How We Rate Casinos

The six scoring categories

Every casino is rated 0–100 across six weighted categories, then rolled up into the overall score on each card. The weights below reflect how we think about a casino in the real world: the things that go wrong loudly (trust, payouts, games) carry more weight than the things you only notice when they're great (UX, support).

• Trust

  25%

  The category we treat as most important — and the one most casinos would prefer wasn't. Inputs include the active operating licence (Curaçao, Malta, UK, etc.), ownership history, parent-company track record, public dispute logs, payout reliability under load, and how the operator handles edge-case players (suspected bonus abuse, large wins, cross-account flags). Trust caps the rest of the score: a generous bonus on a casino with unresolved player complaints isn't a win.

• Bonuses

  15%

  Realistic bonus value, not headline number. Wagering requirement, max-bet cap, game-contribution percentages, expiry window, and conversion limits all price into the score. A $10,000 match with 60× wagering, a 3-day expiry, and live-dealer at 0% contribution scores worse than a $500 match with 35× and 30 days. Reload structure, cashback, and ongoing promotions are weighted alongside the welcome.

• Games

  20%

  Library breadth, top-tier provider integration (Pragmatic Play, NetEnt, Evolution, Hacksaw, Nolimit City, Push Gaming, BGaming, Play'n GO), exclusive titles, RTP transparency, and live-dealer depth. Sites that pad their library with unbranded re-skins lose points. Sites that publish clear RTP information per game gain them.

• Payouts

  20%

  Tested withdrawal speed across crypto and (where supported) fiat methods. Payout speed under load matters more than best-case marketing claims — we re-test through weekend windows and during post-big-win review. Limits, fees, manual-review posture, and KYC predictability all factor in. Slow payouts on a 'fast' headline number don't score.

• UX

  10%

  Site speed, mobile cashier quality, search and filter usability, onboarding friction, language coverage, and how cleanly the cashier handles deposits and withdrawals on small screens. Bonus terms accessibility — i.e. how quickly you can read the actual playthrough rules — sits inside this category, not Bonuses.

• Support

  10%

  Live chat coverage hours, median response time, complaint resolution quality, and willingness to escalate. We test with a mix of basic queries and harder edge cases (KYC backlog, withdrawal-stuck) to see how agents handle the cases that actually matter when something goes wrong.

The editorial process

Every casino on the site has been deposited at, played at, and withdrawn from before publication. We use the same tools any player would: the live cashier, the live support channel, the actual game library on the actual mobile and desktop builds. We re-test sites at least once per quarter and immediately after any public signal that something material has changed (licence transfer, ownership shift, payout slowdown, predatory bonus-term edit).

When a casino drops the ball — payouts get slower, support stops answering, bonus terms quietly get worse — its scores go down, its rank moves, and in some cases it comes off the site altogether. The ranking shifts as the industry shifts.

What disqualifies a casino

A casino does not appear on the site at all if any of the following are true:

• ✕Operating without a verifiable licence, or with a licence under active regulatory action.
• ✕A pattern of unresolved player complaints with credible evidence — particularly stuck withdrawals, voided big wins, or KYC walls used as payout gates.
• ✕Bonus terms designed to be functionally impossible to clear — for example, >60× wagering combined with a 7-day expiry and 5% live-dealer contribution.
• ✕Repeated payout failures under normal conditions, or evidence of selectively delaying winning accounts.
• ✕No functional support channel for resolving disputes.

Affiliate disclosure and independence

Online Casino Guru earns affiliate commissions when readers sign up to casinos through links on this site. Those commissions fund the testing — without them, the testing wouldn't happen at the scale or cadence it does. We disclose this clearly in the footer of every page.

Affiliate revenue does not influence our ratings, our rank ordering, or what we say about a casino. The commission rate is the same across operators we rate at the top of the list and operators we rate at the bottom — the rank is decided by the editorial team using the methodology above, not by who pays the most. Casinos that fail our review process do not appear on the site at all, regardless of commission terms offered.

If you ever spot something that suggests our ranking has been compromised — a casino punching above its weight, a glaring omission, a writeup that reads like marketing — tell us. The editorial team reads everything that comes in, and the methodology only works if the people relying on it can hold us to it.