A Guide to Safe Gambling
How to Control Your Online Gambling
The world of online casino has brought a lot of benefits. Gambling is much more convenient and it’s far easier for certain social groups that haven’t been involved in this activity so much in the past to get started. While that’s great in many ways, it also brings a lot of new challenges. This particularly refers to groups like younger generations, women, elders etc. who are generally more vulnerable to problem gambling.
Gambling is an emotional thing and controlling your persona is a crucial thing for safe gambling. Therefore, this article brings a couple of tricks and useful pieces of advice that can help you keep your gambling habits at a reasonable level. Generally, the key is to set some rules and stick with them:
Set Your Limits
One of the most symptomatic things of problem gambling is practicing really long casino sessions. Problem gamblers often stay awake all night long to play their favorite casino games and often neglect their responsibilities. Therefore, one of the first things to do is to set a time limit. Determine how many times in a week, for how many hours you want to gamble and stick to the plan. In that way, the chances to become addicted will be significantly lowered.
Besides time limits, it’s important to set your financial limits. Problem gamblers tend to spend more money than they can afford, which could eventually lead to losing assets, borrowing or even stealing money etc. That’s why it’s important to set your limits, on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis. A good thing to know is that many online casinos these days allow players to set up their deposit limits. In other words, they won’t let the player make new deposits once the limit is reached.
Don’t Try to Recover Your Loses
This is so typical for any form of gambling. We all see gambling as a chance to earn some money. However, the reality is that we won’t win anything. Instead, we will probably lose all of our money and the worst thing to do is to try to recover the losses. In other words, if you lose money, don’t try to make up with additional deposits, it can only make things worse.
Also, keep your stakes at rational measure. Too high bets are one of the first signs of gambling addiction. Finally, don’t take your gambling too seriously. Many players have the ambition to build a career of their gambling but this can lead in just one direction – financial disaster.
Signs of Problem Gambling
Despite different personalities, signs of problem gambling are common for most players. They display in a couple of pretty obvious ways, starting from spending too much money on online casinos. So, if a player spends more money than he can afford on gambling, it’s a clear indicator.
Once the money is lost, the next step leads to asking others to bail out of financial trouble. Alternately, we can often see people stealing and making all kinds of frauds in order to get more gambling money.
Problem gamblers tend to lie to their family about bad habits. Finally, neglecting personal relationships, as well as daily commitments such as job, school and similar things is another clear indicator.
Dealing With Problem Gambling
Dealing with problem gambling is extremely hard and the first step is the hardest. That step is to accept that you have a gambling problem. Once you do that, things become a whole lot easier. The next step would be to seek help. That may be some of your close friends or a professional.
In most cases, it’s much easier when you share your problem with someone you don’t know, so it’s not a rare thing to see people seeking help online. There are many websites where you can get help in many different ways. In New Zealand, one of the first names that come to mind is the Gambling Help Online website, which is amazing in so many ways. There, you can count on support in so many ways and what’s important to mention is that everything is free.
First of all, there is an emergency line, where you can get support 24/7. Furthermore, the website offers free chat or SMS support, while there is also a forum section, where you can relieve yourself and share your problems with people who are troubled with the same or similar things, who will understand you completely. Also, you can hear a whole bunch of recovery stories, which is a great way to learn how to deal with problem gambling from the first hand. There is even a gambling calculator, so you can much money you’re really spending on gambling.
