Ranking online casinos is easy to fake. You take an affiliate feed, sort it by commission, write three sentences under each name and call it a review. Most pages in this market are made that way, and you can usually tell because every casino is excellent and nothing ever goes wrong.
We test differently, and this page explains exactly how so you can judge whether the ratings are worth anything.
What Gets a Site Excluded Before Testing
Some operators never reach the assessment stage. We drop a site immediately if it blocks Australian IP addresses, quotes only euros or US dollars with no AUD option, has a documented pattern of voiding winnings on technicalities, or publishes a licence number that fails when you check it against the regulator's own validator.
We also drop sites that were registered in the last few months with no operating history. Not because new means dishonest, but because there is nothing to assess yet, and recommending an untested operator to somebody about to deposit their own money is not a service.
The Deposit Test
We fund every account at the site minimum rather than the amount the welcome offer wants. The minimum is where an operator's real behaviour shows. A casino that treats a A$20 deposit the way it treats a A$500 one is worth your time.
We note whether the deposit credited instantly, whether the payment method listed in the cashier actually worked, and whether any fee appeared on the statement that the cashier did not mention. Some operators pass on 1% to 3% on PayID without saying so anywhere.
The Withdrawal Test
This matters more than everything else combined, because a casino that will not pay is not a casino.
We request a withdrawal and time it from the moment we submit to the moment the money lands. We record every document demanded, when it was demanded, and whether anything was rejected and resubmitted. We check whether the payment method used for the deposit is available for the payout, which is where several otherwise decent sites fall over.
Then we withdraw a second time. The first payout is slow everywhere because it carries the full identity check. The second is the one that tells you how a site behaves once it knows who you are, and it is the number we weight most heavily.
Reading the Terms
Bonus terms are read in full before anything is claimed. The figures that decide whether an offer is worth taking are almost never in the banner.
- Whether wagering applies to the bonus alone or the bonus plus your deposit
- The maximum bet allowed while a bonus is active, and what happens if you exceed it once
- Which pokies are excluded from bonus play, since the excluded list is usually the high RTP titles
- Turnover requirements that apply with no bonus taken at all, which two of the sites we rank have
- Withdrawal caps, both per transaction and per month
The Lobby
Game count on a homepage means very little. A site advertising ten thousand titles where half are duplicate live tables scores below a smaller lobby where the catalogues that matter are complete.
We look at whether the major studios are present in full or in fragments, whether the RTP figure is visible in the game info screen, and whether the deployed build is the headline version or a lower one. Studios ship the same title at several return settings and the operator chooses which to use, so this is worth checking at every site.
Support
We contact live chat cold with a specific question about withdrawal limits, and we time the reply. A bot answering in four seconds is not support. A person answering in ten minutes with an accurate figure is.
How Ratings Change
Ratings move when behaviour moves. A site that slows its payouts drops the same month we notice, and a site that fixes a problem moves back up. We re-test the operators on our main pages at least quarterly, and after any change of ownership, licence or payment processor.
If you have had an experience that contradicts what is written here, tell us at [email protected]. Reader reports do not change a rating on their own, but they tell us where to look next.