Gamblers Anonymous: how it works and how to find a meeting today

Gamblers Anonymous (GA) is a free fellowship of people who meet to help each other stop gambling. It is run by its own members, not by professionals: the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop gambling, and there are no dues or fees. Meetings run in person, on Zoom and by telephone, and you can attend one today without a referral, a booking, a diagnosis or your surname.

Which site you need depends on where you live, because GA is not one worldwide organisation. In the United States the finder is at gamblersanonymous.org and the national hotline is 855-222-5542. England, Wales and Northern Ireland are covered by gamblersanonymous.org.uk (information line 0330 094 0322), Scotland by gascotland.org (24-hour helpline 0370 050 8881), Ireland by gamblersanonymous.ie (+353 1 8721133, 10am–10pm daily), and Australia and New Zealand by gaaustralia.org.au.

What Gamblers Anonymous is, and what it is not

GA grew out of a chance meeting between two men in January 1957, and held its first group meeting in Los Angeles on Friday 13 September 1957. The method came from Alcoholics Anonymous: a twelve-step Recovery Program, a twelve-step Unity Program (GA's version of the traditions), and meetings where members share their own experience rather than hand out advice.

Four distinctions are worth having straight before you go.

• GA is not treatment. There is no clinician, no assessment, no treatment plan and no medical record. GA describes itself as a fellowship and states that it “should remain forever non-professional”.
• GA is not a debt service. It has an internal mechanism for money pressure, the Pressure Relief Group Meeting described below, but that is members helping members rather than regulated debt advice. If you owe money, run both: GA and a proper adviser. Our guide to gambling debt covers the second part.
• GA is not one global body. The American, English/Welsh/Northern Irish, Scottish, Irish and Australian organisations run separate websites, separate phone lines and separate meeting lists. A phone number from a US page will not help you in Glasgow.
• GA is not Gam-Anon. Gam-Anon is the separate fellowship for the people around the gambler, with its own meetings and its own hotline.

One more thing catches newcomers out. GA's definition of gambling is much wider than casino play: its literature counts internet gambling, the stock market, commodities and options, lottery and raffle tickets, fantasy sports, the office pool and flipping a coin. GA's wording is “any betting or wagering, for self or others, whether for money or not”. Abstinence, in GA terms, means all of it.

How a GA meeting works, and what happens at your first one

A meeting is a group of people in a room, or on a Zoom call, taking turns to talk about their own gambling and their own week. Meetings are listed as open (anyone interested may attend, including family members) or closed (for people with a gambling problem), and some are listed as step meetings, which work through the Recovery Program one step at a time. The Australian finder lets you filter by exactly those formats, and by in-person or online, before you leave the house.

Nobody asks for identification. Anonymity is the twelfth point of GA's Unity Program, described there as the spiritual foundation of the program, and GA's own material says that no disclosure of anyone's affiliation with GA can rightfully be made by anyone but that member.

What GA asks of a new member

GA's published list of suggestions for new members is short and concrete: attend as many meetings a week as you can; telephone other members between meetings using the group's phone list; do not test yourself by going near gambling venues or opening online and mobile betting apps; take it one day at a time; read the Recovery and Unity steps and review the Twenty Questions regularly; and get a sponsor, because “it is difficult to recover on your own”.

A sponsor is another member who works with you one to one, sharing and practising the twelve steps together. You get one by asking a member directly, usually after a meeting, and it costs nothing.

Pressure Relief Group Meetings

This is the part of GA that general summaries skip, and the part that matters most if you are in debt. GA encourages every member to have a Pressure Relief Group Meeting: a separate, structured session with experienced members that goes through your financial, employment and personal pressures. GA publishes a handbook, a workbook and forms for it through its service office. Ask about it at your first few meetings rather than waiting to be offered one.

The twelve-step Recovery Program, summarised

GA's Recovery Program is twelve steps, published in full on GA's Recovery Program page and printed in its combo book. Summarised, they move through four stages:

1. Admitting the problem (steps 1–3). Accepting that gambling has become unmanageable, coming to believe that a power greater than yourself could restore a normal way of thinking and living, and deciding to turn your will over to that power as you understand it.
2. Taking stock (steps 4–7). Making a searching moral and financial inventory of yourself. The financial half is GA's own addition to the AA wording, and it is where the debts get written down. Then admitting it to another human being, and becoming willing to have the character patterns behind the gambling removed.
3. Repairing (steps 8–9). Listing everyone your gambling harmed and making direct amends wherever possible, except where doing so would injure them or someone else.
4. Maintaining and passing it on (steps 10–12). Continuing to take personal inventory and admitting when you are wrong, seeking through prayer and meditation to improve conscious contact with God as you understand him, and carrying the message to other compulsive gamblers.

Steps 7 and 11 use religious language explicitly, always qualified: “God of our understanding”, “as we understood Him”. GA states it is composed of people from many religious faiths along with agnostics and atheists, and is not allied with any sect or denomination. Read the official wording rather than a paraphrase before deciding whether the steps are for you.

GA's Twenty Questions, summarised

GA's self-screening tool is a list of twenty yes/no questions, published at gamblersanonymous.org/20-questions. The threshold GA gives is blunt: “Most compulsive gamblers will answer yes to at least seven of these questions.”

The questions ask about consequences and control rather than about gambling volume. They cover time lost from work or school; unhappiness at home and damage to reputation; remorse; borrowing, selling possessions, or considering an illegal act to fund gambling; gambling to pay debts; chasing losses and chasing wins; gambling until the last dollar is gone or for longer than planned; gambling to escape worry, boredom, loneliness or grief; sleep problems; arguments and frustration triggering an urge; and, in the final question, whether gambling has ever made you consider self-destruction or suicide.

Note what is missing: not one of the twenty asks how much money you have lost. Someone losing $50 a week can score above the threshold while someone losing thousands scores below it. The Twenty Questions are a self-check rather than a clinical diagnosis. For a structured version you can take now, use our gambling self-test.

Find a GA meeting: official sites and numbers by country

If you searched for a meeting near you, start from the official finder for your own country rather than a third-party directory: these are the lists the fellowships themselves keep. All were checked on 1 September 2026, and the meeting lists are not shared between them.

Online, Zoom and telephone GA meetings

Remote meetings sit on different lists from the in-person ones, which is why a search for “Gamblers Anonymous online meetings” so often lands on a page of church-hall addresses. In the US, GA keeps a separate virtual meetings list, searchable by state or province, country and day of the week; GA states that you may attend any virtual meeting in any state, so the practical limit is the time zone, not geography.

GA also runs five telephone meetings that need nothing but a phone. Two are American: Wednesday at 9pm and Friday at 3pm Eastern, on 267-807-9601, access code 9131957#. Three are run from Vancouver, British Columbia: Tuesday, Friday and Sunday at 7pm Pacific, on 778-907-2071, access code 285 745 0604#.

In the UK, the GA England, Wales & Ulster meetings page carries its own online section of Zoom meetings, with the meeting IDs and passcodes published in the listing, including an LGBTQ+-preferred Midlands meeting on Saturday evenings. Ireland lists video and audio conference meetings under Meeting Updates, and the Australian finder has an online filter that also returns New Zealand meetings.

Gam-Anon: meetings for partners, parents and friends

Gam-Anon is a separate fellowship for people affected by someone else's gambling and by its financial and emotional effects on families. It has its own meetings, its own directory and its own US hotline on 844-475-4213. Its virtual directory lists Zoom, Google Meet and dial-in meetings and states that all virtual meetings are open to members regardless of where they live, which makes it a workable option in countries with no local group. In the UK and Ireland, Gam-Anon runs separately at gamanon.org.uk, and the Irish GA site hosts its own Gam-Anon page.

Gam-Anon UK describes its meetings as being for “anyone who has been affected by a loved one's gambling problem”. The criterion is your situation, not whether the person who gambles has ever set foot in GA. Our guide on helping someone with a gambling addiction covers what to do in the meantime.

Chips, coins and anniversaries

GA groups mark lengths of abstinence with pins, keychains and medallions — the “GA coins” people search for. GA's International Service Office sells them: a bronze medallion with the year in Roman numerals on one side and the Serenity Prayer on the reverse ($4.00), stocked for years one to sixty; plain G.A. coins at $0.75; keychains from $1.50; and a gold-plated one-year pin at $35.00.

How a group runs a pinning, and what it asks of you first, is decided at the group, so ask at the meeting rather than assume. Our guide to recovery and relapse covers what to do when a run of counted days ends.

How well GA works: what the evidence shows

The published evidence on GA is thin, and it points in two directions at once.

The most-cited outcome study remains Stewart and Brown's follow-up of 232 people who attended GA groups, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 1988. Total abstinence was maintained by 8% of all comers one year after their first attendance, and by 7% at two years. That figure counts everybody who ever walked through the door, including people who came once and never returned, and attendance turns out to be the central problem. A 2016 scoping review in the Journal of Gambling Studies found that across randomised trial arms which referred people to GA, between 38% and 54% never attended a single meeting in the following year.

Among people who did attend, the same review found that the number of meetings attended was positively associated with abstinence in the previous month, both at the end of treatment and at twelve-month follow-up, and that adding professional cognitive-behavioural work to GA did better than a GA referral on its own. Its authors are careful about what that proves: most of the supporting studies are cross-sectional or cohort designs, so “it is not possible to draw any firm conclusions regarding the causal relationship between GA involvement and treatment outcomes”, and large randomised trials are still needed.

In practice: GA is free, available tonight, and going more often tracks with doing better, but for many people it is not sufficient on its own. If you have been going to meetings and are still gambling, that is a documented pattern rather than a personal failure, and the next move is to add structured treatment. See gambling addiction treatment for what exists and CBT for gambling addiction for the approach that, in the review above, added the most to GA.

What to run alongside GA, and what to use instead

Three things are worth having in place alongside GA. None of them conflicts with going to meetings.

• A professional helpline for the hours when no meeting is running. In the US, 1-800-MY-RESET (1-800-697-3738) takes calls, texts and chats 24/7 across all 50 states and the territories, with no payment or insurance details required. In the UK, the National Gambling Helpline is free on 0808 8020 133, 24 hours a day. Everywhere else, use our helplines directory by country.
• Structured treatment, if meetings alone are not holding. Our guide to gambling addiction treatment sets out what is available and how people are referred.
• SMART Recovery, if the twelve steps and the religious language are the barrier rather than the meetings themselves. Its free, facilitator-led groups run in person and online and are built on rational emotive behaviour therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy instead of steps, covering problem behaviours as well as substances.

One thing to do in the next ten minutes: open your country's finder from the table above, filter to today, and write down the address or the Zoom ID. You do not have to have stopped gambling before you arrive. The only requirement for membership is wanting to.