Responsible Gambling
Free, confidential help is available now on 1-800-522-4700, 24 hours a day.
Get help now
- National Council on Problem Gambling helpline: call or text 1-800-522-4700. Free, confidential, 24 hours a day, all 50 states.
- Live chat: available through the NCPG at ncpgambling.org.
- Gamblers Anonymous: free peer support meetings, in person and online, at gamblersanonymous.org.
- Gam-Anon: support for family members and partners, at gam-anon.org.
You do not need to have decided anything before you call. The helpline is also there for someone worried about another person's gambling.
Warning signs worth taking seriously
- Betting more than you planned to, or more often, to feel the same interest.
- Chasing losses, meaning increasing stakes specifically to recover money already lost.
- Betting with money set aside for something else, or borrowing to bet.
- Hiding the extent of it from people close to you, or lying about time or amounts.
- Feeling restless or irritable when you try to cut back.
- Gambling to manage stress, low mood, boredom or sleeplessness rather than for entertainment.
One of these is worth noticing. Several together is worth acting on.
Controls to set before you need them
Every control below works better set in advance, because the point at which you most need a limit is the point at which you least want to set one.
- Deposit limits. A daily, weekly or monthly cap on what can enter the account. Most books let you lower one immediately and impose a waiting period before raising it, which is the feature doing the work.
- Loss and wager limits. Caps on what can be lost or staked in a period, independent of what you deposited.
- Session time limits and reality checks. A prompt showing how long you have been logged in. Easy to dismiss, and still useful.
- Time out. A short lock, typically 24 hours to six weeks, after which the account reopens automatically.
- Self-exclusion. A longer or permanent closure that cannot be reversed on request during the term. This is the strongest tool an operator offers.
An honest limitation you should know about. The operators reviewed on this site are licensed outside the United States and are not part of any US state self-exclusion register. Excluding yourself at one book does not exclude you anywhere else, and no regulator enforces the exclusion for you. If you need a barrier that does not depend on an individual operator honouring it, blocking software installed on your own devices and a bank-level gambling block are more reliable. Many US banks and card issuers now offer a gambling transaction block on request, and that operates on your account rather than theirs.
Protecting people under the minimum age
Every operator covered here sets a minimum age of 18 or 21 depending on the book, and nothing on this site is intended for anyone below it. If you share a device, filtering software restricting gambling content is worth installing, and keeping payment credentials out of saved browser fields removes the most common route to an underage account.
Some facts worth holding on to
Every bet on every site listed here carries a built-in margin for the operator. That margin is how the business works and it does not change with strategy, confidence or a run of results. A system that appears to beat it has not; it has changed the distribution of outcomes without changing the expectation.
Gambling is not a way to make money, solve a debt or recover a loss. Treated as paid entertainment with a budget you have already decided you can lose, it is a leisure cost. Treated as anything else it stops working quickly.