Our methodology for reading terms, criteria and registers

Reading dates

The methodology requires every figure to carry the date on which it was read, because terms and registers change independently of each other. We read the general terms of the twelve casinos between 24 August and 12 September 2026. The registers of the licence issuers — the cert.cga.cw portal for Curaçao and the available publications for Anjouan — we checked between 8 and 13 September 2026.

The gap between those two windows is not accidental: terms are read once and rarely change from day to day, whereas a register can change faster, so we check it closer to publication of the table.

What an empty field means, and what it does not

In our methodology an empty field means one thing only: the document does not contain that information. It does not mean the answer is negative, and it does not mean the casino is hiding something. At Shuffle.com, for instance, the terms name neither an amount nor a deadline for documents — that is recorded as an empty field against both criteria, not as a judgement that the casino has no such requirements.

The methodology deliberately avoids wording that would read an empty field as an advantage or a shortcoming. An empty field is information about a document, not about a casino.

Why Vave stands outside the table

Vave is shown above the table rather than inside it, and carries no position and no score. The same reading methodology applies to it — five criteria, articles, dates — the difference is only that Vave is not part of the ranked twelve. The order of the table itself is editorial and follows the five criteria set out above.

Two payment tests

The methodology also takes in two cases where we checked the terms with our own money rather than by reading alone. At Vave the desk paid in and withdrew its own money on 28 August 2026; up to roughly 5,000 USDT in total no document was demanded, even though art. 8.7 expressly allows it. At TrustDice the desk paid in USDT over several weeks in May 2026; after roughly US$5,000 in withdrawals came a message about a payment under review, then a request for documents through the Veriff service, with a driving licence refused and a passport accepted only on the fifth attempt.

For every other casino in the table we deliberately make no such claim — the methodology separates what we read from what we actually tested with money.

What the methodology deliberately leaves out

The methodology does not use data from sites that aggregate user opinions, and it does not use old saved snapshots of web pages, since both kinds of source change independently of the original document and cannot be checked the same way as terms read at the source itself. Nor does it use figures on search volume or on how many visitors reach a given page — those are not facts about a casino but about readers' search behaviour, which has nothing to do with terms of business.

Why the methodology does not measure withdrawal speed

The methodology deliberately sets no criterion that would require a claim about hours or days to payout, because such numbers are as a rule not written into terms as an undertaking but as the operator's estimate of itself. Instead the methodology measures what is actually checkable: whether a deadline for handing over documents is fixed by an article, and how long it is. A detailed review of published deadlines and limits per casino is gathered on the page about withdrawal limits.

How the methodology handles the amount behind an identity check

The third criterion — whether the check is tied to an amount — is one of the rarer ones to get a positive answer. Only two of the twelve casinos name a specific figure in their terms; for the rest the methodology records an empty field rather than an assumption. The full review per casino, including the moment at which the check is set off, sits on the page about identity verification.

How the methodology handles the issuer's register

The fifth criterion compares two things: what a casino's terms claim about its licence and what the issuer's register says about the same certificate on the day of the check. At four of the casinos in the table those two statements do not match completely, which the methodology records without drawing a conclusion about the cause. Every case of mismatch, and the procedure for checking a number yourself, is set out on the page about foreign licences.

How the methodology corrects itself

If a figure turns out to have been read wrongly, or the document has changed in the meantime, the correction replaces the old statement, and the old text does not stay published alongside the new one. The date beside each item lets the reader see when the statement was last checked and, if need be, check for themselves whether anything has changed since.

This methodology is the same for all twelve casinos and for Vave, whether the brand is ranked or stands above the table — the only difference is the position, not the reading procedure.

Corrections happen in practice for two reasons: because the document at the source actually changed, or because a detail was missed on the first reading and a later one caught it. In both cases the same rule holds — the new statement replaces the old, and the old text does not stay published in parallel as a possibly misleading version.

A reader who notices a discrepancy between this page and the actual text of the terms is invited to say so — the methodology is built to be corrigible, not to be written once and left unchanged.

Why the methodology uses no stars or overall scores

Some sites boil five or ten criteria down to a single number from one to five, expressed in stars. This methodology deliberately does not, because one number would hide which of the five criteria a casino actually met and which it did not. Instead of an average, the reader sees five separate answers per casino, each with its own article.

Deciding against a single combined score also means there is no difference in presentation between two casinos that meet the same number of criteria — the difference only becomes visible once the reader sees which criteria are met and which are not. For a reader comparing only two or three brands, that matters more than a general impression, because it decides which specific condition will affect their withdrawal in practice.

How the methodology handles missing data about coins

The number of supported coins or currencies is not one of the five criteria, but it is stated where it was read. At some casinos — Wolfbet with 32 coins, or Bitcasino.io with 12 to 13 — the figure is clearly given in the terms or on the casino's page; at others we did not find it set out as plainly, so it stays unpublished. Here too the methodology does not guess but leaves the field empty where there is no source.

What the methodology says about the relation between the five criteria

The five criteria are not equal in practice, even though the assessment treats them alike. The criterion about the entry in the issuer's register, for instance, is independent of the wording of the terms, while the other four depend directly on how precisely a casino has written its document. A casino can meet every criterion about identity verification and still have a mismatched register entry — or the other way round, as the cases in the section on foreign licences show.

That is why the methodology does not advise the reader to pick a casino by the number of ticks alone, but to read which specific criterion matters more to them — the document deadline, say, if they are planning a quick withdrawal after a large win, or the state of the register, if traceability of the licence is what counts.