Last Saturday I was standing in my kitchen with the kettle on, half-watching the racing from Newbury, when my mate Dave sent me a screenshot. He'd turned a tenner into £40 on a slot. He wanted to know if he should "go bigger". I put the kettle down, because that's a question that deserves both hands.

Fair question, terrible timing. If you've ever wondered what it really means to play for real money casino games here in Britain, pull up a chair and grab a biscuit. I'm no expert in a lab coat. I'm a bloke who has made most of the classic mistakes, from chasing a loss after a bad Saturday of football to signing up somewhere without reading a single line of small print.

So this is the chat I had with Dave, tidied up a bit, with the facts checked against what the regulator actually publishes. No hype, no "get rich by Tuesday" nonsense, just the stuff that keeps a hobby a hobby.

Checking the licence before anything else

Here's the boring bit first. It's boring, but it matters most. The Gambling Commission is the regulator for gambling websites that trade or advertise to customers in Great Britain, and every operator serving British customers, online or on the high street, needs an operating licence from it, with some individuals needing a personal licence on top. Licensees have to follow a rulebook called the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice, or LCCP if you like acronyms.

The core framework is still the Gambling Act, and official paperwork calls online betting "remote gambling". (I laughed the first time I read that phrase. It made me picture someone placing bets from a lighthouse off the Hebrides, which, to be fair, would be quite remote. Anyway, back to the point.) In licensing terms, Great Britain means England, Wales and Scotland, and anyone applying for an operating licence has to be at least 18.

The Commission says plainly that it can only regulate sites that trade or advertise to customers in Great Britain. Anything outside that circle is outside its reach, full stop. My rule is simple and a bit dull: if I can't find the licence details at the bottom of the page, I close the tab and go back to my tea.

Understanding the stake limits on slots

This one surprised Dave. Slots now have stake caps. The regulator brought them in last year, and they're properly firm. From 9 April last year, the maximum stake on an online slot became £5 per spin for all adults, and from 21 May it dropped to £2 for adults aged 18 to 24, which is a big change for anyone who remembers the old days of daft spin sizes.

I think it's a good move, honestly. When I was younger I'd have happily spun at stakes I couldn't afford just to feel something. A £2 limit at that age would have saved me from at least one very awkward conversation with my bank account (and my mum).

For Dave, it meant "going bigger" had a ceiling anyway. That took a bit of the heat out of the idea, which was rather the point.

Paying in and getting your money back out

Right, money. Credit cards are banned for gambling in the UK, so forget them completely. That rule is there for a reason. Borrowed money and slots are a nasty mix, and nobody should be paying interest on a losing spin.

• Debit cards, which are by far the most common way to pay in pounds.
• PayPal, handy if you'd rather not type your card number into yet another site.
• Apple Pay, quick for anyone already using it at the shops.
• Paysafecard, a prepaid voucher that some people like for keeping spending fixed.

Before I put a penny anywhere, I read the cashier page from top to bottom. I keep a short list of licensed sites I compare against each other, and one tab I had open last week was cleanwins, next to a couple of others I use for comparison. What I'm looking for is boring and practical: which methods work for cashing out, how long payouts take, whether any fees apply. Expect identity checks before your first withdrawal on any licensed site. It feels like a faff at the time, but it's a sign the place is playing by the rules.

Setting limits before the first spin

This is the bit I wish I'd done years ago. Set limits first. Play second. Licensed GB sites offer a handful of safer gambling tools, and using them before you've had a single spin is far easier than trying to switch them on after a bad night when your judgement is wobbly and the next spin always looks like the lucky one.

These are the tools I'd point any mate towards:

• Deposit limits, so you decide your weekly budget when you're calm.
• Time-outs, a short forced break from your account.
• Reality checks, pop-ups that remind you how long you've been playing.
• Self-exclusion through GAMSTOP, which covers online gambling sites licensed in Great Britain.

GAMSTOP deserves its own sentence. Signing up blocks you from every licensed British gambling site at once, rather than one site at a time, and I know two people who say it gave them their weekends back. You might hit affordability checks too, where a site asks about your income or spending. Some people grumble about those. I don't, really, as they exist to catch problems early.

Looking at the numbers behind the hobby

I'm a bit of a stats nerd, so bear with me. The figures are huge. They tell a clear story. The Gambling Commission's industry statistics for the year to March last year put total British Gross Gambling Yield at £16.8 billion, up 7.3% on the year before.

Online made up £7.8 billion of that. The remote casino, betting and bingo sector accounted for 46% of the Great Britain market by Gross Gambling Yield. The Commission's statistics page puts the overall market value at £17.5 billion.

The quarterly data is just as eye-opening. From April to June last year, total online Gross Gambling Yield rose 2% to £1.49 billion. From October to December it fell 2% year on year to £1.5 billion. That same final quarter saw 27.4 billion online bets or spins, a new peak for the dataset, with 12.7 million active accounts on average.

Gross Gambling Yield is basically what operators keep after paying out winnings. So every one of those billions is money players lost overall. That's not a moral lecture, just maths, and it's the clearest reason I know to treat a casino session like a night at the cinema: you pay for the fun, you don't expect a refund.

Keeping winnings and keeping perspective

Good news for once! In the UK, gambling winnings usually aren't taxed as personal income for players. Operator taxation is a separate matter, handled on their side. If Dave's £40 had become £400, it would have been his to keep, without a form to fill in.

The trick is deciding in advance what counts as a win. My own rule is daft but it works. If I'm up by half my starting stake, I withdraw that half straight away, no debate. The rest I treat as already spent, and if it goes, it goes.

I've broken that rule, of course. There was a Cheltenham week a few years back when I kept "reinvesting" a decent win on increasingly hopeful horses, and by Friday I'd handed every penny back plus a bit more. I still wince when I see a grey horse in a photo finish.

Mixing gambling with other plans helps too. I'll have a small budget for the weekend's football, maybe a few spins on a Sunday evening, and that's my lot. When it stops feeling like a laugh, I stop, and if I ever struggled to stop, GAMSTOP would be my next move rather than "one more go".

Dave, for the record, took his £40 out. He bought a round at the pub with some of it and a new pair of trainers with the rest. Best result of his week, and he didn't even need the bigger stake he'd been dreaming about!

Back to you, then. If you're going to have a go, pick a site with a Gambling Commission licence, pay with your debit card, PayPal, Apple Pay or Paysafecard, set your limits on day one, and keep an eye on how you feel after each session. Do that, and real money play stays what it should be: a bit of fun on a Saturday, with the kettle on.