Our Review Methodology
- → Five categories scored out of 10. Payout reliability carries the most weight.
- → We test casinos twice: once as an affiliate partner, once as an ordinary player. Every review is labelled with which stages we actually reached.
- → Anything under 7.5 has something specific we found worth flagging.
- → We read the full terms and conditions, not the summary page. Most disputes trace back to a clause nobody reads.
- → Every review states plainly whether it is based on personal testing or on published terms and documented player reports.
- → We earn commission from some casinos here. It has never changed a score, and several ratings on this site have cost us money.
Who writes these reviews
All reviews on CasinoGuides.pro are written by Vitalii Chernenko, who spent over ten years working inside the gambling industry before building this site. That background matters because it means understanding how casinos operate from both sides: how bonuses are structured, how player value is calculated, and where the fine print does the heavy lifting.
Where possible we test with real money. Where we have not, the review says so and explains what the assessment is based on instead.
What we evaluate
Every casino is assessed across five categories, each scored from 1 to 10:
The two account test
This is the part of our process that separates these reviews from most of the industry, and it is worth explaining in full.
Affiliate sites get treated differently by casinos. When you register through an affiliate programme, you deal with account managers rather than general support. Questions get answered quickly. Problems get escalated. Everything works, because the casino knows exactly who you are and what you are able to write about them.
That experience tells you almost nothing about what happens to an ordinary player at three in the morning with a stalled withdrawal.
So we test both sides.
Side one: the affiliate relationship
We register with the casino's affiliate programme, deal with their managers, and assess how the operator behaves as a business partner. Response times, transparency about terms, whether promotional material matches the actual offer, whether they answer awkward questions about withdrawal limits and complaint volumes.
This side is almost always smooth. That is exactly the point: it is not evidence of anything, and any review site presenting it as evidence is misleading you.
Side two: the player experience
Separately, we play as an ordinary depositing player. Own money, standard registration, no special treatment requested and none expected. Then we watch what actually happens.
How long verification takes when nobody is expediting it. Whether live chat gives consistent answers or a different story each time. Whether a withdrawal approved on screen actually arrives. Whether documents already verified get requested again. Whether support ends the chat when a supervisor is asked for.
The gap between those two experiences is the single most useful thing we can report, and it is why a casino can score well on games and bonuses here while still scoring badly overall.
Most casino terms state that affiliates, and often their employees, employers, agents and family members, are not eligible to play for real money. That rule exists to stop affiliates funnelling traffic to themselves and farming their own bonuses. It is reasonable and we are not encouraging anyone to work around it.
In practice the clause is rarely easy to find. It is typically one line buried in a numbered list deep in the terms, never on the promotional page, and phrased differently at every operator. Where we identify it before testing, we limit ourselves to the deposit, interface, support and verification stages and do not run a withdrawal. That is marked on the review as a partial test.
We have occasionally found the clause after already depositing. When that happens we say so in the review rather than deleting the test and pretending it did not occur. If we made a mistake reading a terms document, that is worth telling you about, partly because it is honest and partly because the same clause can catch you.
Every review carries a label showing which kind of evidence it rests on:
- Player tested means we deposited our own money and completed a withdrawal.
- Deposit tested, payout not means we tested the deposit, interface, support and verification, but did not reach a withdrawal, either because the terms prohibited it or because we lost the balance first.
- Affiliate side only means we dealt with the operator as a business partner and assessed the published terms, without a player account.
- Not personally tested means the assessment rests entirely on published terms and documented player reports.
When a review says a withdrawal completed cleanly, that is a real cashout to a real account with no special handling behind it. When it says a payout is still outstanding after two weeks, that is our own money sitting in the casino. And when it says we did not test the payout, that is exactly what it means. You will always know which you are reading.
And when a casino has been generous as an affiliate partner while treating ordinary players badly, we publish the second half. That has cost us commission more than once. It is the only version of this job worth doing.
Our testing process
- Licence verification. We check the licence on the regulator's own site, not just the casino's claim. Where no licence is named anywhere in the terms, the review says so.
- Full terms and conditions review. Not the summary page. The whole document, including bonus terms, withdrawal limits, dormant account clauses, dispute windows and restricted countries. Most player losses trace back to a clause nobody reads.
- Real money deposit. Where the casino's terms allow it, we deposit our own money and play across multiple game types.
- Withdrawal test. We request a real withdrawal and document exactly how long it takes and what is asked of us along the way.
- Support test. We contact live chat and email with specific questions and record both the response time and whether the answers stay consistent between agents.
- Player feedback review. We read Trustpilot, AskGamblers and Casinomeister, looking for repeating patterns rather than individual outliers. We also check whether a Trustpilot profile is verified, unclaimed, or registered under a lookalike domain the casino does not operate.
How we score
The overall rating is a weighted average of the five categories, with payout reliability carrying the heaviest weight. A casino with a beautiful game library that takes six weeks to pay is worse than a plain one that pays in 48 hours, and the score reflects that.
Anything rated under 7.5 has something specific we found worth flagging. Slow verification, a documented pattern of withdrawal complaints, bonus terms built to create friction, or a licence we could not verify. Those casinos are not automatically unsafe, but they need more caution and more reading before you deposit. The cons list on each review says exactly what we found.
Flagged casinos
Two labels can appear on a casino card in our rankings. Both push the operator to the bottom of every list it appears in and remove the affiliate link entirely.
Closed means the casino has stopped operating or stopped accepting registrations. The review stays online for reference.
Scam means we have concluded, on documented evidence, that the operator does not pay players. This is not applied to slow payouts, bonus disputes, or a low review score on its own. It requires a pattern of non-payment we consider established.
A casino can score badly without being flagged. Slow, restrictive and frustrating is not the same as fraudulent, and we try hard not to blur the two.
Review updates
Casino terms change, ownership changes, and payout behaviour changes. We update reviews when we become aware of anything significant, and where a personal test is still in progress the review says so and commits to reporting the outcome either way.
If you spot something out of date or wrong, tell us. Player reports directly influence these ratings, and a pattern of unresolved complaints will get a casino downgraded or removed.
Transparency on affiliate income
We earn commission from some of the casinos reviewed here. That funds the deposits, the withdrawal tests and the hours spent reading terms in full. It does not influence the scores.
Several casinos on this site carry ratings we would rather not publish from a commercial standpoint, and at least one carries no affiliate link at all because recommending it would be dishonest. Full details are on our affiliate disclosure page.