Help is free, confidential and independent of every site we list

The tools your account already has

Holding a British licence obliges an operator to give you a set of controls. They sit in the account settings, they are free, and using them is not a confession of anything.

• Deposit limits. A ceiling on what you can pay in per day, week or month. Reductions take effect immediately; increases involve a cooling-off period, which is precisely the point. Setting one on the day you register is the single most effective step available to you.
• Loss and spend visibility. Account history showing what has gone in and out over time. Memory is unreliable about gambling in a very specific direction, and a statement is not.
• Reality checks. A reminder that interrupts play at an interval you choose. Useful mainly because casino sessions are designed not to have natural endings.
• Time-outs. A short break, typically from one day to six weeks, during which you cannot gamble with that operator.
• Self-exclusion. A minimum six-month block with that operator, which also stops its marketing reaching you. It cannot be reversed on request during the period.

How GAMSTOP works

GAMSTOP covers every gambling website licensed to operate in Great Britain, so it does what setting limits at one brand cannot: it removes access across the market at once. You register free with your own details, choose six months, one year or five years, and licensed operators are then required to prevent you from using their online services for that period.

It cannot be undone early, which is the feature rather than a flaw. It does not cover unlicensed sites operating outside British regulation, and it does not cover premises. If online gambling is the problem, it is the most decisive single action available, and no operator needs to be told you have done it.

Warning signs worth taking seriously

Gambling harm rarely announces itself. The signs are usually mundane and cumulative: playing longer than intended, returning to win back what was lost, gambling to change your mood rather than to be entertained, borrowing or moving money around to fund it, being vague with people close to you about the amounts, or noticing that thinking about the next session crowds out other things.

Any one of those is worth a pause. Several together is worth a phone call to the helpline above. Harm affects families and partners too, and the same organisations support people worried about someone else's gambling.

Some plain arithmetic

Casino games are constructed so that the operator retains a share of everything staked over time. Individual sessions vary wildly — that variation is the entertainment being sold — but the direction over a long run is not in doubt, and no strategy, system, staking pattern or lucky routine changes it. Anything presenting gambling as a way to make money, clear a debt or fix a bad month has the mathematics backwards.

Treat the money you gamble the way you treat the price of a night out: decided in advance, gone once spent, and never borrowed.

Under 18

Online gambling in Great Britain is for adults aged 18 and over. Every operator we list must verify age, and providing false details is an offence against the operator's terms and the law. If children use your devices, free filtering software such as parental content controls can block gambling sites at the network level; the organisations above have practical guidance for families.