Responsible
gambling

You do not have to be in crisis to use any of these, and you do not have to give your name.

• The National Gambling Helpline is free and open 24 hours a day, every day, on 0808 8020 133. It is run by GamCare, and it is a conversation, not a form.
• GamCare also runs a live chat and moderated forums if talking on the phone is not for you.
• GAMSTOP blocks you from gambling sites licensed in Great Britain. It is free and takes a few minutes to set up.
• If money has become the immediate problem, a free debt adviser will treat it as a debt problem and not a moral one. StepChange and Citizens Advice both do this at no cost.

If you are in immediate danger or thinking about harming yourself, contact emergency services on 999, or Samaritans free on 116 123, at any time.

NextSlots is an editorial site. We do not take bets, hold anyone's money, run games or operate a casino. We log new slot releases in the UK market, write about them, and host the supplier's own free demo where one exists.

Some links to casinos are commercial, and we mark them. A commercial link does not change a release date, a published spec, or the order anything appears in. It also does not make an operator safer, so treat our linking to a site as no more than what it is: a link.

We publish no scores and no verdicts, and where a studio has not published a number we leave it blank and say so rather than filling the gap.

This is the part that matters most on a site like this one, because we put demos in front of you.

A demo is the real game running on play money. Nothing you win in it is money, and nothing you lose in it is money. That is the point of it, and it is genuinely the safest way to see whether a game is worth your time before you decide anything.

What a demo cannot do is tell you what will happen with real stakes. A run of good luck in fun mode is a run of good luck, not a preview. Slots have no memory, so nothing you saw in the demo carries over into a real session, and a game that felt generous for twenty minutes on play money can do nothing at all on the next twenty with your own.

If a demo has left you feeling that a game is due, or that you have worked it out, that feeling is the thing to be careful of, not the game.

Every site licensed in Great Britain has to offer these. They are free, they take a minute, and they work best set before a session rather than during one.

• A deposit limit caps what you can pay in over a day, a week or a month. Lowering it usually applies straight away; raising it does not, by design.
• A loss limit caps what you can actually lose over a period, which is a different and often more useful number than what you deposit.
• A time-out locks your account for a short break, typically from a day up to several weeks, without closing it.
• A reality check interrupts play at an interval you choose and tells you how long you have been going. Sessions distort time badly, and this is the cheapest correction for it.
• Self-exclusion with an operator shuts your account with that operator for a set minimum period and stops their marketing.
• Closing an account is available at any time and does not need a reason.

The exact periods and wording vary between operators. They are set out in the responsible gambling or account settings section of each site, and an operator that makes them hard to find is telling you something.

GAMSTOP is a free national scheme. You register once, choose a minimum period, and it blocks you from gambling websites and apps licensed in Great Britain. Once it is running you cannot lift it before the period you chose has finished, which is the feature rather than a flaw.

Be clear about the edges, because people are caught out by them.

• It covers online operators licensed in Great Britain. It does not cover sites operating outside that licence.
• It does not cover betting shops, casinos or arcades you walk into.
• It does not cover lottery tickets or scratchcards bought over a counter.
• It works on the details you register, so it is worth registering every email address and card you have used.

If you want the shops covered too, ask about a separate scheme for premises. GAMSTOP is for online, and pairing the two is common.

None of this is a diagnosis, and one item on its own does not mean much. Several of them together, over a few weeks, usually does.

• You go back to win money back after losing it, and the amounts creep up.
• You play for longer than you meant to, most times you play.
• You are gambling with money set aside for something else, or with money you borrowed.
• You are vague about it with people close to you, or you have started hiding it.
• You feel restless or irritable when you try to cut down.
• Winning no longer feels like much, and only larger stakes register.
• You are thinking about it when you are meant to be doing something else.

Gambling should be a paid entertainment, in the same way a night out is: you decide the cost beforehand, and the cost is the point of it, not a temporary loan against a future win. If it has stopped working like that, the helpline number above exists for exactly this and costs nothing.

Support for family and friends is not an afterthought at any of these organisations. GamCare's helpline takes calls from people worried about someone else, and treats that as its own problem rather than a version of the gambler's.

Two practical things, from people who do this for a living: protecting your own money is reasonable and not a betrayal, and paying off someone's gambling debt tends to relieve the pressure that was about to make them stop. Take advice before you do it.

Gambling with real money in the UK is 18 and over, and there is nothing on this site aimed at anyone younger. The demos here are play money, but the games they are demonstrating are not, so they are not for children either.

If a young person uses a device you own, free filtering software will block gambling content across every browser on it. Net Nanny and similar tools do this, and most operating systems now include parental controls that cover it without extra software.

• No claim that a slot is due, hot, or about to pay. Nothing on this site can know that, and neither can anyone else.
• No language that treats gambling as a way to make money or to solve a money problem.
• No score and no verdict on any game, because we do not publish one.
• A number the studio has not published stays blank on the page rather than being filled with a guess.
• Every page shows when we last checked it, and commercial links are marked as commercial.

If a page here is out of date, or reads as though it is encouraging you to play rather than telling you about a game, tell us and we will change it. That is a fair thing to hold us to.