How Gamblib Rates Online Casinos

On this page

The gate before the score
What the score is made of
What drags a score down
How a shortlist is assembled
The documents we read
Games and return figures
Money, and where it comes from
Corrections

A score is only worth reading if you know what produced it. This page is the method behind every operator rating on Gamblib: what we look at, in what order, what counts as a disqualifier, and what a commercial relationship does and does not change.

The gate before the score

A licence we can find ourselves. The brand, or the company named in its footer, has to appear in a regulator’s public register — the UK Gambling Commission, the Malta Gaming Authority, the Gibraltar Licensing Authority, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission or another statutory body of that kind. A licence number printed on a website and nowhere else is not a licence.
Terms that exist in writing. Bonus wagering, game weighting, bet caps while a bonus is live, validity windows and withdrawal limits have to be published before an account is opened, not disclosed afterwards.
A payment route out. At least one documented withdrawal method, with a stated processing time and a stated verification requirement.

Fail any of the three and the brand is not listed. This is why some heavily advertised names do not appear on this site at all.

What the score is made of

Operators that clear the gate are read on five axes. Each axis is scored from published material, and the wording that produced the score is quoted on the review page.

Terms and cost of the offer. The real price of a welcome package: wagering multiple and what it is applied to, maximum bet while wagering, game contribution, the expiry clock, and any cap on what a bonus can convert into.
Payments. Stated withdrawal times per method, minimum and maximum amounts, monthly caps, fees, and what documents verification asks for.
Games and studios. Which studios are actually on the shelf, whether live tables and jackpots are present, and whether return figures are published per game.
Player protection. Deposit, loss and session limits, reality checks, cooling-off and self-exclusion, and whether the tools are reachable from the account page rather than from a support ticket.
Transparency and support. Whether the operating company, licence and complaints route are named on the site, and what channels answer at what hours.

What drags a score down

Terms that move
Wagering or caps that differ between the offer page and the bonus terms. When two documents disagree, the stricter one is the one we score.
Caps that bite
Monthly withdrawal ceilings low enough to make a jackpot unpayable in practice, or a conversion cap buried in a clause.
Protection on paper
Limit tools that exist in the terms but cannot be found in the account, or self-exclusion that runs through email only.
Anonymous operators
No company name, no licence number, no complaints body — an operator you cannot identify is one you cannot escalate against.
Support that goes quiet
Published hours that do not match the channels on the site, or a contact route that returns nothing at all.
Game shelf padding
A game count inflated by duplicates and demo-only titles, or return figures the operator refuses to publish per game.

How a shortlist is assembled

The tables of operators on this site are not re-ranked page by page. They are drawn from one pool of brands that have cleared the gate above, and each page takes the slice of that pool which fits its subject: a page about a payment method lists only brands documented as supporting it, a page about live tables lists only brands that run them, a country page lists only brands licensed to accept players from that country. Where a subject has no pool behind it — a market none of our licensed brands serves, for instance — the page carries no table at all rather than a table of brands that would turn the reader away at registration.

Within a slice the order is commercial as well as editorial, as described below, and ties are broken on the documented facts rather than on the offer: a brand whose licence and operating company we can name outranks one where the footer is vague, and a brand with a published withdrawal time outranks one that gives none. Rows carry the terms, the licence holder and the payment routes so the comparison can be made across the row instead of down the rank.

The documents we read

Public licence registers of the statutory regulators, for the licence status, the company holding it and the date it was granted or lapsed.
The operator’s own terms and conditions, bonus terms, payments page and responsible gambling page — the versions published on the site an account is opened on.
The studio’s game sheets, paytables and help screens, for everything printed on a game page.
Regulators’ own decisions, statements and enforcement notices, where a page describes something that has happened to an operator.

Anything that does not come from one of those four is not a fact on this site. Marketing copy, affiliate feeds and other review sites are not sources: at best they repeat a document we can read ourselves, and at worst they repeat each other.

Games and return figures

Game pages follow the same rule. Reel layout, paylines or ways, feature mechanics and the return-to-player figure come from the studio’s published game sheet or from the operator’s own game information panel. Where a studio ships a title in several return configurations — and many do — the page says so instead of printing one number as if it were the only one. Volatility is reported when the studio states it, and described in words when it does not. Return figures describe long-run behaviour across millions of spins; they predict nothing about a session.

Money, and where it comes from

This site earns commission when a reader opens an account through some of its outbound links. That relationship is the reason a free reference desk can exist, and it is also the obvious place for a conflict of interest to hide, so the boundary is drawn where a reader can check it.

What commission does change. The order of the shortlist tables on this site — the numbered lists of operators headed Get bonus — is commercial as well as editorial. A brand we have a commercial agreement with can stand above a brand we do not, and the table says so underneath itself. Treat the position as advertising placement, not as a verdict, and read the row rather than the rank.

What it does not change. Commission has no input into the five axes, into whether a negative finding is printed, or into the licence gate above. A brand that fails the gate is not listed however much it pays; a brand that pays nothing is listed and assessed like any other, and where we have no commercial relationship at all the row carries the same facts as every other row. Nothing on this site carries a numeric score we cannot show the workings for, which is why shortlist rows print terms, licence holder and payment routes instead of a mark out of ten.

Corrections

Terms change without notice, and a rating built on last season’s terms is wrong even if it was right when written. Pages carry the date they were last checked, and we re-read the terms of listed operators on a rolling basis. If you find a page that no longer matches what the operator publishes, tell us through the contact page and the page gets corrected or pulled.