«На пути к более устойчивому рынку азартных игр» — Шимон Винче

Shimon Wince, Head of Sustainable and Safe Gambling at Casino Guru, joins the new episode of the Affiliate Grand Slam affiliate interview series

Shimon Vinče describes Casino Guru as a source of honest casino reviews and an online casino database; They inform rather than promote, they focus on visitor satisfaction and never push their visitors to gamble. He talks about some of his projects, including the Casino Guru Academy, the Global Self-Exclusion Initiative, the Complaint Resolution Center, their educational content, and the Code of Fair Gambling – read the full interview below.

How did Casino Guru start and what is Casino Guru?

In terms of business, Casino Guru is the affiliate website with the largest database of online casinos and the bonuses they offer. We specialize in unbiased reviews that help users choose reliable and trustworthy casinos to play at.

However, we aim to do much more by following our values and trying to change the gambling industry for the better through projects such as the Casino Guru Academy and the Global Self-Exclusion Initiative, as well as our Complaint Center, educational content, and fair gambling code.

All of these efforts are related to the values that have been part of Casino Guru since the beginning. The project was launched by two good friends who worked as software developers, and they were tasked with designing and building online casino software. After getting to know the industry, they decided to create a website about online casinos and used their skills to make it stand out.

They chose to base it on structured data, which allows us to work with the data and base our reviews on objective information. The first version was launched in May 2016, and now, after more than 5 years, Casino Guru is one of the largest sites of its kind on the internet.

What is the role of Casino Guru in the online industry?

Among the many things we do, it’s hard to single out any one role, but I can try to summarize the most important ones.

Casino Guru is a database of online casinos, casino games, and casino bonuses. Since it is one of the largest resources in the online gambling industry, people come to our site in search of information.

It is important to note that we are also a source of honest casino reviews that follow a strict methodology and focus on objective data and parameters. We read the fine print so that players don’t have to. These reviews help our visitors to truly understand how reliable, fair, and safe any casino is, which sets us apart from other casino review websites.

We are committed to being a driving force for change that will make online gambling safer for everyone. The non-profit projects I lead, such as the Casino Guru Academy and the Global Self-Exclusion Initiative, aim to do just that. I really believe that both players and companies operating in the industry can benefit from a more sustainable gambling market, and I hope that our efforts will move in the right direction.

What sets you apart from other partners and what makes your websites unique?

I would argue that our approach to informing, rather than promoting, is one of the things that sets us apart. Our goal is to provide our visitors with the best possible information so that they can make informed and informed decisions when it comes to where to play, what games to play, how to play them, and whether or not they should gamble at all. We never push our visitors to gamble. Instead, we present things as they really are. If we find a casino or game bad, we just talk about it. We believe that this is really important in this industry.

Our methodical approach to almost everything is another differentiating factor. We use streamlined processes for our casino reviews and their periodic updates, which allows us to remain objective, minimize errors, and get repeatable results. Thanks to this, users can rely on the information they find on our site.

In addition, I think our global presence is unique in some ways. Casino Guru is available in 17 languages, allowing users from most corners of the world to access casino information in a language they understand. This is also present in our forum, where users can discuss questions in any language thanks to automatic translations.

What is your approach? What are your goals?

To sum up our approach in just a few words, I would say that it is all about doing the best we can and staying true to the values that have been a part of Casino Guru since the beginning. With a focus on visitor satisfaction, we believe that players should be able to enjoy online casino games in a fair and secure way. In our opinion, a strict attitude towards casinos and a desire to make them better will benefit this goal.

We hope that this approach and our values will help us achieve our goal of becoming the most visited online casino website in the world. In addition to the obvious business benefits, it will also help us help as many players as possible and positively influence their gaming decisions. And I would say that we are on the right track.

You evaluate your players’ complaints in accordance with the code of fair play. Can you tell us more about this and how you’re improving player safety and game fairness?

The main idea behind the fair gambling code and how we approach complaints is fairness. We always try to find the best and most honest way to solve problems that arise between the casino and the players. From our point of view, just because a casino’s terms and conditions say something doesn’t mean it’s okay.

For example, we have seen casinos state in their Terms and Conditions that they can decide at their discretion to close a player’s account and keep all the funds that were in it. In the end, the player will agree to the Terms and Conditions upon registration. However, we would definitely do our best to help the player if the casino wanted to use this rule against them, as it is completely unfair.

Now, of course, this is an extreme example, as I’m sure most people would agree that it was unfair, but there are many problematic situations in which the answer is not clear. To deal with this, we hold weekly meetings where we discuss these situations and try to find the best way to solve them. We consider cases and rules not only from a legal point of view, but also from the point of view of fairness and user-friendliness.

The entire Complaint team is present at this meeting, as well as other people who have something to say. For example, I take part in these meetings to help with complaints related to self-exclusion and responsible gambling.

Once we agree on how best to proceed, we know how to deal with similar complaints in the future. If necessary, we also describe the situation and our point of view in our Code of Fair Gambling. Not everything is described there yet, as everything is developing and requires time to write and translate, but we are working on it.

Our reviews are data-driven, follow a rigorous methodology and are not intended for sale. Can you tell us more about them? Does this help to make the casino fairer to players?

Haha, I see you’re reading our About Us page. Well, of course, I believe that it is. I think that we, as an industry, need to hold casinos accountable for their actions. If casinos treat players unfairly, I think we need to point that out and push them to do better. And that’s what we’re trying to do with our reviews.

Our review methodology is set up to make our reviews and ratings completely unbiased. They are based strictly on the data entered into our system by the casino verification team. We walk around the casino’s website, look for complaints about it, read its terms and conditions in full to make sure they are fair, and so on and so forth. All of this is then used to calculate the casino’s reputation rating, which essentially describes the probability that a player (who has played in good faith and without any bad intentions) will receive payouts without any problems.

All of this means that the casino really needs to change something in order to get a higher ranking from us. If they don’t like their bad review, they can remove the unfair rules that caused them to get a bad rating, or they can fix the situation with the players they mistreated and file a complaint. And hundreds of casinos have done so over the years.

At Casino Guru, you have a complaint resolution center. How did it all start and what is the idea of this center? How big is it?

Complaints have always been part of our review methodology. However, at first, we only searched the internet and other gambling sites for complaints about the casinos we checked. In addition, we continued to receive complaint emails from unscrupulous players long before we launched the complaint resolution center.

Taking into account the complaints we’ve seen on other websites, as well as the complaints we’ve received in our inbox, we’ve realized that we can help players by running our own complaint center and doing it better than everyone else by addressing issues also in terms of fairness and user-friendliness. So, we brainstormed, designed, programmed, and ran it.

Since then, the number of complaints we receive every month has been constantly growing. For 2021, we registered 5,532 new complaints on our website, of which 1,631 were closed as resolved and the total disputed amount was returned to players in the amount of $4,243,557.

Now, I’m not sure about the number of other websites and forums that help players with casino complaints, but I think we’re definitely one of the largest, if not the biggest.

You produce educational videos to give players a chance to learn and help them avoid problems. Tell us more about it.

Yes. We create gambling training videos and publish them on our YouTube channel as well as on our website. There is a lot of gambling-related video content on the internet, but unfortunately, I would say that most of it is not conducive to responsible gambling. For example, just find the best strategies for slot machines, and many of the videos you will see will try to tell you that you can win at slot machines systematically. And this, of course, is not true.

And it is not by chance that I give this example. We are currently finishing our own video on slot machine strategies, which goes hand in hand with our article on the site on the same topic. We’re absolutely clear that these strategies won’t help you beat the casino, but they can help you play slots more efficiently and lose less in the long run. And we end this video by saying that the best strategy is not to play slots at all, at least from a mathematical standpoint. We do our best to spread the message that gambling should be considered as entertainment that costs money, and not as a way to make money.

Personally, I think this gives us a slight downside as people are more likely to click on sensational content that promises huge, unmistakable wins, but I also believe our approach is the right one. If we help at least some people understand how things really work and that gambling is not a way to make money, it’s all worth it.

And I’m sure our videos have definitely helped at least some people looking for information about gambling. We currently have over 900 subscribers on our channel, and our videos are gaining more and more views every month. And, since the number of videos on our channel is still quite small, I expect that number to start growing even faster when we have more video content.

The Casino Guru website is available in 17 languages and has a multilingual forum. What value does it give?

When we were developing our forum, we spent a lot of time figuring out how to do it best. And considering all the languages in which Casino Guru is available, we decided to implement automatic translations that allow players to communicate seamlessly, even if they don’t speak the same language.

And I think it’s very valuable, especially for people who don’t speak English. If you think about it, it’s pretty easy to find several major gambling forums on the internet. However, people who do not speak English may find it more difficult to find an active forum to discuss gambling with other players in a language they understand. This is where our forum excels. It overcomes the language barrier and brings together players from all over the world.

And I think having these available communication channels is very important for a lot of players. Apart from the usual things that casino players love to discuss, such as their favorite slot machines and the biggest wins, they also have the opportunity to discuss their problems with the casino and share their stories and experiences regarding gambling, including problems related to gambling addiction.

Your database contains more than 3000 casino sites. How do you keep all this up to date?

In fact, there are already more than 4000. And yes, it is very difficult to keep all the information up to date, but we do our best. First, we periodically review the casinos in our database and review the information. This means that we check all the casino data we have and make sure that it is true, correcting what has changed since the last casino check.

In addition to this, many casinos themselves contact us whenever something important changes, such as a new language version, a new payment method, etc. Whenever we find something new, we add it to the review, but big regular updates of reviews happen regardless of this. .

How do you manage relationships with multiple operators?

I’m sure there’s a lot of work behind it given the size of our database and our global reach, but I have to admit that I personally don’t look too far into this area of business. We have a team that communicates with operators, discusses the terms of our cooperation, and deals with finances.

This team is completely separate from our casino verification team, which collects information about casino websites and enters it into our database. This information is then used to calculate the reputation score and create reviews.

We did this on purpose so that our reviews and ratings remain completely unbiased and do not affect the financial side of our cooperation with a particular casino.

How do you help make online gambling safer? Your goal is to create a global self-exclusion system. Can you tell us more about it?

Many of our actions are related to helping to make online gambling safer. I’ve already mentioned many of them, including Unbiased Reviews, the Code of Fair Gambling, the Casino’s Commitment to Getting Better, the Casino Guru Academy, and the Global Self-Exclusion Initiative.

When dealing with player complaints and other issues present in the gambling industry, we have noticed that the current self-exclusion options, which are mostly limited to single-casino self-exclusion and national self-exclusion schemes, do not protect vulnerable and addicted players against further gambling harm.

We have seen many stories of addicted gamblers who used national systems such as GAMSTOP to block their access to gambling, but later started playing again with foreign operators. The problem with systems like GAMSTOP is that they are limited to one jurisdiction, while players can easily find casinos from other countries that are unaware of their self-exclusion and are willing to let them play.

Realizing that we could not solve this problem on our own, we decided to launch the Global Self-Exclusion Initiative to raise awareness of this issue and find partners who can join the Initiative and help make our vision a reality.

Have you ever been to SiGMA events? SiGMA Europe, Asia or Americas – Which of these three expos would you attend in 2022?

I attended SiGMA Europe last year in Malta. It was my first time on this small island and I was amazed at how it can live and breathe gambling during the event. I would definitely like to come to Malta again this year, but I am also interested in the African and Asian regions. However, my participation in these activities will depend on the priorities of my joint projects, primarily the Global Self-Exclusion Initiative.

Tell us a little about yourself – after all, business is done with people, not just with companies! Your hobbies, favorite book, favorite quote, whether you are into gaming yourself, etc.

I’m interested in esports because I grew up playing video games, and it’s a field that is very close to me. I don’t play casino games, but I do bet from time to time when I watch esports tournaments. With two young children, it’s pretty hard to find a good opportunity to play some games, but luckily I manage to do it from time to time.

In addition to work, I spend most of my time with my family or doing sports, most commonly swimming. I’m a fan of Stoicism, and I’m currently improving my communication skills. That’s where my favorite quote or maybe advice comes from: “Tell me what time it is. There is no need to reinvent the clock.”

Find out more about the SiGMA Affiliate Grand Slam here.

SiGMA Asia 2022:

After the fascinating set of conferences that Malta Week 2021 has become, SiGMA Group plans to take the world by storm by visiting the golden domes of Kyiv and the snowy city of Toronto, where they will bring together the best and brightest representatives of the iGaming world. Our next exhibition will take us to the ultra-modern metropolises of the United Arab Emirates, where we will organize three days of networking, group discussions and celebrations. Stay up to date with the latest SiGMA News.