Something for you in Safer Gambling Week?

BY RICHARD HAYLER, IBAS MANAGING DIRECTOR

If you are satisfied that Safer Gambling Week is of absolutely no relevance to you, please stop reading now. The rest of this article will waste your time.

I can’t remember precisely when the betting and gaming industries joint launched Safer Gambling Week. It was a good few years ago. The concept of self-exclusion is much older still.

As far as I am aware, self-exclusion – at least on any organised scale – is unique to gambling. I’m sure that plenty of pub landlords, takeaway owners and tobacconists would work with you if you asked them not to serve you, but the formality of handing a form and passport photo to a betting shop, casino or bingo club always felt like a big deal to me. You would have to really want to be excluded to go to those lengths, I thought.

Those Who Need Help, And Those Who Don’t?

I suspect quite a few people who enjoy betting still see ‘safer gambling’ in that fairly binary way.

It’s either okay for you or it isn’t, right?

And it being okay for you takes into account that every now and again it actually isn’t okay. But it is most of the time, comfortably most of the time, so you put yourself in the ‘okay’ camp, maybe?

More Than Simply Self-Exclusion

Safer gambling has progressed beyond the arguably blunt tool of  self-exclusion. Online bettors have for a number of years been able to limit the amount you either spend or the amount you can lose – and you can vary that so you can set the amount you’re comfortable losing in a day, a week or a month.

If you’re thinking, “I might try that, but what good is limiting myself to £50 a day if I want to bet a lot more than that at Cheltenham, or in pre-season antepost football bets?”, then these limits can be changed if you give the company notice – usually 24 or 48 hours. The key is that you’re not able to make those changes impulsively, in the heat of the moment.

There’s also a ‘Time Out’ or ‘Cool Off’ feature that most online firms offer. If you’ve gone in deeper than you want to and if you can feel yourself slipping into chasing mode you can request a short-term block on your account – which you can set up without the need to speak to anyone, either when you request it or when it expires. It’s just between you and the website.

Potential Game Changer

This week though, I have read about an initiative that strikes me as a potential game-changer for safer gambling.

You may or may not have heard of Betblocker. Betblocker is a charity which provides free-to-use software for people who have significantly struggled with betting. Installing the software on your phone, laptop or tablet effectively blocks you from visiting any gambling website. The charity is six years old and the software even older – it was developed by Duncan Garvie, who – like IBAS – has a background in Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), dealing with consumer gambling disputes in the UK and further afield.

To mark Safer Gambling Week, Duncan has announced on social media that Betblocker will be launching a new service – a user-controlled, time-restricted blocking service called ‘Scheduler’.

He explains:

This feature is intended to fundamentally change how blocking software is perceived and used. It’s going to take time and a lot of work. But the potential gains in terms of harm reduction are massive.

Traditionally, blocking software has been viewed as a crisis response tool. A player loses too much, panics, and looks to install a complete block. That is a valuable service. A critical service that we need to continue to support. But there’s so much more that blocking software can do if we just stop viewing it as an abstinence only tool.

Our Scheduler is targeted at a completely different cohort. It supports users to customize, in advance, when they would like a block to support management of their gambling. It is intended to empower people. To offer them a tool to help them control how they engage with gambling, and to mitigate escalation to a crisis.

Want to make sure your bills are paid before you play? Set the block to switch on for a few days after payday each month.

Sitting up too late playing? Set yourself a curfew.

Don’t want to be distracted while spending time with the kids? Set the block to switch on when the schools let out and switch off at bed-time.

Like a bet on the match, but get carried away with the In Play betting? Set your block to switch on during match time.

All of these lines will be born out of the experience of reading about the specific problems that people share with ADR bodies every week. I would be amazed if the exact scenarios Duncan has referred to don’t strike a chord with some readers – and these are only the tip of the iceberg.

Safer Gambling Growing More Sophisticated

There are bound to be other positive initiatives launched this week too and others will be in development. The established concept of safer gambling is evolving quickly. If you think that Safer Gambling Week isn’t relevant to you, I would urge you to reconsider – and even if you’re sure it isn’t, I would keep an eye on how safer gambling tech develops.

You never know when you might need a safety net – and as these become more user-friendly and more practically useful to a wider range of bettors and a wider range of familiar, real-life scenarios, I would be amazed if their take-up doesn’t soar.

Choosing to take advantage of something that helps manage the risk of betting seems eminently sensible – and if you think you might be inclined, even just occasionally, to bet in a way you’d regret the following day, why not have a look to see whether any of the tools offered might be able to help you manage the risk.