Safer Gambling Week 2024: The art of blocking – self-exclusion tools

As part of the European Safer Gambling Week 2024, The European Gaming and Betting Association has launched several initiatives to help raise awareness of problem gambling and promote harm minimization and responsible play.

One of the initiatives is "The Art of Blocking: Self-Exclusion Tools" webinar, hosted by Casino Guru in collaboration with BetBlocker.

The webinar has reunited five prominent figures and experts from the world of responsible gambling who address the issue head-on and focus on discussing the importance of self-exclusion tools, their efficacy, and the impact they have on player health and player safety, including:

• Katie Reynolds-Jones (GAMSTOP’s Chief Marketing Officer)
• Šimon Vincze (Casino Guru's Head of Sustainable & Safer Gambling)
• Duncan Garvie (the Founder of BetBlocker)
• Kate Graham (Vulnerability and Accessibility Manager at Monzo)
• Pedro Romero, Chief of SG Partnerships at BetBlocker

The webinar offered a platform for all participants to share their unique insights into self-exclusion tools with Katie Reynolds-Jones from GAMSTOP, explaining why it is important to introduce a lifelong self-exclusion option that is squarely based on the available data.

As she cautions, rolling into lifetime self-exclusion without frequent updates to the central data could result in the measures not working as well 15 to 20 years later, and this is why GAMSTOP has opted for five-year periods and subsequent extensions based on frequent updates to the data.

Monzo’s Kate Graham spoke about the challenges in balancing self-exclusion tools with player demands – many of whom prefer to have more control over when exclusions can come and go, but also benefit from longer cooldowns, for example. The need for control is mostly player-driven, Graham explained.

For example, a customer could type up a reminder of why they shouldn’t be gambling, and that message would show when they go to remove the block. Monzo has found this to be an efficient way of deterring relapses while letting players stay in control, which is one of the core demands when approaching self-exclusion tools, Graham added.

Šimon Vincze and Dunca Garvie engaged in a dialogue about their partnership on the Global Self-Exclusion Initiative, designed to empower customers toblock from gambling in an anonymous and frictionless manner no matter where they are in the world using the Betblocker app.

The conversation about the GSEI, however, revealed another important truth about the state of self-exclusion tools and their efficacy - they could only ever work if they were adopted by the industry at large. As Vincze pointed out even with a global system in place, it is essential to focus on education and support of those who are self-excluding as there will always be some opportunity to gamble..

The entire webinar in its entirety is well worth watching for anyone who is interested in what successful applications self-exclusion tools have been able to achieve.

Image credit: Casino Guru News