Cooperation over conflict in Czech gambling regulation, with Jan Rehola

The Czech Institute for Gambling Regulation gets operators, the state, researchers and treatment specialists talking to each other instead of fighting. Its director, Jan Rehola, explains on Safer Gambling Talks how it keeps them at one table and how its cross-operator risk system, IRIS, works.

In this episode

• Rehola says the institute has 36 members representing 95% of the legal market and does not lobby for lower taxes or less regulation; the common goals are player protection, preventing harm and fighting illegal markets (5:10, 5:19, 6:34).

• IRIS spots at-risk players across operators, looking at the data from the customer's perspective; since October 2025 the gambling act lets operators share pseudonymised data for such systems (15:31, 16:02, 16:44).

• Two of the four partner operators are integrated and all should be connected by the end of the year. His longer-term vision is for the IRIS team, not operators, to run interventions (45:36, 45:40, 46:14).

• After the institute began supporting the national helpline and operators put it on their websites, calls and contacts rose 600% within a year (32:02, 32:07).

• More than 200,000 people are on the self-exclusion list, yet a survey of them found a great percentage play on the illegal market (34:37, 34:55).

• He calls the cooperation very fragile and says keeping it going is tiring (57:13, 58:27).

Episode from Safer Gambling Talks with Šimon Vincze by Casino Guru News, published on YouTube.