Casino Guru, a global gambling authority with the most extensive database of online casinos, has recently engaged City, University of London, one of Britain’s top universities providing outstanding education to its students for over 125 years, to identify best practice in online gambling self-exclusion and to recommend a set of standards for adoption across different jurisdictions. 

The origins of the project can be traced back to Casino Guru’s Global Self-Exclusion Initiative, launched back in 2020, whose aim is to establish an online self-exclusion scheme on a global scale that would provide a much-needed additional layer of protection for players grappling with problem gambling. 

“Upon identifying the rules for self-exclusion in a proposed global system, we came to a conclusion that no general standards are currently in existence. Each jurisdiction creates their own set of rules for self-exclusion, and very few of them actually follow the same level of standards, not to mention the details of implementation. This creates a considerable gap in terms of the general effectiveness of self-exclusion within the industry, and the goal of this project is to close this gap,” stated Šimon Vincze, Casino Guru’s Sustainable and Safer Gambling Lead and the mastermind behind the Global Self-Exclusion Initiative. 

The project is led by City, University of London’s Associate Professor Dr Margaret Carran, who possesses extensive research experience in the field of gambling and has in the recent past devoted herself to the analysis of player protection and monitoring of problem gambling in the EU states. The project is set to last around 18 months and involves three phases: research and fact finding, workgroup meetings with representatives of all stakeholders’ groups, and broader consultations. 

The workgroup meetings will consist of experts with various backgrounds, whose task will be to find a consensus based on the research and fact finding exercises of existing self-exclusion rules’ impact, their professional experience, expertise and lived-in experience. This is set to be the main pillar of the project, which plans to deliver a recommended set of rules for online self-exclusion. 

The final phase of the project will see the findings of the workgroup be open for broader consultation for other stakeholders in the industry. Gambling operators, regulators, non-profit organizations and trade associations will be invited to give their feedback. Criticism will be evaluated and incorporated, and the project will culminate in a series of freely available self-exclusion guidelines for effective implementation and greater protection of players who use self-exclusion to limit their access to gambling. 

“Research represents a reliable basis for decision-making of regulators and the creation of standards, especially in the field of player protection. This project is exciting as no such work on self-exclusion has ever been done on an international level before. I have high hopes for the real impact of the project and wish for it to significantly improve player protection across jurisdictions,” Carran commented.  

The first phase of the project has already started, and the second phase is scheduled to begin in September when the workgroup holds its initial meeting.