This is the second article in my series on responsible gambling rules and ideas that sound right in a meeting room but fall apart on the casino floor. I have spent more than 20 years in this industry, and I am strongly in favour of responsible gambling. That is exactly why I think some of its ideas deserve a second look.
In the first article in this series, I told the story of my first ever slot session. I put $100 into a machine, pressed spin twice, and only then noticed my balance was $20. The default bet was $40 a spin.
That is a bad default. But I want to be precise about why it was bad, because the responsible gambling conversation on default bets has started heading somewhere I do not think it should go.
The opposing case deserves a fair hearing, and it has real evidence behind it.
When the UK's Behavioural Insights Team audited ten gambling operators in 2022, seven of them set the in-game default stake above the minimum. In one example the default was £1 on a game with a 10p minimum. The report counted this among defaults that are not in the customer's best interests.
Academics have followed. A 2026 review of "dark patterns" in online gambling named bad defaults as the most common type, including stakes set above the minimum. A 2025 paper in the journal Addiction went further and suggested that bet sizes should default toward the minimum possible.
The behavioural science behind this is well established. People stick with defaults. When organ donation is opt-out rather than opt-in, consent roughly doubles. When the suggested amounts in a deposit limit dropdown were lowered, the average limit people set fell by 45%. Defaults are powerful, so the argument goes, and a default stake above the minimum quietly pushes every player to bet more.
It is a reasonable argument. I just do not think it survives contact with how players actually play.
Most of the famous default studies involve choices people make once and then never look at again: a pension contribution rate, a box on a form, a deposit limit. Those defaults stick because nothing ever forces the person to notice them.
A bet size is the opposite. The cost of every spin comes straight out of a balance that sits on screen in front of the player. A default that is too high announces itself within a few spins, and the player turns it down.
That is exactly what happened to me. It took me two spins to notice, and then I corrected it. Those two spins cost me $80 I did not mean to spend, which is a genuinely bad experience. But the damage was bounded. It did not follow me through the session, and it certainly did not follow me for years.
So a large default bet is a real risk for one specific player: someone very new, in their first few spins, who has not yet learned to check the stake. For everyone else it is a poor user experience rather than a source of harm. That distinction matters, because poor user experience and gambling harm need different fixes.
If high defaults are bad, the obvious reaction is to set every game to its minimum bet. I think that is a mistake, for three reasons.
First, it is a poor experience. On a $100 balance, a 10 cent spin produces wins so small they barely register. A slot is entertainment, and a session where nothing that happens feels meaningful is not good entertainment.
Second, it does not achieve anything. A player who finds the minimum too conservative will simply raise the stake themselves, usually within a few spins. The default has not protected them. It has just added a step.
Third, and most importantly, the minimum ignores the one number that actually tells you what a sensible bet looks like: the player's balance. 10 cents is a sensible bet on a $10 balance and an oddly timid one on a $1,000 balance. A default that treats those two players the same is not a responsible default. It is a lazy one.
Here is what I would actually recommend operators do. Set the default bet as a proportion of the player's balance, so that every player starts with a stake that gives them a reasonable amount of playing time.
In my experience, a bet of around 1% to 2% of your balance is the sweet spot for playability. On a $100 balance that is a $1 to $2 spin, enough for a long session before you even count any wins. Something like $3.75 on a $100 balance is about the upper edge of reasonable.
Compare that with my $40 default on a $100 balance: 40% of my money on a single spin. That is why it was a bad default. Not because it was above the minimum, but because it was completely out of proportion to what I had in front of me.
In practice, for most slots and most balances, this lands somewhere between $1 and $5 as a starting bet. Above that you start getting into risky territory, especially for new players. It is worth noting that the UK's maximum stake on online slots is £5 per spin (£2 for players aged 18 to 24), so even the strictest major regulator agrees that a bet in this range is a normal bet, not a reckless one.
None of this stops a player from choosing a bigger bet. Someone who wants to take a bigger chance at a bigger win is entitled to do that. The default is not there to decide how the player plays. It is there to make sure their first spin is a sensible one.
Ultimately, the bet size is the player's decision. That is not me passing the buck. It is the same principle as the first article in this series: the player sets their limits, and the product's job is to make that decision easy and visible.
So the rule that matters most is not where the default sits. It is that the player must be able to see clearly what they are betting before they press spin, and before they start an autoplay run. A stake that is visible, readable and impossible to miss protects the new player far better than a 10 cent default that they will raise thirty seconds later anyway.
My $40 spins did not happen because the default was high. They happened because I did not see it. Fix the visibility and you have fixed most of the problem.
If I were writing the guidance, it would look like this:
| Minimum bet default | Balance-relative default (1% to 2%) | Fixed high default | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Risk to a brand new player | Very low | Low | High, until they notice |
| Playing time on the starting balance | Very long | Long | Short |
| Wins feel meaningful | Rarely | Yes | Yes |
| Likely to be overridden immediately | Often, upward | Sometimes | Often, downward, after the damage |
| Adapts to the player | No | Yes | No |
I have kept the first row honest. The minimum is the safest possible starting point for a brand new player, and anyone who tells you otherwise is overselling. My argument is that the gain is small and short-lived, and the cost to everyone else's experience is real.
A high default bet is a real but short-lived risk to a very new player, and it is mostly a user experience problem. Forcing every game to its minimum bet does not fix that. It swaps one poor experience for another. The better answer is a default that respects the player's balance, a stake that is impossible to miss, and a player who stays in charge of their own bet.
Once again, the real responsible gambling levers are limits, defaults and clarity. The trick is setting them where they actually help.