The Reno Model, Two Decades Later: What Comes Next for Responsible Gambling

Responsible gaming knowledge had expanded over the years, proving that the Reno Model is an appropriate response to problem gambling. But RG has also evolved and new revelations are available to aid RG research and treatments, according to Paige M. Shaffer, Assistant Professor at UMass Chan Medical School.

More than two decades ago, my father, Howard Shaffer, along with Alex Blaszczynski and Robert Ladouceur, introduced what became known as the Reno Model. Their premise was both straightforward and ambitious: reducing gambling-related harm required stakeholders to work together, guided by science, to create conditions in which people could make informed choices about gambling.

I grew up alongside many of these conversations. Years later, I had the opportunity to contribute professionally to this work myself, joining Robert, Alex, and my father in examining the empirical evidence supporting responsible gambling strategies. Since then, my own work in public health, behavioral health, and health services research has further shaped how I think about responsibility, prevention, and the systems in which individual choices are made.

Twenty years later, however, I think the most important question is no longer simply who is responsible for reducing gambling-related harm. A central premise of the Reno Model was that responsibility is shared. The more pressing question now is what that shared responsibility requires in a gaming environment its architects could not have fully anticipated.

Shared Responsibility Is The Starting Point

The Reno Model is sometimes reduced to its emphasis on individual choice. That interpretation misses much of its larger contribution. Informed choice is meaningful only when people have accurate information and an environment that allows them to act on it.

Responsibility therefore extends across the gaming ecosystem. Operators influence how products are designed and marketed; regulators establish the rules governing them; researchers generate evidence about risks and protective strategies; and clinicians, governments, communities, and consumers each have distinct roles in preventing and responding to harm.

But recognizing shared responsibility is only the beginning.

Gaming has changed dramatically since the Reno Model was introduced. Gambling opportunities increasingly exist on devices people carry throughout the day. Sports wagering has become deeply integrated into sports media and culture. Digital platforms can capture extraordinarily detailed behavioral information. New technologies can personalize both gambling experiences and interventions.

If the environment has changed, our approach to responsible gaming should change with it.

From Static Protections To Responsive Systems

One of the most important opportunities for the next generation of responsible gaming is moving from static protections toward more responsive ones.

Traditional responsible gaming strategies have often relied on universal tools: warning messages, educational materials, self-exclusion, deposit limits, or information about probabilities and risk. These tools remain important. But digital gambling environments create opportunities to recognize meaningful changes in behavior as they occur and to respond accordingly.

A player whose gambling suddenly accelerates may need something different from a player maintaining a stable pattern over many years. Someone repeatedly increasing deposits after losses may benefit from different support than someone occasionally exceeding a predetermined limit. And a person beginning to experience significant gambling-related harm may need a pathway to human support, not simply another automated message.

This does not mean surveillance for its own sake. Nor should algorithms become opaque arbiters deciding who has a gambling problem. Rather, technology can help create systems in which protections become more responsive as risk changes.

That is one important way I believe the Reno Model can evolve: responsible gaming should increasingly become adaptive rather than static.

Evidence Still Has To Lead

Technology also creates a familiar temptation: assuming that a well-intentioned intervention is necessarily an effective one.

When my colleagues and I reviewed responsible gaming strategies nearly a decade ago, we found substantial variation in the quality of evidence supporting commonly implemented practices. That lesson remains relevant. The existence of a responsible gaming feature tells us that an intervention has been deployed. It does not, by itself, tell us whether that intervention reduces harm.

The field should be asking harder questions.

Does the intervention actually reduce harm? For whom? Under what circumstances? Does it change behavior temporarily or durably? Are there unintended consequences? Do people use the tools being offered? Does an intervention work differently for people at low, moderate, and high levels of risk?

And perhaps most importantly: when evidence shows that something does not work, are we willing to stop doing it?

A science-based approach to responsible gambling requires more than continually adding new protections. It requires testing them, refining them, and abandoning ineffective ones.

Success should not be measured by how many responsible gaming features exist. It should ultimately be measured by whether those efforts meaningfully reduce risk and harm.

Responsible Gambling Should Also Become More Person-Centered

Much of my own research has focused on people with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders, including individuals navigating homelessness, criminal legal involvement, and fragmented systems of care. That work has shaped how I think about gambling-related harm as well.

People do not experience problems in disciplinary silos.

A person experiencing harmful gambling may also be struggling with depression, substance abuse, financial instability, family conflict, or other significant stressors. Yet our systems often divide these experiences into separate programs, providers, and interventions.

The next generation of responsible gaming should therefore be more connected to behavioral health and public health. Screening for gambling-related problems should occur in settings serving populations at elevated risk. Gambling services should be better integrated with mental health and substance use treatment. Responsible gambling programs should consider not only gambling behavior but also the circumstances in which that behavior occurs.

This does not mean pathologizing everyone who gambles. Quite the opposite. It means recognizing a continuum from recreational gambling to emerging risk, gambling-related harm, and gambling disorder—and matching the response to the person and the level of need.

A person-centered system should match the intensity of its response to the individual’s level of risk and need.

The Next Generation Of The Reno Model Should Be A Learning System

The greatest opportunity may be to think about responsible gaming not simply as a collection of programs or safeguards, but as a learning system.

The Reno Model was never designed to be the final word on responsible gaming. A science-based framework, by definition, cannot be static. It must evolve as evidence accumulates and as gaming itself changes.

Imagine a responsible gaming system in which real-world implementation continuously generates evidence. Operators evaluate interventions rather than simply deploy them. Researchers have access to data capable of answering meaningful questions about gambling behavior and harm. Regulators modify requirements when evidence changes. Clinicians and public-health professionals help connect gambling-related harms with the broader circumstances affecting people’s health. Consumers and people with lived experience help determine which outcomes matter.

And everyone involved is willing to discover that something they strongly believed was effective was not.

That may be one of the most difficult responsibilities of all.

More than 20 years after Reno, preserving the model should not mean preserving every assumption, intervention, or practice associated with responsible gaming. Its more enduring legacy is a way of thinking: stakeholders working collaboratively, using evidence to reduce harm, and being willing to change course when the science demands it.

The gambling environment will continue to evolve. Technology will continue to create both new risks and new opportunities for prevention. Our understanding of gambling-related harm will continue to deepen.

Responsible gaming must evolve as well.

The best way to honor the Reno Model is not to freeze it in time, but to make it a living, learning system.

Follow the evidence. Learn from it. And be willing to change.

Paige M. Shaffer, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor at UMass Chan Medical School and a public health researcher whose work focuses on addiction, mental health, gambling, and complex multimorbidity. Her research uses implementation science and mixed methods to understand how evidence can be translated into real-world health and community systems. She brings this public health and systems perspective to questions of responsible gambling and how evidence can inform policy and practice.