Gambling addiction help in Slovakia

Verified helplines

Helplines and online chat

The line the regulator itself points to is 0800 131 000 — free, non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is operated by Odborný liečebný ústav psychiatrický, n. o. Predná Hora, a specialist institute for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of substance and non-substance addictions, and a trained therapist answers it. From outside Slovakia use the chargeable number +421 587 875 800.

What the call actually consists of is telephone crisis intervention: space to lay out the problem, emotional support, usually a motivational conversation, information about pathological gambling as an illness and about treatment options, and contact details for the nearest specialist service. The Úrad pre reguláciu hazardných hier reported in March 2026 that the line had handled more than 2,800 calls in its first year (urhh.sk).

A separate free number, 0800 127 000, answers questions about the exclusion register itself on weekdays 09:00–14:00; outside those hours write to rvo@urhh.sk.

Self-exclusion

The Register vylúčených osôb (RVO) is the state register of adults barred from gambling, set up under § 33 and § 34 of Act 30/2019 Z. z. Its administrator is the Úrad pre reguláciu hazardných hier; the system is operated by DataCentrum.

Its reach is wide. Operators must run a check on every person present in a gaming hall, casino or venue, and on everyone playing internet gambling, and refuse anyone listed. Asking to be entered is one of the grounds in § 34; the others are administrative or judicial — households receiving material-need assistance, a diagnosis of pathological gambling, full-time university students on a social scholarship, a court-imposed gambling ban, maintenance obligations towards a child entitled to substitute maintenance, and criminal prosecution for non-payment of maintenance. The data comes from the labour office, the health ministry's information centre, the education ministry, the courts and the police.

Applying, and getting out again

Download the Žiadosť o zápis do registra vylúčených osôb from urhh.sk. Two routes are accepted: post to Úrad pre reguláciu hazardných hier, Križkova 9, 811 04 Bratislava, or the state portal slovensko.sk with a qualified electronic signature. E-mail is not accepted. The signature must be officially verified, the application must be no more than three months old, and no confirmation letter is sent back to you.

Removal is deliberately harder than entry. Only people who put themselves in the register may ask to come out, and only after six months have passed — an entry made on 1 February can be challenged no earlier than 2 August. The signature on the removal request must be verified by a notary or a registry office, so do not sign it at home; nobody, including a family member, can apply on your behalf; and someone entered on a doctor's initiative after a diagnosis of pathological gambling needs a doctor's confirmation that the grounds have ended.

The register binds Slovak-licensed operators. Offshore sites ignore it, which is why it is worth pairing with blocking software on your devices. How other countries handle the same problem is compared in self-exclusion by country.

Blocking gambling payments and sites

ÚRHH publishes a zoznam zakázaných ponúk — a list of prohibited gambling offers — as downloadable CSV, XML and XLSX files, updated weekly, alongside the court orders behind the blocks and a separate list of legally operating websites. Internet providers work from that list. It is aimed at unlicensed operators, not at individual players.

There is no statutory bank gambling block in Slovakia; where a card-level gambling block exists it is a feature of an individual bank or payment app, so check your own bank. The two layers you control are the RVO and device blocking. If the money side has already gone wrong, see what to do about gambling debt.

Free treatment and counselling

OLÚP Predná Hora, the institute behind the helpline, is a non-profit whose core activity is outpatient and inpatient treatment for patients with addictions. The helpline is the practical way in: callers who want it are given contacts for the nearest specialist unit, and the line is financed from the state budget rather than by charging callers.

If you would like to gauge where you are before making the call, our self-test takes a few minutes and is not stored.

Support for family and friends

The helpline is explicitly for relatives and friends as well as for people who gamble. Family members get information about the illness and its consequences, advice on how to approach the person they are calling about and how to motivate them into treatment, and — where the counsellor identifies co-dependency — supportive psychotherapy in their own right. That is a rarer offer than it sounds, and it does not require the gambler to have agreed to anything.

Before the conversation, read how to help someone with a gambling addiction and the signs of a gambling problem.

Gambling law and the regulator

The regulator is the Úrad pre reguláciu hazardných hier, based at Križkova 949/9 in Bratislava. It licenses operators under Act 30/2019 Z. z., keeps the central register of gambling operators, the list of individual licences and the list of legal gambling websites, and runs both the exclusion register and the prohibited-offers list.

Local government has real power here too: municipalities can ban gaming halls and casinos on their territory by general binding ordinance, and restrictions exist on placing a gaming hall within 500 metres of certain specialised facilities or within 200 metres of another gaming hall. ÚRHH publishes which municipalities have used those powers. Terms used above are explained in our glossary.