The four kinds of question, and which of them have answers

Nearly everything put to us divides into four kinds, and the division matters because one of the four has no answers in it: questions about what an award is, questions from the companies we list, questions about the ratings that stand in for one, and questions about a casino's conduct that no reader of registers can settle.

The first three are answered in the entries below and in the pages they point at. The fourth is answered here, by saying what cannot be known from outside, which is more useful than a confident guess and much less common.

What an award is, and what it never is

The entries below set out what counts here, why a withdrawn claim is published and not deleted, what a "shortlisting" (a place in the final field, which is usually ten names) is worth, and what a "group award" (one that went to the owner of several casinos rather than to one site) says about a single site. Three further points come up often enough to belong in the prose.

The first is that categories do not travel between bodies. The heading "Casino Operator of the Year" used by one organisation and "Online Casino Operator of the Year" used by another are different things with different fields and judges, so adding them together produces a number describing nothing; our counts keep each body's wording for that reason.

The second is that an old award ages oddly, since a title from 2007 or 2008 went to a company which in several cases no longer trades under that name. That does not make the result false; it does make it a record of the past, not a recommendation for tonight.

The third is that a negative result is still a result. One body on these pages runs a category for the year's sharpest loss of reputation ("Fall From Grace", in its own wording), and a brand that has won it carries the entry in its "ledger" (every line with its source) beside anything won on a better day.

The questions operators ask

By far the most frequent is a request to add an award we have missed, and the answer has four parts: the body, the category in that body's exact wording, the year, and a link to the page where the result is published. With those four we check it in an afternoon and add it the same week.

Without all four we cannot, and the request reaches us in four forms instead: a press release calling a brand "award-winning", a "badge" (the image an operator puts on its pages), a line in a company profile, and an entry in a reference work with no citation (several have been chased to nothing). None of those is a result; of the twenty-three claims we tested and rejected, most failed on the category or the year rather than because the award did not exist.

The second is a request to take down a regulator's decision, and the answer does not belong to us: while it stands on the register of the authority that made it, it stands on the page here too. Where it has been withdrawn, superseded or set aside, the page saying so is all we need; the correction is made on the day it arrives.

The third is an offer, whether a better "position" (a higher place in a list), a softer sentence, a paragraph slipped into an existing page, or a commission improved in exchange. Offers are simply not answered, as a settled practice, which is cheaper for everybody than a conversation about them.

The questions about the ratings

Two things are asked about the figures more than anything, and both are fair. One is why a score carries a date, and the answer is that it moves: a "Safety Index" (an independent portal's figure from zero to ten, published with a band in words) is recalculated whenever a complaint lands or a term is rewritten, so an undated one is today's claim dressed as a permanent one.

The other is why a widely quoted penalty total appears nowhere on this site. Across the brands of one group, between ninety and ninety-seven per cent of that figure comes from the brand's "siblings" (other sites under the same ownership), so next to a single name it would chiefly describe them. A second absence is worth naming: one portal answers our requests with an error, so none of its ratings reaches any page here.

Whether an award was bought, which is the question under all the others

This is what everybody really wants settled, and it can be answered for two of the eleven bodies and for none of the rest. The "entry terms" (what a body charges to enter a category, and on what conditions) are simply not published by most of them: the field we keep for that reads "not declared" for seven of the eleven, and the silence is a finding we print rather than a gap in the research.

A single body puts in writing that it charges nothing, and publishes its scoring rule too: the twenty judges named with roles and employers, the ranking of each entry as a first or second choice, the compulsory abstention where a judge's own company is running, and the exclusion of its operator's staff. A second says plainly that a casino cannot pay to be listed or treated differently.

Two of the eleven name an outside firm to oversee the count, Deloitte at one and KPMG in the Crown Dependencies at the other, and those two are the "audited" field entire. For the remaining nine the useful sentence is not that an award was bought but that nobody outside can tell, and a page claiming more is guessing on your behalf!

The questions nobody here can answer

Which casino pays a "withdrawal" (getting the money out) fastest, what a particular account will be asked to prove at "verification" (the identity check before a payout), whether a brand is "safe" in the sense a reader means (which is a prediction, not a record), and what the chance of a given outcome is: none of these is knowable from a register, a winners list or a complaint archive, and nobody writing these pages has opened an account to find out.

What goes in their place is narrower and real: the regulator and the company that a "licence" actually names (rarely the name above the website), read in a register, what an independent portal has recorded about complaints (the deductions, and what each was for), and a regulator's own decisions where they still stand. Those three answer a different question from the one asked, and saying so beats converting them into a verdict out of five!

Where the answers actually live

Each entry below is as short as its question allows, and points at the page carrying the evidence, whether that is the grading of the bodies, a brand's ledger, the admission rules or the list of claims that did not survive. Following the pointer, where there is one, is worth more to you than reading the answer twice.

If a question of yours is missing, the page that ought to carry it is usually the method, and the quickest route, if you want it added, is the contact address. A question asked by two readers in one week is a defect in a page rather than a gap in a list, and we treat it as one.

Questions