Steady Stakes exists because most information about betting sites is written by people who profit when you sign up. We are not one of them. We do not take bets, we are not a regulator, and we accept no advertising or commission from gambling operators. That independence lets us put your wellbeing first and write honestly about risk.
Our purpose
Our aim is simple, to help UK adults make safer, better-informed choices about where and whether to bet. We frame every topic through harm reduction, because the site that suits you is the one that makes it easy to set limits and easy to stop. We explain licences, deposit limits, GAMSTOP, payments and the warning signs of an unsafe site in plain British English, without hype and without ever telling you to gamble.
We are clear about what betting is. It is a form of paid entertainment with a built-in cost, not a way to make money, and never a solution to financial pressure. Where a page touches on money or health, we treat it with the care those subjects deserve.
Independence and how we are funded
We keep the site deliberately lean and carry no operator advertising, affiliate links or sponsored placements. This means no bookmaker can influence what we publish or where a site appears. If our funding model ever changes, we will say so plainly on this page, because transparency is part of being trustworthy.
Every page reinforces the same free support, the GamCare National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133, because that is where real help lives, not with us.
How we research and review
We rely on primary UK sources, principally the UK Gambling Commission for licensing and rules, and established support bodies such as GamCare for help and self-assessment tools. Figures on stake limits, the statutory levy, financial risk checks and the credit-card ban are checked against official guidance from the Gambling Commission before publication.
Every page is written by Nadia Coombe and then reviewed for accuracy and tone by Dr Iain Merrick, a BACP-accredited gambling counsellor. We introduce them properly below, because on a subject this sensitive you deserve to know who is writing and what experience sits behind the words.
Nadia Coombe, writer
Nadia has spent more than a decade working in gambling harm reduction, first as a support worker on a regional problem-gambling helpline and later coordinating community outreach for a treatment charity. Day to day, that meant sitting with people at the point where betting had stopped being fun, from students who had run through a term's money on in-play football markets to pensioners quietly hiding online slots losses from their families. She has also supported the partners and parents of people who gamble, who often carry the financial and emotional weight without anyone asking how they are.
That front-line experience shapes how she writes. She has watched how a single unguarded notification or a delayed withdrawal can tip a fragile week into a bad one, and how much difference a deposit limit set in a calm moment can make. So she writes plainly, avoids anything that reads as encouragement to bet, and keeps the free routes to help, GAMSTOP, BeGambleAware and the GamCare helpline, in front of the reader on every page rather than buried at the bottom.
Dr Iain Merrick, clinical reviewer
Dr Iain Merrick is a BACP-accredited gambling counsellor with over fifteen years of clinical practice. He has delivered one-to-one and group therapy for people experiencing gambling harm through NHS-commissioned and charity-funded services, worked with families affected by someone else's gambling, and supervised trainee counsellors entering the field. His caseload has ranged from young adults caught by app-based betting to older clients recovering from significant debt, which keeps his review grounded in how harm actually presents rather than how it looks in the abstract.
Iain reads every page before it is published and checks that our safer-gambling guidance is responsible, evidence-based and genuinely useful to someone who may be struggling. Where a passage risks sounding like advice to gamble, or understating a risk, he asks us to change it. His involvement is why this site treats setting limits and self-exclusion as the safe path, and never frames betting as a way to make money.
Keeping information current
Gambling rules in Britain change often, so we review our pages regularly and update the date shown on each one. Recent changes we track include the April 2025 online slot stake limits, the statutory levy in force from April 2025, the £150 financial-risk-check threshold from February 2025, and the January 2026 bonus rules. If you spot something that looks out of date, we would genuinely like to hear about it.
Contact us
We welcome corrections, questions and feedback from readers, and we read everything that comes in. What we cannot do is offer personalised betting or financial advice, or act as a substitute for professional support, which is always free through the services we link to.
You can reach the team, including a message for our reviewer Dr Iain Merrick, BACP-accredited gambling counsellor, by email at [email protected]. If your message is about your own gambling and you would like to talk to someone straight away, please call the GamCare helpline free on 0808 8020 133, at any hour of the day or night.