How We Judge: The FairPlay Standard

Most sites that write about casinos fall into one of two camps: the affiliates who praise everyone they earn from, and the outrage blogs that call everything a scam. We are neither. Here is exactly how we work, so you can weigh everything we publish.

We are not anti-casino

We are pro-transparency. Plenty of operators run honest games and pay out fairly, and we say so when they do. When a casino gets something right, it earns credit here. When a player's accusation doesn't hold up, we say that too. Our loyalty runs to the evidence and to the reader who relies on it.

We give the other side its due

Before we criticise, we state the legitimate case for what an operator does, even when we go on to disagree with it. A casino tightening verification isn't automatically the villain; sometimes it's reacting to real abuse. You'll see this in our recurring "In fairness" notes, where we defend whichever side an article goes on to criticise, including the player when a complaint doesn't hold up. We think you deserve the full picture, including the parts that complicate our own view.

We hold operators to account anyway

Understanding why a casino acts as it does never excuses withholding legitimate winnings, hiding terms, or punishing honest players. Where an operator crosses that line, we name it plainly.

We are disciplined with numbers

If a figure can't be verified, we don't print it as fact, even when it would strengthen our own argument. You'll often see us flag a widely-circulated statistic as unproven rather than borrow its shine.

We show our work

Where it matters, we verify things ourselves, mathematically and reproducibly, and we tell you how. "Provably fair" means you shouldn't have to take anyone's word for it, including ours.

We disclose what we earn

Some links on this site earn us a commission. That never buys a better verdict. We would rather lose the commission than tell you a casino is safe when it isn't. If you can't trust us on that, there's no reason to trust us on anything.

How to read our verdicts

Every casino we cover lands in one of three places: Verified — it passed our checks; Caution — usable, but with specific caveats we spell out; or Avoid — stay away, and here is why. You'll always get a call and a next step, never a shrug. And when we stay measured about a casino others are bashing, that's not fence-sitting, it's us refusing to mislead you in either direction.

That's the standard. Hold us to it.

See our track record and corrections log: every audit verdict, dated and open to being checked.