IRIS is a modern tool to make gambling safer for gamblers. It performs in-depth analyses
of individual players' gambling behaviour and can warn them in time if their gambling
becomes risky.

From 1 January 2017, legal gambling operators in the Czech Republic must register any player who wants to play in a land-based gambling room, casino or online. At the same time, gambling operators are legally obliged to collect an enormous amount of gaming data, which is then sent in data packets to the Ministry of Finance at 8-hour intervals, in accordance with Decree No. 10/2019 Coll., on Gambling Reporting (the "Reporting Decree").

IRIS tracks so-called Markers of Risky Gambling Behaviour in this data, such as the amount of money invested in the game, the frequency of depositing it into the player's account or the time spent gambling, what time of day the player plays, etc. Based on these factors, it is able to categorise gamblers into risk groups and at the same time it is able to recognise the first symptoms of risky behaviour. That is, the point at which a gambler's gambling stops being fun and turns risky.

IRIS will evaluate if players are not in control of the game. It will alert them that their game activity has increased, they will be given a comparison with the average of other players and the system will also provide them with instructions on how to deal with the situation.

IRIS will be able to send alerts to players such as "Did you know you spend 6 hours more than the average player per day playing?" or "Did you know you play more than a third of the day?"

We have currently developed a scoring classification model, for which we are now developing a complex server application so that we can validate the model's features on a sufficiently large sample of data. At the same time, we are preparing the intervention communication and legalities of distributed deployment to individual providers.

Regulation now offers players a number of tools to protect themselves from risky gambling (limits, registration on the Exclusion Register, mandatory breaks, etc.). However, the pitfall of the legal measures is that they assume that all players are the same. But players are all different, so blanket measures affect them differently.

However, IRIS is the only tool that looks at the issue comprehensively and from a player's perspective. This is the only way to identify or alert problem players early and offer them the best possible help. In Europe, similar systems already exist at the level of a single operator. However, what makes IRIS unique is that it aims to be an inter-operator system. In such a case, gambling operators would send anonymised gambling data to a single point which would evaluate it on the basis of the same criteria and send all participating operators the same information about which group a player is in. This would be followed by a single intervention and all subsequent steps. The indisputable advantage of this solution is that the player will have the same playing history with all participating operators and will be evaluated comprehensively as a whole. There will be no distortion of a player's playing behaviour by taking a break and going to play for another operator.

Players need not worry, no personal player data will be shared across operators, only anonymised game data. And this is under a single player identifier assigned to them under the relevant reporting ordinance and used to report gaming history to the state. This identifier may be further encrypted.

Without an across-the-board obligation to identify high-risk players, there will always be "stowaways" in the market who will take advantage of high-risk player tourism at a vulnerable point when responsible operators stop offering them bonuses and start encouraging them to set healthy limits or other measures to keep their gambling under control.

IRIS will offer a wide range of intervention tools. These will include:

• Warning about increased game activity with comparison to average players.
• Recommendations for setting personal limits on time and money invested in gaming.
• Information on self-regulation options such as setting limits or temporary self-
  exclusion.
• Guidance on how to seek professional help (e.g. links to contacts of organisations
  working on addiction prevention).