Responsible Gaming

Five tables in a coach house at the end of a garden, open three evenings a week. Everything described on this page is arranged face to face, here at the house.

Where the house stands

A guest who plays for an evening, enjoys it and walks back up the garden to bed has had a better night than one who plays until the room closes and thinks about it on the drive home. That is a large part of why the room is the size it is: five tables, closing at one, no credit at any hour, and no cash machine on the property. The bar stops serving before the tables do.

Over-18s, every visit

The age is 18, and identification is checked at the door every time you come, however many evenings of the stay that makes. A passport, a driving licence or a PASS-accredited card will do. Nobody under 18 enters at any hour.

What staff will do, there and then

• Hold a limit. Say your figure before you sit and it is written down and kept for the evening. If you want a figure suggested, ask.
• Tell you the time. Say when you want to be told the time, and you will be.
• Keep your seat. Step out into the garden for twenty minutes and your seat will be there when you come back.
• Keep you out for a stretch. Tell the house you do not want to be admitted for a number of days and it is written down and followed.
• Self-exclusion. Signed at the hall desk, it takes effect the same evening and is lifted only by coming back to that desk in person. It cannot be done by telephone.

None of this happens through the website. Each part of it is a conversation with somebody who can see your face, which in a house with nine bedrooms is easy to arrange.

Worth noticing in yourself

• Staying later than you decided to, on more evenings than you decided to.
• Going back the next night chiefly to recover the night before.
• Being vague with whoever you came with about how the evening went.
• Thinking about the coach house while you are walking on Whitcliffe.
• Money meant for the rest of the stay going down the garden instead.

Any one of these means little by itself. Three together are worth talking about, and the people here have had that conversation before and know how to have it without a fuss.

How staff are trained

Everyone who works that floor is briefed before a first shift and twice a year after: setting and holding a limit, handling a guest who has drunk too much, taking a self-exclusion discreetly, and when to fetch one of the owners instead of dealing with it alone. One of the owners is in the house every evening the room is open.

How to ask

Say it to whoever is on the floor, or come to the house between seven in the morning and eleven at night. You do not need an appointment or a reason.