ThePOGG – Redefining Player Protection

ThePOGG.com was my first venture into the commercial side of gambling.

History

I’d been an active advantage player offline for around 7 years before starting ThePOGG and was looking for a way to continue to make money without the travelling. My player focused experience naturally led me to create a brand focused on player protection. As such I launched ThePOGG in 2011.

The Players’ Online Gambling Guide was set-up with the idea of being a consumer champion. Regulation in the sector at the time was close to non-existent, and players were being ripped-off left, right and centre. So I started ThePOGG with the intention of providing quality information and helping players find safe places to play.

ThePOGG established BetBlocker in 2017. BetBlocker was far and away the greatest achievement of ThePOGG, though the resources it pulled from ThePOGG at a critical time significantly undermined the business’s ability to succeed in a market that was rapidly becoming hyper competitive. In hindsight BetBlocker was a poor commercial decision for the business, but I certainly do not regret the decision to invest in this project.

In 2022 ThePOGG went through the first sale of the business to the Brandstreamers group where I remained a significant stakeholder in the project. This was an ill-fated sale to an under-resourced group that found itself unable to continue less than 6 months later. However the structure of the contractual agreements facilitated a second sale shortly afterwards.





In April 2023, ThePOGG changed hands again, being sold, this time entirely, to Blexr Ltd and in early 2024 the website was decommissioned and rebranded to CasinoReviews.com.

ThePOGG Speaking for Consumers:


Part of the work of ThePOGG included investigating various issues that were negatively impacting players. Here’s a selection of the pieces I authored:

I have written lots of other articles, many of which related to the black market. You can find a selection of these articles here.

What Difference Did ThePOGG Make for Consumers?

7.5k
Complaints Managed
€7,700,000
Money Recovered for Consumers
13 years
Protecting Players

ThePOGG Unique Selling Points

Alternative Dispute Resolution

One of the principal products that I established when running ThePOGG.com was our informal complaint management service. Providing our users with an avenue to receive help when they experienced problems with a gambling operator.

In the early days, before regulators started to come onto the scene in any substantive capacity, all complaints were managed informally. However, starting with the UK Gambling Commission, some regulators started formalising ADR services, appointing independent 3rd parties to manage complaints on behalf of the regulator.

Whilst running ThePOGG, we received accreditation from both the UKGC and the MGA to act as an ADR within their license system, granting far more authority to intervene on behalf of players and ensure that gambling operator behaved in a fair and legal fashion. We were the only affiliate based complaint service to receive approval from any regulatory authority.

Over my time running ThePOGG, I managed well over 7k disputes and helped returned over €7.7 million to players.

Second to BetBlocker, this is my proudest achievement in life.

Slots RTPs

We were the first site to start compiling and listing the RTP figures for slot games. This was long before games has to include this information in their help files and these figures were hard to come by. We’d list the figures that we’d managed to locate alongside the source of the information and had thousands of figures. Our list was substantial enough to receive recognition from Michael Shackleford, the Wizard of Odds. A substantial accolade for a geek like me.

Today the majority of slot providers include this information in their game help files and affiliates build this information into all of their reviews, but I’m very proud that we were out there first, and I think the work ThePOGG did helped influence regulators to require transparency around this information from the industry.

I think there’s still more work to be done in this area, specifically around monitoring how frequently gambling operators are changing these figures, so I hope someone will continue the work we started and go on to develop a tool that alerts players when the RTP figure of a game changes.

Detailed Game Guides

We put together exceptionally detailed information, including strategy calculators and fairness calculators (again developed by Nolan Alexander) for scores of casino games.

This was a Wikipedia equivalent for casino gambling, was around quarter of a million words of content and was something I was exceptionally proud of.

Honest Casino Reviews

The casino reviews that ThePOGG published were always intended to be player focused and uninfluenced by the commercial concerns of the business. We were stalwart in our mission and the vast majority of gambling operators received Not Recommended status due to unresolved complaints, slow payments, weak licensing, predatory terms and conditions or other unethical conduct. No other service even came close to the standards that we required from our partners.

Bonus Comparison System

I invested a lot of time developing a mathematical system for the evaluation and comparison of bonus offers.

Every affiliate site lists ‘best’ bonus offers based on nothing more than a big number or, more likely, which program is paying them to say they have the best bonus offer. It’s a rubbish system that isn’t even intended to benefit consumers.

Utilising a calculator tool that was developed by Nolan Alexander, ThePOGG’s bonus comparison system could take into consideration the bonus offer, all of the terms and conditions associated with the offer and even the player’s bet size to give an approximate figure for the value of a bonus to the player.

This allowed for genuine apples to apples comparisons between bonuses, something that has never been achieved before of since.

Whilst I never felt we got the marketing of this tool right, it was too maths heavy for the average reader, I felt that this service had huge untapped potential.

Terms and Conditions Monitor

For most of the years that ThePOGG was in operation, we ran an extensive monitoring service of the terms and conditions of the thousands of gambling operators that we listed on the site. This created a unique archive of information that supported players establishing what terms were at the time that they actually accepted them, rather than what was currently being shown. This was especially valuable when dealing with Curacao and other weak regulatory systems, where we identified dozens of instances of gambling operators changing the rules after a player won in order to avoid paying out.

Since the decommissioning of this service, I’ve seen nothing similar being offered by any competitor services.

ThePOGG Interviews:


During my time working on ThePOGG, I was fortunate enough to interview some of the most knowledgeable and influential people in gambling:

POGGWebmasters

Sister-Site to ThePOGG


As a companion resource to ThePOGG, I launched POGGWebmasters. This site looked to fulfil a similar role to ThePOGG, but with affiliates as the target audience rather than players.

POGGWebmasters focused on reviewing gambling affiliate programs, engaging an in-depth assessment of their terms and conditions and highlighting any terms that affiliates should pay particular attention to. Over the years I’ve been told many times by affiliates of all sizes how useful this resource was, and even had feedback from operators saying they used our reviews to help them construct the terms of use they used for their affiliate programs.

Legacy of ThePOGG

Our strident adherence to protecting players earned ThePOGG a very strong reputation. Even years after the closure of the site I’m still regularly contacted by stakeholders from all over the sector commenting on how much they respected, or used, the service.

I like to think that ThePOGG has influenced the gambling affiliate marketing sector for the better, and continues to encouraging other affiliates to take a more consumer focused approach to their content. Projects like BetBlocker were paradigm shifting for an affiliate and I hope played a role in the genesis of other similar projects like Casino.Guru’s Global Self-Exclusion Initiative.

contact me

Are You Committed to Building a Consumer Focused Marketing Business?

If so, I may be able to support your team to help find a vision and voice that will resonate with players and ensure that you build a reputation for integrity, securing a sector defining brand.

Contact Duncan