How we rate

1. Licensing, verified in the register

We do not read the footer seal. For Curaçao licensees we download the Gaming Authority’s own Online Gaming Licence Registry PDF and read the operator’s row: holding entity, licence number, issue date, expiry, status. Then we check the separate enforcement register for the same entity.

The register lists legal entities, not brands. Searching it for “Stake” returns nothing; searching for “Medium Rare N.V.” returns the row. That gap is where fake-seal fraud lives, and closing it is the single most useful check a reader can run.

We re-read the register on a 45-day cycle and publish a change log. Where a jurisdiction publishes no register at all — Anjouan, for instance — we say the licence cannot be verified rather than treating the absence as a pass.

2. Payouts and limits, from the operator’s own documents

Withdrawal limits, verification thresholds and restricted-country clauses are read at source and archived, with the clause number where the page gives one. We publish what the terms say, including when the answer is that no limit is published at all.

We also read the complaint record rather than the marketing. Where a pattern exists — for most crypto operators it is a document-rejection loop at enhanced verification rather than a refusal to pay — we describe the pattern and give the resolution rate.

3. Fairness, measured where we can measure it

Where a game has a published RTP or a closed-form house edge, we check it against our own Monte Carlo runs before trusting it anywhere else. The simulation code and the raw results are published with their seeds, so you can reproduce the figures or find our mistake.

Every study also states what it does not prove. Variance, game weighting and the fact that most players never complete a wagering requirement are named rather than buried.

4. How far we verified each claim

Not every fact can be read at source. Some operator pages are geo-blocked from where this site is maintained, some statutes are behind unreachable servers, and some claims rest on secondary reporting.

So we grade: read at source; confirmed in part; corroborated across independent sources; or unverified. Where sources contradict each other by a wide margin we publish no number at all rather than pick one. A figure you cannot trace is worth less than an admitted gap.

5. Independence, including when it costs us

Commissions never change a rating or the order operators appear. The test of that is not the policy, it is whether we publish findings that hurt commercially — and we do: an unflattering licence status on our largest partner, the fact that a competitor publishes a withdrawal limit where our partners do not, and the absence of any independently verified large payout to an unaffiliated player.

We also refuse traffic on principle. In countries where advertising an operator that is not locally licensed is an offence for the publisher — not merely where playing is an offence for the player — we show no affiliate links at all, and say which statute that is. That currently covers 29 countries including several of our largest reader markets, and since September 2026 it also decides which languages we publish in: a locale whose readers we may not lawfully link to is not published at all.

How the score is built

Each operator receives a rating out of 5, weighted across five factors so the number is reproducible rather than a gut feeling:

Licensing & player protection — 35%. Payout speed & reliability — 25%. Fairness & transparency (RTP, provably fair) — 20%. Game range & experience — 15%. Support & reputation — 5%.

A light-touch licence caps the licensing component regardless of how good the rest is, which is why a slick operator on a weaker licence rarely scores above the mid-4s.

What we list, and what we do not

The casino listing and the ranking include only operators we have actually reviewed against the register. Stubs we have not finished are not listed, are not indexed, and are kept out of the sitemap, because listing them would inflate the roster without informing anyone.

How often we update

Every review carries a last-reviewed date and every guide shows published and updated dates. Licence registers are re-read on a 45-day cycle; operator terms on the same schedule. We re-check sooner when a licence, owner, payout term or market availability changes.

Corrections

When we get something wrong we correct it on the page, dated, and say what was wrong rather than quietly editing. Recent examples: an operator we described as Curaçao-licensed had moved to Anjouan, and we had repeated a claim that Curaçao requires neither segregated funds nor dispute resolution, which stopped being true in December 2024.

Spotted an error? Tell us. Accuracy matters more than being first, and a correction costs less than a reader who stops believing the rest.