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.
A fifth outcome exists and it is the one that matters most. Sometimes we deposit, verify, request a withdrawal and are simply not paid. When that happens the review carries the dates and amounts rather than a label, the casino is added to our payout warnings page, and the entry stays there until the money arrives. That page is the whole reason we test with our own money instead of relying on what operators tell us.
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 outstanding, that is our own money sitting in the casino, and the review states the date we requested it so you can see how long. 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.
Player reports
Every review on this site ends with an invitation to tell us if something went wrong at that casino. Those reports feed back into the ratings, and here is exactly how.
A single report does not change a rating. We have no way to verify one person's account from outside, and a player who has just lost money is not always describing what happened accurately. That is not bad faith, it is what frustration does to anyone's recollection.
Two or more independent reports describing the same pattern will change a rating, and we say so in the review when that is why it moved. A verification loop reported by three players in the same month is a fact about the casino. The same thing reported once is a fact about one account.
We check every report against the casino's own published terms first. A substantial share of complaints describe rules that are written down and were simply not read: deposits from someone else's card, bets above the bonus maximum, accounts sharing a household IP address. Where that is what happened, we say so and explain the rule rather than treating it as misconduct. That is also why our reviews quote these clauses at length.
Ratings move in both directions. A casino that resolves a problem we reported, or that fixes something we criticised, can go up as well as down.
We never publish a reader's name, account details or anything identifying without asking first.
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.
Unpaid means we requested a withdrawal from a fully verified account and were not paid. These casinos are listed on our payout warnings page with the dates, the amounts and the full sequence of what happened.
The bar for that second label is our own money, not a reader report. We will not flag a casino on the basis of complaints we cannot verify, however many there are. What we can verify is a deposit we made, a verification we completed, a withdrawal we requested and a payment that did not arrive. That is a fact about our account rather than a conclusion about the business, which is also why the page says "did not pay us" rather than anything stronger.
A casino can score badly without being flagged. Slow, restrictive and frustrating is not the same as refusing to pay, and we try hard not to blur the two. Several casinos rated below 6 on this site paid us without a problem.
The flag comes off when the money arrives. If any operator listed settles, we update the review, raise the rating and remove the entry. That offer has no expiry date, and we would rather write that update than leave the page as it is.
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.
Where a test has failed, the review carries the date we requested payment and the date of the last reply we received. Those dates do not get quietly softened as time passes. If anything, a longer gap makes the record stronger, and leaving it visible is the point.
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, at least one carries no affiliate link at all because recommending it would be dishonest, and the operators on our payout warnings page have had their links removed entirely. Full details are on our affiliate disclosure page.