Our first feature post to take you behind the scenes at 4Poker, has us speaking to one of the most important people that any gaming/gambling industry company can have today.

We have calculated more than 150 years of gaming experience in the 4Poker team, and JEFF VAN DEN HOOVEN is one of the more impressive contributors and subject matter experts, as our Head of Responsible Gaming. In short, Jeff was working in responsible gaming, before responsible gambling was even a thing.

Back in 2007, to say regulation was light would be an understatement. As big as the likes of PokerStars and partypoker were in the mid 2000s, you could count on one hand people that were in roles dedicated to safer gambling, and Jeff was one of them.

Often then playing the role of counsellor and educator as players came to grips with the game during the online boom, the role and function has evolved dramatically over the years, as has regulatory controls to ensure games online are safer than ever. A global pandemic and extended period of lockdown saw some countries take even stricter and stronger measures to further protect our great game, and more importantly - the people who play it.

[HC] Jeff, I’m not sure I’ve ever explicitly asked… how did you come to start at 4Poker?

[JVDH] Really lucky timing more than anything. As the pandemic eased, I was one of the many who participated in the "great resignation" that hit the globe. After 14 years with a single operator, it just really felt time for a change in scenery, and really try to find something that reignited a bit of passion in me. I knew I really wanted to work for a startup and start something from scratch to get the entire journey. Literally 48 hours after I finished my final day at PokerStars, I was offered this job, which I agreed to with the caveat that I don't start right away and get a nice break in first. It worked out well.

[HC] Tell us a bit about those early days, almost a year on?

[JVDH] As I started my first day, and looked who was in the Company, aside from the development teams, there was only a small group of us - maybe four or five people. The fact they hired me that early in a pre-launch technology/development phase I thought spoke volumes as to how much the Company valued safer gambling.

[HC] Can you share a bit of your vision in terms of responsibility and safer gambling?

[JVDH] It was put to me about a year ago… how can we be the safest site out there? How can we be ethical? How do we go beyond compliance minimums?

Simple questions that were a good start to setting the direction.

I had already learned a load through experience, but being so early before launch, I was able to do a lot more research and reflect on the landscape… what regulators were doing, what the industry is doing, and the reality is that no one has really cracked it yet. At least not sufficiently well. There is however some genuine good effort out there, trying to make online gaming safer. But the keyword is gaming. Most of the time that relates to casino (and sports), which sometimes doesn't necessarily translate to online poker, so I wanted to keep that in mind.

As I looked around at the industry, I realized lot of investment in the space is really going into 2 things:

• Awareness and RG-related marketing
• Identifying at-risk players, and intervention

Those are great and necessary pillars of any RG strategy, but investment into new and innovative tools, that people use, or at least endorse to others, is very low. Name any other part of a business where you would spend millions in ad buys to advertise a product that every competitor offers?

[HC] How long will it take to have the toolset you ultimately want (and need) to give to your players?

[JVDH] We need to make sure we have the basics right at launch. There was a great research paper in 2020 that called out the single most popular tool, for poker players, is short term self-exclusion, the 24 hour and seven-day options specifically. We are going to also include two day and five-day options for our players at launch. Reason for that is if you are a professional player playing most of the week, a two-day break gives you that choice to have a weekend off without being tempted to play, like any other job. I don’t think many would disagree that everyone needs help sometimes in work-life balance. If you are a recreational player, the five-day option makes sure you can stay focused on work and family during the week but play your favorite tournament on the weekend.

[HC] What would come next?

[JVDH] Well, the second most used tool amongst poker players was deposit limits. Both research, social media and experience tell me the problem some face with deposit limits is that they can be removed too easily, so we are going to give players the chance to "lock their limit", which means they can't increase it for a period of their choosing (e.g. six months). We hope to put that into production early next year. The reality is, typically people’s financial situations don't change week on week, so we think this will help people manage their spending on a game they enjoy in the longer term, and really be an effective enhancement to an already used feature.

[HC] What does innovation look like in the space?

[JVDH] We have a lot of other ideas in the pipeline, many centered on driving informed decision making and tools catering to people who want to avoid specific game types, but in the interest of retaining true competitive advantage alongside our over-arching company goal to build our product “with” our players, means we really need to give ourselves a chance to go live, and receive feedback and requests

If our community thinks something would be a good idea, and it would help them, or their friends and family, then we want to hear it, and it will lead us to doing more than the average site, and much more than any minimum compliance expects. I think it’s time that we recognize that players are an important stakeholder in this discussion, and not only regulators