How about Safer Gambling Year?

“Every day is Valentine’s Day for me darling”. That’s my usual line when persuading my lovely wife that an evening spent amongst couples who have called a temporary truce in order to slurp spaghetti together might not be the best idea in the world.

And by and large, it is true. I don’t think it takes Casanova to figure out that couples who love each other don’t need to set aside a special day in order to remind themselves of the fact.

I have similar feelings about the recently-completed Safer Gambling Week. Yes, it is good to make an effort to remind players about the importance of gambling responsibly. It is right to talk about the ways in which we are making gambling safer and ensuring it remains what it surely is, a fun pastime enjoyed by millions of people who get an awful lot of pleasure from it (I’m one of them). 

But shouldn’t we be doing that all year round? Yes, a week is good, but a commitment to safer gambling for the full 52 weeks in the year would be even better. It was heartening to see ClearStake customer Hollywoodbets make precisely that point last week - and they are exactly right.

Taking responsibility

That commitment doesn’t just extend to telling players what to do and how to behave in order to stay out of trouble. An awful lot of Safer Gambling Week activity effectively amounts to advice for punters: ways to stay out of trouble, advice for keeping gambling under control, how to spot signs of danger and so on. All well and good, but it does rather suggest that gambling issues are a problem (and responsibility) for punters, not operators.

This year, the current ongoing ‘war’ over affordability checks, or financial vulnerability checks, makes a lot of this messaging even harder to swallow. I don’t like to criticise operators, but I