iGaming Academy: Free Online Courses in Licensing, Compliance and Payments

Short, structured lessons on licensing, compliance, payments, and operations - built by editors and industry contributors.

Who the courses are for

Operators starting in new jurisdictions, compliance teams onboarding new hires, and analysts who need a working vocabulary across the value chain. Each course runs to about two hours in six or seven lessons of fifteen minutes or so, and is structured so you can drop in on a single lesson when you need a specific topic.

How progress works

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has been central to online gambling since the industry began, and it remains one of the largest single deductions from operator margin. This course covers how the channel works from both sides: how affiliates build and monetise traffic, how operators structure and manage programmes, how deals are priced, and why compliance obligations now shape the relationship as much as commercial terms do. **Who this is for:** Affiliate managers, marketers moving into gambling from other sectors, publishers and media operators considering the vertical, and operator staff who need to understand where a large share of their acquisition spend actually goes. **What you'll learn:** - Explain how the affiliate channel functions within the wider iGaming value chain and why it developed as it did - Compare revenue share, CPA and hybrid commercial models and select an appropriate structure for a given situation - Describe how affiliate traffic is built across search, content, social and comparison formats - Explain tracking and attribution mechanics, including the technical and regulatory pressures reshaping them - Apply the compliance obligations that govern affiliate marketing and understand where liability sits - Assess affiliate performance on player quality rather than volume, and identify fraud and low-value traffic

Bingo, Lottery & Instant Win

An introductory course on bingo, lottery and instant win games, the three product categories that sit outside casino and sportsbook and are often overlooked. It explains how each makes money and who plays it, how bingo works across its main variants, prize structures and why community, chat and hosting are its real differentiator, how official lotteries are structured and why monopoly is the dominant model, the routes by which private operators take part, how instant win and scratchcard mathematics is built on finite pool or generated outcome models, how to acquire and retain these distinct audiences, and the regulation and responsible design specific to each product. Written for product, marketing and commercial staff new to these verticals, and for operators considering adding them.

CRM & Player Lifecycle

A practical iGaming CRM course on what customer relationship management actually does inside a gambling operator, and how it differs from acquisition marketing. It covers segmentation built to support decisions rather than describe a population, programmes for each stage of the player lifecycle and why early tenure has an outsized effect, campaigns from objective through audience to measurement, bonus and incentive design costed on net rather than awarded value, churn and reactivation, and measuring CRM with holdouts that still give readable answers in a heavily skewed player base. Written for CRM managers, retention and lifecycle marketers, and the analysts and product people who work alongside them. It assumes no prior CRM experience, and it treats incremental effect, not activity, as the measure of whether a programme works.

Customer Service & VIP Excellence

A course on customer service and VIP management in a gambling business, where support is also where regulatory obligations meet the customer. It covers how a support operation is structured across channels, tiers and shifts, verification and withdrawal disputes and which requirements are genuinely mandatory, bonus and settlement complaints where the operator is contractually right and the customer still feels misled, how VIP programmes work and why they concentrate the sector's most serious regulatory risk, recognising and responding to signs of gambling harm in a conversation, the front-line duties that apply to staff personally, including the tipping-off restriction, and measuring service by resolution quality rather than handling speed. Written for support agents and team leaders, VIP and account managers, and the compliance and safer gambling staff they escalate to.

Data & Analytics Foundations

An introductory data and analytics course for iGaming, about analysis that changes decisions rather than reporting for its own sake. It covers the decisions an operator's analysis should support, the data sources an operator holds and how each tends to fail, defining core commercial and player metrics precisely and keeping a metric dictionary, cohort analysis and working with the heavily skewed distributions gambling data produces, which comparisons can support causal claims and how to design experiments, reporting built for a defined audience and decision, and data quality, governance and the ethics of using player data. Written for analysts and new data team members, and for managers in marketing, product and finance who commission analysis and need to judge whether it can be trusted.

Gambling Regulation Basics

What gambling regulation is for, what a licence actually is, and what a licensed operator has to do every day. The course covers the three objectives almost every regulator shares and the models states choose between, the types of licence, what it takes to get one, what it costs and what it obliges, customer verification and anti-money-laundering in plain terms, responsible gambling from the standard tools to the operator's duty to intervene, the advertising and promotion rules and the affiliate problem, and the compliance function: framework, calendar, event reporting, complaints, enforcement and culture. Written for people new to the industry or new to its compliance side, in any role. No legal training is assumed, and no jurisdiction's rulebook is taught; the aim is to be able to read a regulator's announcement, a licence condition or a news story about a fine and understand what is going on. The through-line: every rule is an answer to one question, how to arrange gambling so the harm is limited, the games are honest and the money is clean, and once you see the question the rules stop looking arbitrary.

Poker & Skill Games

An introductory course on online poker and skill games as a business, and why they work so differently from casino and sportsbook. It covers the poker revenue model and the player ecosystem an operator is really managing, the main formats and how each balances skill and chance, rake structures and their effect on player outcomes, where the money flows and how reward programmes change it, ecosystem management and its effect on different player groups, game integrity in player-versus-player games and how detection relies on patterns, adjacent skill-based categories and the skill-versus-chance arguments that decide how they are regulated, and the functions a poker operation needs, from scheduling to liquidity. Written for product, operations and compliance staff working on poker or skill-based products, and anyone new to player-versus-player gaming.

Sports Betting Basics: Odds, Markets and How a Sportsbook Works

The grounding every job in sports betting assumes. The course covers odds in every format and the probability behind them, the overround and why margin rather than prediction is where a bookmaker's profit comes from, the standard markets from match result to same-game parlays and how exchanges, pools and prediction markets differ, what happens inside a sportsbook from opening a market to settling it, the settlement rules that generate most disputes (voids, dead heats, Rule 4, palpable errors), how to read line movement and closing line value, and the numbers a sportsbook reports: handle, hold, GGR, NGR and what they say about the business. Written for people starting in the industry in any role, for journalists and analysts who cover it, and for anyone who wants to understand what a price is actually saying. No prior knowledge is assumed beyond arithmetic. The through-line: a price is a probability with a margin on top, and once you can read it that way the whole business makes sense.

iGaming Basics

A structured grounding in how the online gambling industry actually works: who the players are, where the money comes from, how casino and sportsbook products differ, and why regulation shapes almost every commercial decision an operator makes. Written for people entering the sector from outside it, or moving into a role that requires them to understand the business beyond their own function. **Who this is for:** New entrants to the industry, professionals joining from adjacent sectors such as fintech, media or technology, and anyone in a supporting function who needs a working command of how operators earn and lose money. **What you'll learn:** - Explain the structure of the iGaming value chain and identify where each type of company earns its margin - Distinguish between the casino and sportsbook verticals in terms of product mechanics, revenue behaviour and risk - Read and interpret the core commercial metrics of an operator, including GGR, NGR, hold and bonus cost - Describe how licensing and regulation constrain product, marketing and payment decisions in a given market - Assess a player acquisition and retention model and understand why lifetime value governs marketing spend - Discuss responsible gambling requirements and their commercial implications with informed judgement

Self-paced courses for the iGaming industry