Lori Kalani outlines ambitious responsible gambling agenda for DraftKings and beyond
DraftKings Chief Responsible Gaming Officer Lori Kalani has pledged to “work [herself] out of a job” as she strives to get 100% of the operator’s customers familiar with its safer gambling tools.
Speaking at SBC Summit Americas on Wednesday morning, Kalani described how DraftKings was approaching its internal responsible gambling strategy, alongside its role as a founding member of the Responsible Online Gaming Association.
Setting herself the ambitious goal of reducing gambling harm to the point her role was no longer required, she said “I’m going to work myself out of a job. That’s what the future looks like. There’s going to be nothing to repair.”
Kalani joined DraftKings in April 2024 as the operator’s first Chief Responsible Gaming Officer.
Touching on her own lived experience while growing up in Las Vegas, Kalani said her father was a compulsive gambler. “My parents got divorced, my mother started gambling, and my brother started gambling, and my whole family was basically disintegrated,” she recalled.
Rather than her experiences fuelling distrust, or even disdain, for the industry, Kolani said, “it just gave me two perspectives”. After many years of thinking about it, she said she realised that “the vast majority of people don’t have the horrific problems my father had, and I do know that you can do this for fun and entertainment.”
As a result, her objective is educating people on the risks, and on the tools available to them to keep a check on their gambling.
DraftKings has learned that there can be a stigma attached to the use of safer gambling tools. So, alongside more traditional interventions, it offers tracking and monitoring tools like its ‘My Stat Sheet’ feature, which is a visual dashboard of players’ time spent on the platform and net wins and losses. “It’s a responsible gaming tool. We don’t call it a tool,” Kalani said. “We call it my stat sheet. And nearly half of our players have used that since the start of NFL.”
Elsewhere, DraftKings is a founding member of the Responsible Online Gaming Association, which is working on building a self-exclusion database that is shared between all members.
“Today, if somebody self excludes on DraftKings, they can turn right around and go to FanDuel or Fanatics,” Kalani says. “What this would do is allow all of the ROGA members to share the names of anyone who self excludes on their platforms, so that person would be self-excluded on all of the ROGA members.
“Now that would be a great improvement. But again, with the illegal sites, it’s not the perfect answer. I’ll tell any regulator – any law enforcement person – any day, that enforcement has to be part of the government’s agenda.”
Kalani emphasised the collective responsibility of the industry to take a unified approach to safer gambling best practice. “For business, all of these operators, we’re competing like crazy, very competitive. But when it comes to responsible gaming, there should be no competition at all.
“If we want this industry to thrive, we should be taking the best ideas and implementing them across the board. So that’s really one of the purposes of ROGA, for us to be able to come together with the other seven operators and say, ‘what are the best practices?’, and then actually formalize them.”
Dig deeper
2025/03/06: DraftKings extends its responsible gaming initiatives
2025/03/19: DraftKings uses Kenny Rodgers song The Gambler in latest responsible gambling commercial
2025/01/10: Industry stakeholders call for stronger US Federal responsible gaming measures
2025/03/20: FanDuel unveils responsible gaming initiatives for Problem Gambling Awareness Month
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