One name, two businesses, and an award that belongs to a building

A significant London award does sit behind this name, and it was given to a room in Leicester Square (a physical casino, with tables and a door) rather than to the website that this page reviews. The two are separate companies that hold separate licences under separate regulators, and they share a name, a logo and a commercial agreement, which turns out to be enough to move a trophy from one to the other on page after page.

A reader will say that a brand agreement makes them the same thing in practice (one name, one shopfront, one experience). The licences disagree, and so does the register.

The award, and the company that holds it

The "Casino of the Year" title handed out by the Global Gaming Awards London for 2023 went to the land-based casino at Leicester Square (the London series, as the awards were then called), a venue that holds a licence of its own and a management of its own. Nothing we found in that year's results, or in any other year within our reach, attaches to the online casino trading under the same name.

One further fact makes the confusion almost inevitable rather than merely easy. That ceremony was staged at the Hippodrome Casino in London for seven consecutive years before the series was renamed and moved abroad (it is now the Global Gaming Awards EMEA, held at Barcelona in the week of the ICE exhibition), so for most of its life the award was handed out inside the building that eventually won it.

The body itself is among the more rigorous on this site, which is worth saying because it means the 2023 title is a real result and not a bought one. Companies enter, a "college" of senior executives votes, ten entries are "shortlisted" in each category, each company may seat only one member on that college (one member per company, and no more), abstention is compulsory when a member's own company is on a shortlist, and the vote is "adjudicated" by KPMG in the Crown Dependencies.

That adjudication makes it one of only two bodies in our whole survey (two out of eleven) that have a named third party checking the count. So the award is well made, properly documented and entirely genuine; it is simply not this website's award, and no amount of shared branding will transfer it.

What the registers say about the website

The online casino launched in 2013 and has never, at any point, been operated by the venue that gives it a name. Betway Limited of Gżira in Malta runs it under a "white-label" arrangement, which means that four things (the licence, the cashier, the terms and the complaints process) all belong to a company with no address in Leicester Square.

The documents are unusually clean on this point, and we read both of them in a couple of minutes. On the British public register the domain hippodromeonline.com appears with the status "White Label" beneath Betway Limited, which we read on 22 September 2026; the Malta Gaming Authority's seal names the same company as "Licensed" and lists the domain under MGA/CRP/130/2006, for customers outside Britain (two documents, two regulators, one address).

The proportions on that register are informative as well, once you know which row to look for. Betway Limited carries twelve rows of domain names on the British register (eight of them active and three inactive), and exactly one is marked as a white label, which is the one this page is about.

What the operator's own record holds

Because the licence belongs to Betway Limited, that company's conduct record belongs on this page rather than on the venue's. On 12 March 2020 it undertook a payment of 11.6 million pounds together with a package of measures, after the Commission examined social responsibility and money-laundering failings at the company; the Commission describes the outcome as "regulatory action" rather than as a fine, and a substantial part of the money was "restitution" instead of punishment (a distinction that almost every summary loses).

A second case is dated 21 September 2022, and it carries a "penalty" set at 408,915 pounds for marketing that appeared among children's material on a football club's website. The Commission is explicit that it makes no suggestion of any deliberate attempt to reach children, and none that a child was ever allowed to gamble (its own words, and the reason we repeat them), because the figure travels without that qualification almost everywhere else.

Neither case appears on the licence account's own page today, and the explanation is clerical. Enforcement entries remain on the register only for a while, and "public statements" come down at the three-year mark (nothing on it now predates November 2023), so both of these now live on the Commission's news pages, where they can still be read in full.

The figure this page does not have

Not one independent portal card for this name opened for us, which leaves the page with no "complaint index" and no review average at all. We would rather leave that blank than fill it with a score computed for the operator's main brand or for the venue.

The gap matters more here than it would elsewhere, and it has a tidy consequence. With no award of its own and no portal figure, the only "evidence" this page can offer you is the licensing and the operator's record, which is exactly the evidence a reader ought to be weighing on every other page as well.

The question that separates a venue from a website

The question here applies to every casino brand that shares a name with a physical building, and there are more of them than anybody expects. Ask which company holds the licence for the specific thing you are about to use, read it off the "footer" or out of the regulator's register, and then ask what that company's own record looks like.

Do it here, as we had to, and the answer arrives in two lines. The award belongs to a room in Leicester Square, the website belongs to a Maltese operator carrying twelve million pounds of "regulatory history", and the only thing the two genuinely share is the sign over the door (one room, one website, one name)!

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  Betway Canada

  Betway Limited, Gzira (Malta) · UK Gambling Commission account 39372

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  Videoslots

  MGA/CRP/258/2014, Videoslots Limited (Malta)

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  888 Casino

  Virtual Digital Services Limited under MGA/CRP/121/2006, as the operator's own terms state · 888 UK Limited, Gambling Commission account 39028, in Britain

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