Responsible gambling

Gambling is entertainment with a negative expected value. Over enough time the product is built to keep more than it returns, and that is not a flaw in a particular site — it is the arithmetic the whole industry runs on. Responsible gambling means the amount you spend on it is decided before you start and does not grow afterwards.

Two phrases get repeated so often that they have stopped meaning anything, and both are worth taking apart.

“Gamble responsibly and you will be fine” reads as a promise about outcomes. It is not one. Playing within a limit protects your money and your week; it does not change what the game pays back.

“Only play with money you can afford to lose” is true and useless without a number. The version that works is arithmetic: what is left after rent, bills, food, debt payments and savings, and how much of that remainder you are willing to spend on an evening’s entertainment. Write the figure down before you open a site, and treat it the way you treat the cost of a concert ticket — spent when you buy it, not an investment that might come back.

The useful test is not how much you spend. It is whether the amount is still the one you chose.

These are behaviours, not diagnoses. One of them on its own is a prompt to pay attention. Several at once is a reason to talk to somebody on the list below.

• The stakes have grown, and the smaller ones no longer feel like anything.
• Sessions run longer than you planned, and you notice the time only when you stop.
• You go back after a loss specifically to get it back.
• You play instead of sleeping, working, or being somewhere you said you would be.
• You think about the next session while you are doing something else.
• You feel irritable or restless on days you do not play.
• You have tried to cut down and did not manage it.

The financial signs are easier to check, because they leave records.

• You have borrowed to gamble, from a bank, a card, an app or a person.
• You have sold or pawned something to fund a session.
• You have missed a bill, a rent payment or a debt instalment because the money went somewhere else.
• You hide what you spend, delete the app between sessions, or use an account other people cannot see.
• You have told someone a smaller number than the real one.

If more than one of these is true, the fastest useful step is not a decision about gambling. It is a conversation with a free helpline, and every country on this page has one.

We do not publish a test of our own. An unvalidated questionnaire on a site funded by gambling commission is a medical-sounding claim with nothing behind it, and there are properly built tools available for free. Each of the assessments below is run by a public health body or a specialist organisation rather than by an operator.

A result is not a diagnosis. It is a structured way to see your own answers in one place, and something to bring to a conversation with a helpline or a counsellor.

Six tools exist across the licensed market, and they do different jobs. The useful thing to know about them is what each one does not do.

Deposit limit

A ceiling on what you can pay in, per day, week or month. Set it before you deposit, not after. At a licensed operator, lowering it takes effect immediately and raising it takes effect only after a delay, which is the entire point of the tool: it protects the decision you made calmly from the decision you make at 2am.

Loss limit

A ceiling on what you can lose, which is not the same as a ceiling on what you stake. It is the more honest of the two numbers, and it is the one most frequently missing from operators outside the licensed market.

Session or time limit

A cap on how long a session can run. It is aimed at losing track of time rather than at spending, so it works alongside a deposit limit and not instead of one.

Reality check

A message that interrupts play to tell you how long you have been at it. The weakest tool on this list on its own, and useful mainly as a trigger to act on a limit you already set.

Time-out or cooling-off

A pause, typically from 24 hours to six weeks. Your account is not deleted and your balance is not touched; you simply cannot play until it expires. It is the right tool when you want to break a pattern rather than end an account.

Self-exclusion

The only one of the six that can work at the level of a whole country rather than one site. It runs for a minimum term you cannot shorten, it does not end by itself in most of the markets we cover, and undoing it is deliberately slower than starting it.

The difference between a time-out and self-exclusion is the difference between a pause and a decision. Both are legitimate. Choosing the first because the second feels final is a good reason to read the section below before you pick.

The Netherlands runs a national register, Cruks. In the markets that have one, a single registration blocks every operator licensed in that country at once — online, and in arcades and land-based venues where the scheme covers them. That is a genuinely powerful thing, and it is worth using.

It also has one boundary, and it is the most important sentence on this page for anybody who has already registered.

A national register only binds operators licensed in that country. Querying the register is a condition of holding the licence. An operator without a licence where you live has no such obligation, no access to the register, and no reason to look. The Hellenic Gaming Commission puts it in a single line that applies to Cruks: exclusion applies only to licensed gambling operators.

So if you have registered with Cruks and you can still open an account somewhere, that is not a failure of the register. It means the site is operating outside your country’s licensing system — and outside everything that comes with it: no age verification you can rely on, no statutory deposit limit, no exclusion check, no complaints route, no authority to appeal to.

In that situation the register is not the tool that will help you. A device-level blocker is, because it runs on your side of the connection and does not care whether anyone holds a licence.

Blockers are also the answer where an exclusion is per-operator rather than national — an operator outside the Dutch system is not in Cruks at all.

Help comes in more shapes than a phone call, and the shape matters more than most people expect.

An anonymous phone line is the lowest-commitment option. You do not give a name, nothing goes on a record, and the person answering has had the conversation thousands of times. The Netherlands has one, and it are free.

Online chat and email suit anyone who would rather write than speak, and several of the national services run both.

Self-help programmes are structured courses you work through on your own, usually free, usually offered by the same organisations that run the lines.

Outpatient treatment is the route when gambling sits alongside debt, sleep or mental health problems, and the national services refer into it.

Peer groups — Gamblers Anonymous and its national equivalents — put you in a room with people who have already done the difficult part.

Debt advice is a separate speciality and often the more urgent one. Talking to a free debt service is not an admission about gambling; it is the practical half of the problem, and treating it separately usually works better.

Contacting any of these is free and confidential, and it does not put your name in any public register.

If someone close to you gambles, the two most useful things are also the two hardest.

Talk about behaviour, not character. “You were up until four again and the rent is late” is a conversation. “You have a problem” is a verdict, and it usually ends the conversation instead of starting it.

Do not pay the debts. Clearing a gambling debt removes the consequence and leaves the behaviour, and it is the single most common way a family makes the situation last longer. Helping with a repayment plan, or going with someone to a free debt service, does the opposite.

Two more that come up constantly. Do not take over the money management as a permanent arrangement: control by somebody else is not the same as control, and it tends to collapse. And do not treat a relapse as proof that nothing works — it is the normal shape of this, not the end of it.

In several of our markets you can ask the regulator to enter a family member in the national exclusion register when other routes have failed. The details differ by country and are on the country pages.

Finally: the help lines on this page are for you as well. You do not need the person who gambles to agree, or to know, before you call one.

The Dutch system is the simplest of the six to describe and one of the strictest to live inside: one regulator licenses everything, one register excludes you from everything it licenses, and a legal market has existed only since 1 October 2021.

The Kansspelautoriteit — the Ksa — is an independent administrative body, funded by industry levies, supervising all gambling in the European part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Policy sits with the Ministry of Justice and Security; enforcement sits with the Ksa.

Its position on everything outside the licensed market is short. From 1 October 2021 there have been legal online gambling companies in the Netherlands holding a Ksa licence, and every other online game offered to players in the Netherlands is illegal. There is no partial version of that: no product category is exempt and no foreign licence substitutes.

The Ksa also runs an information line on 070 302 13 00, option 1, on weekdays from 09:00 to 13:00.

There is no domain shortcut in the Netherlands — a Dutch licensee is not required to sit on .nl — so the register is the check. Search it by company name, by website, by app or by licence number. Search the website address rather than the brand: one company frequently runs several brands, and a marketing name does not have to match the licensed entity.

The results table loads through JavaScript, so it will look empty in a text-only reader. That is the page working, not failing.

Cruks — the Centraal Register Uitsluiting Kansspelen — is run by the Ksa itself, and registering takes a few minutes with DigiD.

What it covers is the part worth being clear about: once you are in Cruks you can no longer gamble with legal Dutch providers, online and in arcades and casinos alike. Checking the register at every attempted registration is a condition of the Dutch licence, which is what makes one action cover the whole licensed market.

Six months is the floor, not the default length. It does not lapse on its own at the end of that period; coming out is a separate application you make yourself.

Somebody else can also start it. A family member, a friend, an employer, a guardian or an administrator can ask the Ksa to enter a person in Cruks when other routes have not worked, and the Ksa publishes the procedure on its player pages.

One change is on the way and is not law yet. On 12 June 2026 the Dutch cabinet announced it wants a full ban on online gambling advertising, a ban on signup bonuses, an overarching deposit limit with an affordability test before it can be raised, and improvements to Cruks including indefinite registration with no automatic removal. Those are stated policy intentions; nothing in this section changes until they are enacted.

OpenOverGokken is the national information and help service, free on 0800 24 000 22, with an English version of the site and a self-test. It also runs a regional help finder that maps you to services near you.

If you see the name “Loket Kansspel” in older material, it is the same service under its previous name: the old domain now redirects. Content still using the old name in 2026 has not been updated, which is a useful signal about the rest of that content.

Two more, both free at the point of contact. AGOG runs peer support groups for people who gamble and for the people around them. Jellinek is an addiction treatment provider with a gambling programme.

One address to avoid: cruks.nl resolves but is an unrelated third-party site whose text still says the register does not exist yet. It does. The official address is the one linked above.

Cruks binds Dutch licensees. It does not bind anyone else, and that gap is documented rather than theoretical: the Dutch affiliate certification body has published warnings about sites accepting Dutch players where people registered in Cruks were able to play, and in 2024 the Ksa investigated 33 affiliate and publisher sites advertising unlicensed supply and found breaches on 14 of them.

The practical consequence for you: if you are in Cruks and a site still lets you open an account, that site is outside the Dutch licensing system. Nothing that comes with a Dutch licence applies to it — not the deposit limits, not the identity checks, not the complaints route. A device-level blocker is the tool that works there, because it does not depend on anyone holding a licence.

The legal minimum in the Netherlands is 18 for casino games and betting, and we apply it across this site.

Age verification at a licensed operator is a real check against an identity document. Outside the licensed market it is often a checkbox, which is exactly why underage access shows up in regulator warnings about unlicensed sites rather than about licensed ones.

If you share a device or a payment method with someone under age, the practical measures are the boring ones: a device-level gambling blocker, which is free and covers every browser and app on the device; parental controls at the operating system level; and a card or account the young person cannot reach. If an account has already been used, contact the operator to have it closed, and if it is a licensed operator, funds staked by a minor are generally recoverable.

Talking about it works better than blocking alone. Gambling advertising is designed to be attractive, and a conversation about why the maths cannot work is more durable than a filter that gets discovered.

There is not a single link to a casino on this page, and there will not be one.

We are funded by commission: when a reader opens an account through a link elsewhere on this site, an operator pays us. That model is disclosed in full on our affiliate disclosure page. It also means a page about gambling harm is the one page on the site that must not earn anything, because a call to action next to a helpline number is not a mixed message — it is the message.

So there are no operator names here, no logos, no offers, no rating figures and no buttons. The Dutch affiliate code requires exactly that of pages about gambling addiction, and it is the right rule whether or not it is enforced on you.