Every score on this site comes from documents we can show you, dated to the day we read them. There are no secret test accounts behind these pages and no payout times we claim to have clocked ourselves. What there is instead: the operator’s own terms, read clause by clause, and the operator’s own data feeds, counted and recorded.
That choice is deliberate, and it is worth explaining before anything else, because it is the opposite of how most casino review sites present themselves.
Why we review from documents
A great many casino reviews open with a line about depositing fifty euro and timing a withdrawal. Some of those tests happened. Many didn’t, and there is no way for a reader to tell the two apart, because the evidence is a sentence rather than an artifact. A payout time nobody can reproduce is worth exactly as much as the trust you already had in the person claiming it.
Documents behave differently. Clause 6.11 of the Golisimo terms sets a monthly withdrawal ceiling of €7,000 at the entry tier, and anyone reading this can open the same document and find the same number. If the operator changes it, the change is visible. That is a weaker claim than “we withdrew in forty minutes”, and a much more durable one.
So our method is closer to records journalism than to product testing. We read the contract, we count what the platform publishes about itself, and we write down the gaps.
What we read on every operator
The same six sources, in the same order, for every brand covered here.
- The full terms and conditions, including bonus terms, with the version number and the last-updated date recorded.
- Every promotion page and its individual conditions, including minimum deposits, wagering multiples, time windows and release caps.
- The payments or banking page: accepted countries, account currencies, per-method minimums and ceilings.
- The footer and any licensing, security or fairness page, checked for a licence number, a named company and a regulator link that actually resolves.
- The complaints clause, followed to wherever it leads, to establish whether a dispute reaches a regulator, an appointed adjudicator or a commercial website.
- The public data the site’s own interface loads, where that is available, to count games, providers, locales and supported countries rather than repeat the marketing figure.
That last point does a lot of work. Operators quote round numbers in their copy, and review sites repeat them for years after they stop being true. Counting the actual catalogue on a stated date produces a figure with a shelf life you can see.
How the scores are built
Rated pages carry a number between 0 and 10, built from six weighted components rather than assigned by feel.
| Component | Weight | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Transparency | 25% | Licence, company, jurisdiction, dispute route |
| Cashing out | 20% | Ceilings, processing windows, fees, friction clauses |
| Bonus honesty | 15% | Wagering, caps, exclusions, how clearly they are stated |
| Game library | 15% | Counted titles, live tables, supplier breadth |
| Payment rails | 15% | Methods, minimums, limits, currency support |
| Player protection | 10% | Limits, self-exclusion, signposted help |
Transparency carries the heaviest weight because it governs every other component. A generous bonus from an operator you cannot identify is not generous; it is a promise from a stranger. A reviewer who weighted library size first would produce higher numbers than ours on the same facts, and could defend that choice. We think it gets the risk backwards.
Scores are rounded to one decimal place. Anything we cannot evidence scores as unknown and is excluded from the weighting rather than guessed at, which means a page with large unpublished areas ends up with a number built from a smaller base. We say so on the page when that happens.
What we never do
Four rules, and they are absolute.
- We never invent a measurement. No deposit we did not make, no payout we did not receive, no support conversation we did not have, no device we did not use.
- We never state an unverified claim as fact. If three review sites say an operator holds a particular licence and the operator says nothing, we report the discrepancy and attribute each claim to whoever made it.
- We never fill a gap with a plausible number. Where a fee, a timing or a threshold is unpublished, the page says it is unpublished. That sentence is more useful than an estimate dressed as data.
- We never soften a finding because of a commercial relationship. See the disclosure below, which is the whole reason this rule has to be written down.
How this site makes money
Golisimo is a commercial partner. When a reader follows a tracked link from one of these pages and opens an account, this site may earn a commission. That is how the work is funded, and it creates an obvious incentive to be kind.
Our answer to that incentive is procedural rather than a promise. The scoring weights above were fixed before any operator was reviewed and are not adjusted per brand. Findings that hurt a partner are published at the same prominence as findings that help: the absence of a licence sits in the opening paragraph of the Golisimo review, not in a footnote. Where the facts support a warning, the page carries the warning in the same words we would use about a brand that paid us nothing.
What we do not do is run a brand takedown or steer readers toward a rival we happen to earn more from. Comparisons on this site are against regulatory categories, such as what an EU-licensed operator must provide, rather than against a named competitor with its own affiliate deal attached.
When pages get updated
Terms change, catalogues grow and promotions expire, so every factual page carries two dates: when it was published and when the underlying sources were last checked. Those dates are different on purpose, and an unchanged page keeps its original publication date rather than quietly pretending to be new.
We re-check an operator when its terms version changes, when a promotion listed here is withdrawn, or at least twice a year. Clause numbers quoted on these pages refer to a stated version of the document, and if the operator reissues it the numbering may move. That is why the version and date are always written next to the quote.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we would rather hear it than defend it. Email the page URL and the specific sentence to the address on the contact page, with a link to the source that contradicts us where possible.
Factual errors are corrected at the top of the affected section and the check date is updated. We do not quietly rewrite a page and leave the timestamp alone, because that is indistinguishable from never having been wrong.
Who writes this
Pages are written and scored by Niall Brennan, who has spent nine years around online gambling, part of it in payments and compliance support at a licensed operator. The byline is a single editorial desk rather than a rotating cast of names, and the same desk produces the German and Slovenian versions of each page.
There is no photograph, no list of former employers and no social profile attached to that byline, and that is a deliberate restraint rather than an oversight. A credential we cannot evidence publicly is worth no more than the unverifiable payout times discussed at the top of this page, and it would be odd to refuse one while printing the other.
The limits of this method
Reading documents tells you what an operator has committed to. It does not tell you whether the operator honours those commitments in practice, and we won’t pretend otherwise.
A site can publish a three-business-day payout rule and take three weeks. It can promise segregated client funds and hold nothing of the kind. Our method catches the operator that writes an unfair term and the operator that writes nothing at all, which between them cover most of what hurts players. It does not catch the operator that writes a fair contract and ignores it.
For that gap, player-reported evidence matters, and the complaint services linked from our reviews are a reasonable place to look. We point at them rather than summarising them, because a snapshot of complaint volumes on one date would be exactly the kind of unreproducible number this page exists to avoid.
How we work, in short
Do you deposit money at the casinos you review?
No. Every figure here comes from published terms, promotion conditions and public data feeds, each quoted with the date it was read.
What does a score out of ten mean here?
It is a weighted result across transparency, payouts, bonus honesty, library, payment rails and player protection, with transparency weighted heaviest at 25%.
Are reviews influenced by commission?
Weightings were fixed before any operator was assessed and are never adjusted per brand. Negative findings appear at full prominence regardless of partnership.
How often is a page re-checked?
Whenever the operator reissues its terms or withdraws a listed promotion, and at minimum twice yearly. Each page shows its last source-check date.
Why quote clause numbers?
So readers can open the same document and verify the claim. A clause reference survives rewording; a paraphrased promise does not.
What happens if a fact is unpublished?
The page says so explicitly. Estimating a fee, a payout window or a threshold that the operator keeps private would misrepresent guesswork as evidence.
Sources
- The Golisimo rulebook cited throughout this site: an example of the document class every assessment here is built from, carrying its own version stamp so a reader can tell whether our clause references still line up.
- The Irish gambling regulator we benchmark against: supplies the published-obligation baseline that the transparency and player-protection components of our scoring are measured against.
- Gambling Therapy: the independent support service we signpost in place of operator tooling, cited because no such tooling is published here.