Casino Guru, an independent source of information about online casinos, has recently reached an amazing milestone that marks its success in trying to change the online gambling ecosystem for the better. Due to Casino Guru’s efforts, over 50 casinos have removed or altered parts of their Terms and Conditions, that were not in line with fair gambling and player safety.
Player protection is one of Casino Guru’s priorities. The team behind the project believes that current market practices, although in line with the rules of gambling regulators, are not sufficient to allow players to gamble safely and without having to worry about unknowingly doing something against the rules of the venue they play at. Ridding the casinos’ T&Cs of unfair and predatory clauses has been part of Casino Guru’s active endeavors for over two years now.
“We have fine-tuned our casino review process to identify unfair conditions and warn players about them in our reviews. Therefore, the highest casino ratings are reserved for venues that create a safe environment for their customers,” said Matej Novota, the head of the casino review team at Casino Guru.
According to Matej, most of the clauses that have been removed or altered had something to do with these areas:
dealing with dormant player account and giving the casino the right to confiscate the balance of players that have not logged in or played in a certain period of time, giving the casino the right to decline withdrawals of players that have been identified to use so-called irregular betting patters, which don’t really make sense according to the Casino Guru team, limiting the size of winnings that can be accumulated over a certain period of time, unfair rules concerning playing with an active bonus.
“Casinos also often write their T&Cs in a way that’s difficult to understand and confusing, which leaves players helpless when trying to understand what they are and aren’t allowed to do. Additionally, as the T&Cs are generally designed to protect the casino at all costs, this creates an unbalanced player-casino relationship that can be exploited by the casino,” he added.
Casino Guru also helps casino players with their complaints. When players feel like they have been mistreated by the casino in an unfair way, they can submit a public complaint, and Matej’s team analyzes the situation and tries to help to get things resolved. These complaints also help Casino Guru identify points of friction between players and casinos, which can potentially be improved by altering the casino’s Terms and Conditions.
“Our reviews and ratings are used by thousands of players to choose a casino to play at, so it’s in the casinos’ best interest to be rated well. If casinos with unfair clauses in their T&Cs or many justified player complaints want to improve their rating, they need to get these issues resolved. This strict approach has helped us considerably in our endeavor to make casino T&Cs more balanced.”
It’s a great result for Casino Guru, but there still is a long way to go until players are fully protected when playing online. Casino Guru has described common issues in their fair gambling codex, which also defines the terms ‘fair casino’ and ‘fair and safe casino’.
The latter one is reserved for venues that meet exceptionally strict requirements. This is how all online casinos would function in the ideal world, according to Casino Guru. Out of over 3000 online casinos in their database, only two meet the criteria to be called ‘fair and safe’ in line with these requirements. The less strict criteria for ‘fair casinos’ have been met by approximately 150 venues.
The Casino Guru team will continue working towards improving this statistic in the future and helping make gambling online safer, but only time will tell whether that happens or not.
