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Unbiased reviews of the most legitimate online casino sites.
Online Casinos with Proven Track Records
Our top lists are filled with online casinos that treat their customers right. In the end, that’s what it comes down to: do they respect you for risking your hard-earned money on their site? For playing against the odds? These sites do:
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How to Find Legit Casino Websites
We use many criteria to rate and review internet casino sites. The most important criteria, however, is always going to be how safe, reliable and respectful the casino is towards its customers. You can forgive a lot as long as the site works with you to solve whatever problems you may have had with them and — this is crucial — finds a fair solution.
On the other hand, it hardly matters if the games are entertaining and the bonus offer seems wildly lucrative unless you trust on the site to pay your winnings. The golden rule of running an online gambling operation is to be secure, reliable and trustworthy.
Not only is our mission to showcase the operators honoring these rules; we’re also going to make sure you’re aware of the operators that most clearly violate them.
We pay attention to a whole variety of other things, too. Determining which online casinos are good and which are bad isn’t rocket science — that much is true — but it’s still a process where you have to look at many factors.
We expect different things from internet casinos. Some of us swear by table games, for instance, while others can’t get enough of penny slot machines. Some of us appreciate bonuses while others are more interested in house edge. Some of us… well, you get the idea.
Analyzing casino sites in detail is essential. We all like our money to be safe — that’s why safety is our first and foremost criteria — but other than that, different operators excel at different things, so it makes sense to split them into categories in order to make sure their target markets find them. That you find them if they’re the right fit for you.
What We Pay Attention to When Reviewing Casinos
Payout History
If a casino makes it difficult to process a withdrawal, it either shows a lack of respect for its customers or it’s having problems (temporary or permanent). If you have any respect for your customers at all, you make sure they can retrieve their money from your website fast and easily.
Customer Service
Here’s another area (in addition to payouts) that tells you a lot about how much casinos respect you. Do they provide you with good customer service — or in other terms, are they easy to reach and helpful? That’s all it takes but surprisingly few casino operators manage to do this.
Overall Reputation
Although 99% of informational gambling sites are not worth your trust, there’s still value in looking at reviews and browsing through gambling forums. We’ve done this for your, of course, and try to tell you if there’s anything you need to be worried about through our reviews.
License
Operating without a license is a warning sign but throughout the relatively short history of internet casino gaming, we’ve seen operators cheat their customers out of money regardless of which licenses they’ve had. Still, it’s better to have a license than not to have one.
Game Selection
The online casinos that make the biggest investments in their software usually have the best selection of games in terms of entertainment, variety, jackpots, and mobile usability – all of these significantly affect our gaming experience. Also… the bigger the jackpots, the better, right?
House Edge
Although most internet casinos aren’t upfront about this, if a casino is willing to continuously go through house edge testing by reliable testing agencies (and then publish the results), it’s a good sign. If this online gambling industry needs something, it’s transparency.
Bonus Offers
I always tell people this shouldn’t be as big of a deal as its made out to be. I consider every other part of a casino operation more important than the bonus offer. Still, many of our visitors are “bonus hunting,” so we make sure to include relevant bonus details within our casino reviews.
Financials
If a company is listed in the stock exchange and does well financially, their likelihood of going out of business in near future (or doing something scammy to their customers) is as low as can be. We’ll pay close attention to this area and report what’s worth knowing about.
Usability
Usability is a significant part of your overall experience. This area is especially important due to mobile gaming’s explosive surge in popularity (the smaller the screen, the more efficient the user experience needs to be). We put a lot of emphasis into this area for a good reason.
Learn About Odds, Rules and Strategies
Are you a fan of jackpot slot machines?
The majority of our team agrees that slot machines — and particularly slots with progressive jackpots — are the most exciting gambling games online.
Please be aware of that jackpot slots have lower payout percentages (in general) than non-jackpot slots. With that said, the winning opportunities (you can win life-changing money) they offer are on a different level from traditional slot machines. Imagine winning more than a million dollars from Mega Moolah, for instance, like one British gambler did in 2015.
Did you know that on an hourly basis, you’re likely to lose anywhere from 2% to 10% per spin on a slot machine (and your losses can amount to much more on certain slots)? (And did you know there are things you can do to increase your chances of winning at slots?)
On the other hand, if you play the right variation of blackjack, your losses per bet are much more reasonable, on average between 0.5% and 2%.
It’s useful to know that type of stuff.
Or did you know that on average you’ll lose 40% of your bet on scratch cards? It’s almost as bad as the lottery (although not quite). Or that you can significantly increase your odds of winning at video poker if you play according to optimal strategy? Or that there’s only one bet you should make when playing baccarat?
Knowing what to play and how to play are both important aspects of playing at casinos online. It’s not all about (for some of us, not even mostly about) finding the games with the highest returns – after all, entertainment is (and should be) a big factor as well. Still, knowing the house edge for different casino games can only help you.
Read our 10 Tips for Winning More at Casinos in addition to the list of game specific guides below. We’ve done our best to provide you with helpful, actionable casino advice. Suggesting you’re playing at a legitimate casino (if not, none of these tips are likely to help), using our tips to your advantage will be good for your bankroll.
Playing with Real Money
Watch out for rogue online casinos
AffPower, Buffalo Partners, and countless other companies have cheated their customers out of real money. Who knows the total amount, but in all likelihood it was millions of dollars, several times over.
What do these companies also have in common?
They were heavily recommended by various casino site review affiliates (websites that send traffic to online casinos). Why? Because these rogue casino companies were willing to pay bigg checks to affiliates for the traffic.
Unlike the majority of our colleagues, we think this is wrong and irresponsible. So we’re going to do the best we can to show you which casinos really deserve to handle your money. We do this by looking at a bunch of factors, safety and reliability being the most important ones.
We take our online gaming seriously. If you’ve been active in the online casino world, you’ve probably been burned at some point. A casino may have never paid you and folded their business, used predatory terms to withhold your money… or maybe they refused to award your bonus?
You may have been through the “classic” treatment: horrible customer service. Which really sucks, considering you’re usually in a situation where your money is under the online casino’s control.
Operators in the online gambling industry have this bad habit of making sure everything works great until it’s time to pay customers their winnings. (Fortunately, there are also exceptions to this rule, and we do our best to showcase the best options.)
A classic trick is to make the customer wait. As simple as that. The identity information — yes, the same information the casino couldn’t care less about when the customer deposited becomes oh-so-important when it’s time to initiate the withdrawal.
So the casino may take a while — possibly even a long while — to check your identity. They’re not slow by accident — no, no — they’re just hoping you get a sudden urge to double your winnings and end-up losing all of it back before your payout gets processed.
It’s a common industry tactic and technically they do nothing wrong by taking their time to check your identity. In practice, however, it’s an unpleasant experience for the customer. Therefore the honorable operators — the only ones worth recommending — typically steer away from such practices.
Depending on where you live, transferring money to and from online casinos can be easy or challenging. We’ve explained this more thoroughly in our guide to real money online casinos but here’s the situation in a nutshell:
United States
Casino gamblers living in the U.S. have a more challenging situation: you’re only able to use credit/debit cards, Bitcoin (which becomes more widely accepted by the minute), and money transfer services (like Western Union and Moneygram, although this option has become rarely available).
With the exception of New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware where some forms of online gambling have been legalized and regulated and you have more banking options available.
Rest of the World
For players outside of the United States, depositing is likely to be easy since almost all casino deposit methods are free, instant and have relatively high limits.
For players outside of the United States, depositing is likely to be easy since almost all casino deposit methods are free, instant and have relatively high limits.You can choose between a plethora of options, including credit and debit cards, numerous e-wallets like Paypal, pre-paid cards, online banking, and more. Even Bitcoin is an accepted method for both deposits and withdrawals at several legit casino sites nowadays (and presumably the number of Bitcoin-friendly gambling sites is only going to increase in near future).