Safer Gambling Week 2021 is Coming – What’s it About?

Annual Event to Promote Safer Gambling

The whole of the UK and Irish gambling industry, which includes amusement arcades, bingo clubs, bookmakers, and casinos both offline and online, come together to support Safer Gambling Week for one-week only every year. Running from the 1^st to the 7^th of November, the campaign is led by the gambling industry in a bid to get people talking about gambling. The campaign creates a bridge between the customer, staff and the public, driving awareness of how to gamble more safely while providing all the necessary tools to help them achieve this.

As well as being a topic of conversation, Safer Gambling Week also offers more advice and support through workshops and training sessions, details of which can be found on their website. In 2020, statistics revealed around 70% of the calls to the National Gambling Helpline (GamCare operated), mentioned gambling debt at some level, financial hardship, or both. To address this, GamCare collaborated with multiple industries to develop a tool kit that would help provide more support that may have been missed before.

It’s Good to Talk

Messages you’re likely to see at some point during the event are…

…reminders of what to do and what not to do. Many online bingo sites jump onboard with a week dedicated to flooding their social media channels with gambling awareness posts. “Play smart…don’t chase your losses”, “Remember, friends and family and more important than gambling” and “Gambling is not a way to make money” will be seen at some point between November 1^st and 7^th.

In Touch Games, the owner of the no deposit mFortune and Mr Spin websites (among many others!), has this year become the first operator to highlight the importance of gambling responsibly, by offering a series of responsible gambling tips to customers. Keeping players safe and happy is the ultimate goal for any gambling establishment and this starts with implementing deposit limits.

Your bingo/casino account is more than just a cashier, it is a place where you can impose all sorts of gambling restrictions to stop you from spending more than you can afford, including a tool to reduce how much you can spend per stake, a loss limit, a time-play limit plus you can restrict what games you can play too! Take Tombola for example, they offer a feature where you can block certain games – I for one have the spin games locked as I tend to lose track of time when playing, there’s no shame in admitting that!

Setting your limits will help you to become a safer gambler. If you feel you are playing too much, there are resources to self-exclude and there’s even software that can block all gambling websites too! Don’t be afraid to get help if you need it. Confidential and free support is provided online at GamCare, BeGambleAware, and GamStop.