Get help now
Gambling Helpline Aotearoa — 0800 654 655. Free, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can also text 8006 or use the web chat on the Gambling Helpline site. Counsellors take calls from people who gamble and from families, and the service is funded by the levy on gambling operators, not by any operator directly.
Need to talk — 1737. Free call or text, any time, for anything that is weighing on you. Not gambling-specific.
Problem Gambling Foundation of New Zealand. Free face-to-face and online counselling nationwide, including services for Māori (Te Ara Whakamana), Pacific communities (Mapu Maia) and Asian communities (Asian Family Services). Details at pgf.nz.
Safer Gambling Aotearoa and the Department of Internal Affairs harm prevention pages set out what is available and how the levy funds it.
What self-exclusion covers, and what it does not
New Zealand has a multi-venue exclusion system: one request can bar you from the pokie venues and casinos in your area, and venue staff are required to act on it. It is a real tool and it works for physical venues.
It does not reach an offshore website. No New Zealand exclusion register is visible to a casino licensed in Curaçao or Anjouan, and no New Zealand regulator can compel one to honour it. This is the single most important practical difference between playing pokies at a pub in Hamilton and playing them on a crypto site, and it is worth understanding before you open an account rather than after.
What does work offshore:
- The operator's own self-exclusion. Every operator on this site has one buried in account settings. It binds that operator only, and only until you ask them to lift it. Ask for permanent, not for a cooling-off period, if permanent is what you mean.
- Deposit limits set on day one. They are far easier to set before you need them. On most sites an increase takes effect after a delay while a decrease is immediate — that asymmetry is the only thing making the limit useful, so use it.
- Blocking software on the device. Gamban and BetBlocker cover thousands of gambling domains including crypto casinos. BetBlocker is free.
- Blocking the payment route. New Zealand banks can block gambling merchant categories on your card, and several do it on request. It will not stop a crypto exchange transfer, but it removes the fastest path back in.
The signs worth taking seriously
Not a checklist to score yourself against — just the things people describe afterwards as the point where it changed:
- Depositing again the same day after deciding you were done for the day.
- Playing for the amount rather than for the game — the size of the bet has stopped registering.
- Chasing a loss back rather than accepting it as spent.
- Hiding the size of a deposit, or the fact of one, from someone close to you.
- Money that was for something else — rent, a bill, a shared account — going in.
- Borrowing to play, including a credit card, a buy-now-pay-later balance, or a friend.
If more than one of those is familiar, the helpline number above is the right call to make today rather than after the next session.
The arithmetic, stated once
Every game on every site listed here has a negative expected return. The house edge is the product being sold, and it does not have losing streaks. A crypto casino's provably fair games are verifiable but not favourable — verifiable means you can confirm the house edge was applied honestly, not that it was not applied.
That is why this site compares licences and payout terms rather than promising anyone a strategy. There is no strategy. There is only how much you were willing to lose before you started.
Back to the comparison table, or read how the ranking works and what this site will not publish.