful thing you can do today, and on many banks it carries a deliberate delay before it can be turned off again.

The limits — and the one that catches people out

Be clear about where the protection stops. Discovering the gap by accident, at the worst moment, is how people relapse.

One company frequently operates many casino brands. Different names, different colour schemes, different front pages — the same company, the same platform, sometimes the same account system underneath. Depending on the scheme and the jurisdiction, an exclusion registered with one of those brands may not propagate to the others. You exclude yourself, you feel you have done the thing, and three weeks later you are playing at what appears to be a completely different casino owned by the company you just excluded yourself from.

This is precisely why ownership matters, and why we publish it. Every operator page in our register shows its corporate group and its sister brands, and our scoring pools complaint history across a group deliberately, because a group is one business wearing several coats. If you exclude, exclude across the whole group, and use a national scheme if one covers your market, because a national scheme is the only mechanism that closes this gap by design rather than by your own diligence.

Other limits, stated plainly:

• It cannot stop you gambling somewhere the scheme does not reach: an operator outside your market, an unlicensed site, a different product.
• It cannot stop someone else's account being used, and if that thought has occurred to you, please treat it as the warning it is.
• It does not address why. It removes the access. That is a great deal, and it is not everything.

That last point is the honest one. Self-exclusion buys you distance and time. What you do with the distance and time is the actual work, and most people cannot do it alone. There is no reason you should have to.

Where to get help

Speak to someone who is not us and not an operator. That is not modesty; it is the correct advice. These people are trained, they are free, and they have heard it before.

In an immediate crisis — if you are thinking about harming yourself — contact your local emergency number or a suicide-prevention line right now. Gambling debt feels permanent and it is not. You are worth more to the people around you than any sum of money, and that remains true no matter how large the number is or how it happened.

For gambling-specific help, in most countries there is:

• A national gambling helpline, free, confidential, and open long hours or around the clock.
• Free counselling and treatment services, in person or online, often with no waiting list.
• Peer support groups, in person and online, run by people who have been where you are.
• Debt advice charities — separate from gambling support, free, and genuinely effective. Debt is a solvable technical problem, and it is solved by people whose job it is, not by another session.

Our responsible gambling page lists the services for the major markets we cover, with links, and it is kept current. That page carries no offers either.

Tell one person. A partner, a friend, a sibling, a helpline volunteer, a GP. The secrecy is not incidental to the harm; it is a large part of the machinery of it. Saying it out loud once, to one person, is the step that most people describe afterwards as the one that mattered — and it is the step people put off longest.

If you are worried about someone else

• Choose a calm moment, and lead with what you have noticed rather than what you have concluded.
• Do not pay their gambling debts. It is the most natural instinct and it is, reliably, the thing that makes it worse.
• Do help them contact a helpline. Sit with them while they do it if they will let you.
• Look after yourself. Support services for affected family members exist and they are for you, not for them.

One last thing

If you have self-excluded and an operator lets you back in — accepts a deposit, opens a new account, sends you marketing during the exclusion period — that is a serious regulatory failure, not a technicality, and it is exactly the kind of thing regulators act on.

Report a suspected self-exclusion breach to the relevant regulator and use the operator's complaint route. You may also submit evidence to the Tribunal, where screening and a verified right of reply are required. Submission does not guarantee publication or a finding.

You do not need an account, and you do not need to have gambled with us, to be heard here.