The Casinomeister Awards
The oldest award in our set and the best archived, run by a forum that also publishes a category for the operators that disappointed it.
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Twenty-five years kept at twenty-five addresses
The oldest award in our set is also the best filed, and the two facts are not a coincidence, because a forum that argues about casinos for a living has every reason to keep the arguments where its members can find them again. Each edition between 2001 and 2025 sits at an address of its own, twenty-five pages for twenty-five years, which no trade magazine in this field matches. There was no edition in 2026, and the record stops where it stops.
Casinomeister runs the "Meister Awards" as a single annual series, decided by the people who post on its "forum" (a public board, archived thread by thread) rather than by executives at a dinner, and it is the only body here that publishes a category for the operators that disappointed it. An award and a reprimand, issued by the same hand on the same night, which is an arrangement no magazine in this field would survive for a single edition.
The objection, which is a different one at a forum
A magazine's awards are suspected of following the advertising, and a forum's awards attract the opposite suspicion: that they follow the loudest members, reward the brands that court the community, and punish whoever crossed a moderator. That version of the objection is worth taking seriously, and the answer to it is unusually concrete.
The site states that a casino cannot pay to be listed or to be treated differently, which is the plainest statement about money anywhere in our reading, and exactly one other body says something comparable in writing. A declared price of nothing is not proof of anything by itself; it does remove the commonest explanation for a surprising result (the entry that was bought rather than filed), and it is the first thing we now look for on any awards page we open.
How a winner is chosen here, in the forum's own practice
The moderators read back through the year's posts, build a "shortlist" from what the members actually said, and put it to those members for a vote, which is as near to showing our own working as any body here comes. It is closer to a long argument with a tally at the end than to a judging panel, and its raw material is "complaints" (grievances posted by members, answered or ignored by the house), threads and the public record of how each operator behaved while being watched.
There is no "adjudicator" (an external body signing off the tally) here, and the arithmetic of the final vote goes unpublished too. What fills them is the trail: the threads that fed the shortlist are still readable, which means the evidence behind a result is available in a way that no jury's reasoning ever is.
The category nobody else runs
"Fall From Grace" is the negative award (a category for the operators that let the forum down), and in our view it is the single most useful heading in this whole subject. A body willing to name the operators that let it down has praise worth receiving; praise that costs nothing to give is worth nothing.
Two brands on this site appear in the record under that heading, which puts them in the archive for the wrong reason, and both appear on your screen here with the year and the circumstance attached rather than quietly dropped from the ledger.
The status taxonomy, which outlives the awards
Beyond the annual prizes the portal keeps a running classification of operators, and for a reader it is worth more than any trophy on the site: "accredited" (a status granted after a trial period of up to sixty days against published standards), then a neutral zone, a "grey zone", "not recommended" and finally "rogue" (four rungs below the top one, each with its own criteria). Accreditation is withdrawn when the standards slip, which is how a brand can hold a win from one year and a demotion from another.
That makes this the only body in our set whose award record and conduct record can be laid side by side for one brand across one decade. We read the statuses on 20 October 2026, and each brand page carries that date beside the word.
The record here, in four separate shapes
The longest run of wins here belongs to one brand. Videoslots took "Best Casino" in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2023, and "Best Gaming Experience" in 2015, 2016 and 2018, all eight to the brand itself and all eight on the portal's own pages (eight results across five separate years); the 2015 shortlist put it against 32Red, Betat, Guts and Mr Green, and in 2018 the top place was split with Trada (a joint win, recorded as such by the portal). The portal has carried the brand as "accredited" since 2014, a status we read on 20 October 2026.
Two brands hold group awards, which is a different statement altogether. All Slots is in the record for "Best Casino Group" in 2007 and 2008, won by The Jackpot Factory (the group that then gathered All Slots, All Jackpots, First Web, Wild Jack and The VIP Lounge), and Royal Vegas is in it for the same category in 2003, won by Fortune Lounge (the group it belonged to at the time, and not by the website you would visit today).
And two brands hold the negative award. Royal Vegas sits in the 2005 record under "Fall From Grace" (the same Fortune Lounge group, taken off the accredited list two years after its win), while Betway Canada holds the 2016 one, accredited from 2010 and revoked that year after declining to deal with a complaint the portal had brought to it (the forum filed it, the house refused it, the status went).
The twenty-five addresses, and how to use one
The index sits at casinomeister.com/casino-awards/ and each edition has a page of its own, so the 2025 results are at casinomeister.com/casino-awards/year-2025/ and the 2016 results at the same address with the year changed. We opened the years behind every result on this page, which is a sentence we cannot write about any other body here.
Verified in the award body's own page · The same group, taken off the accredited list two years after the win.
Verified in the award body's own page · To the group Fortune Lounge, which Royal Vegas belonged to.
A win, a group award, a negative award and a status on a card make four separate statements about four different things, and this single body issued all four to brands we list. No other page on this site can say that!
Two claims that failed, and both of them failed on a name
A pair of "Best Casino Group" wins from 2007 and 2008 is widely attributed to Jackpot City, and the trophy belongs to The Jackpot Factory, a different company whose name differs by one word. Jackpot City was owned by Belle Rock Entertainment at the time (another company, with another licence), and the resemblance between those two names is the easiest trap in the entire subject.
The second failure is a formula rather than a fact, and it is the kind of phrase that gets written once and then repeated for a decade. Videoslots is often said to have won "Best Casino" for the second year running in 2015, and the portal's own index gives 2014 to Guts Casino and Club World, so 2015 was a first win and the phrase has to go.
- "Jackpot City won the Casinomeister best group award in 2007 and 2008"
- Casinomeister named a "Best Casino Group" in 2007 and in 2008, and both titles went to The Jackpot Factory, the group that then gathered All Slots, All Jackpots, First Web, Wild Jack and The VIP Lounge. Jackpot City belonged to Belle Rock Entertainment, a separate company. Check it.
- "Videoslots won the Casinomeister Best Casino award for the second year running in 2015"
- The same portal's index gives the 2014 title to Guts Casino and Club World. The 2015 title is the first win.
The check, which runs twice on this body
Open the year, which exists here and costs you about ten seconds (2001 to 2025, one page apiece), and read the category exactly as the portal prints it rather than as a badge paraphrases it. Then do the second check that only this body makes possible, and open the brand's status card to see where it stands now, because a win from 2016 and a grey zone in 2026 are both true and only one of them is being quoted at you.
That second step is the whole argument of this site in miniature, and this is the only body that lets anybody run it! An award is a sentence about one year; a "status" (where the portal places a house right now) is a sentence about today, and a reader holding both will never again be impressed by a badge on its own.
VisitMGA/CRP/258/2014, Videoslots Limited (Malta)
VisitAlderney AGCC Category 1, Baytree (Alderney) Ltd · Kahnawake, Baytree Interactive Ltd
VisitAlderney AGCC Category 1, Baytree (Alderney) Ltd · Kahnawake, Baytree Interactive Ltd
Questions
What is accreditation, and how is it lost?
It is a status granted after a trial period of up to sixty days and a set of published standards, and it is withdrawn when the standards slip. The withdrawal has its own award category, which is how two brands on this site appear in the record for the wrong reason.
Can a casino pay to be listed there?
The site states plainly that it cannot. That statement is rarer than it should be: most bodies in our set publish nothing at all about what an entry costs.