Thirty-nine categories, and the one page missing from all of them

Size and candour are separate virtues in this business, and the largest ceremony we looked at has a great deal of the first together with a usable amount of the second. SBC Events hands out thirty-nine categories in a single night (thirty-nine in 2026, by the body's own count), names the people who judge them (each listed with a name, and in most cases an employer), and then never says how a judge turns an entry into a score.

The 2026 edition, whose winners the organiser mounted as logos rather than as text so that a worded list exists only in its own trade reporting, ran on the first of October at the MEO Arena in Lisbon, on the closing day of the SBC Summit (the twenty-ninth of September to the first of October 2026, split between the Feira Internacional de Lisboa and the arena itself), and the next summit is set for the twenty-first to the twenty-third of September 2027. Three series share the brand: the main "SBC Awards" (the original series, and the one carrying the most headings), an "SBC Awards Americas" and an "SBC Awards Europe", each with its own night and its own list of categories.

The objection, and the part of it that naming judges disposes of

A ceremony attached to a trade fair invites the plainest suspicion of the lot, which is that the categories exist in order to fill a room and the room exists in order to sell tickets to the people who were nominated. Naming the judges answers a slice of that objection, and we would not pretend it answers more.

A named judge can be looked up, placed at an employer and asked afterwards what the panel was shown, which no anonymous jury allows at any price. Anonymity is the cheaper arrangement, and most of the eleven prefer it (nine of them, where we could find no list of names). What naming does not do is tell anybody what weight each of those judges applied to each entry, which is precisely where this body stops talking.

What the body says about its judging, and the rule it omits

The published account amounts to a "jury" (a panel of named industry figures, assembled for each edition) plus the names themselves, and a reader who goes looking for the rest will find that there is no rest to find.

The scoring method is not published; there is no "adjudicator" (an independent firm paid to watch the ballots) anywhere in the process; and the "entry terms" (the cost of an entry, and the small print underneath it) go undeclared as well.

That leaves this body in a middle position which in our view is worth marking rather than rounding down to zero. It publishes a good deal more than the bodies that post a winners list and nothing whatever besides, and a good deal less than the single body in our set that prints the rule by which a tie between two entries gets broken. A middle position is still a position, and on a subject as murky as this one the middle is where most of the traffic sits.

What it keeps, and why an article is not quite an archive

The results are preserved edition by edition, which sounds tidy until you notice that some of those editions survive as a news article rather than as a "results page" with an address of its own (one address, one edition, left alone). An article carries a byline, a date and a headline that can all be rewritten by the publisher; a results page carries an address that a badge on a casino footer can point at for a decade without anybody touching it.

For the 2026 winners that address sits on the group's own news site, at sbcnews.co.uk (a trade news title, published by the same company as the awards), while the awards themselves are described over at sbcevents.com (the events arm of the group, on a domain of its own).

Two domains, one award, and no single page (not one address, anywhere) that settles it. Two domains for one award is not a scandal, and it is exactly the sort of arrangement that quietly breaks a claim five years later, on the afternoon somebody tidies one of the two.

The night that came back inside this one

The "CasinoBeats Game Developer Awards" no longer run under that name anywhere. The categories returned inside the European edition of the SBC Awards when the summit they had belonged to was renamed, so a studio's trophy from those years now has to be traced through a series that did not yet exist on the evening the trophy was handed over.

Anybody quoting a CasinoBeats heading today is quoting a brand that has been absorbed into a larger one, an accurate version would cite the SBC Awards Europe edition alongside the original heading as it was printed at the time.

The SBC record, in five separate shapes

A single brand holds a long sequence at this body, and that sequence sits in a specialism remote from casino play altogether: "esports" (betting on competitive video game matches, which SBC treats as a category family of its own). Betway Canada won "Esports Bookmaker of the Year" in 2018 and then "Esports Operator of the Year" in 2019, both of them to the brand itself and both recorded on the body's own pages.

Then the shapes start to differ, and the differences are the entire point of writing them out one at a time. In 2020 the brand reached the "shortlist" in that same category and 1xBet took the category itself (a different operator, on a different licence), which is the one year in six when the sequence breaks.

We read that year on the body's own shortlist page, where the five finalists are still listed under the heading. The wins of 2021, 2022 and 2023 in that heading were credited to the group instead of to the Canadian site, the first two recorded in the trade press and the third on the body's own page.

A second brand appears twice in 2019, and neither of those entries is what a badge would lead you to expect. Videoslots was commended for "Casino Operator of the Year" without winning it (a notch below the top line of the body's own 2019 page), and the word "commended" stands here for one rung under the top. "Leader of the Year, Casino" that same year went to Alexander Stevendahl (founder and chief executive, and not the website our readers would visit).

The sequence then ends for a reason that has nothing to do with the brand, and we prefer to name it rather than let the run trail off: in 2026 that category is gone, and the thirty-nine headings carry a single esports award, "Esports Supplier of the Year", taken by a supplier. So this one body produced a win to a brand, a shortlisting, three wins to a group, a commendation and a win to a named person, which is five different statements wearing one word. Five shapes, one ceremony. A careless sentence flattens all five into "winner"!

"Betway won the SBC Esports Operator of the Year 2026"

That category no longer exists in 2026. The thirty-nine categories of the edition hold one esports award, "Esports Supplier of the Year", won by Oddin.gg, which is a supplier category. Betway's run, from 2018 to 2023, closes with the category itself. Check it.

The check, which runs backwards from the shortlist

Open the shortlist before the winners, because that order is the thing which protects you from the commonest error on this particular body. If your brand is on the shortlist page and absent from the winners page you are holding a "finalist" and not a champion; if it is on the winners page, read the line beside the name to see whether the group, a sister site or a person actually collected the thing. For this body the line to watch is "Esports Operator of the Year", which changed recipient halfway through its own winning run.

Then ask the question these categories cannot answer, which is what any of it says about the way an operator behaves towards a player who disagrees with the house. Nothing in a thirty-nine category evening speaks to a regulator's register (the public record of fines, warnings and conditions), and on this site the two records are kept well apart and printed separately, each carrying the date we read it. We could not find a single award category, at any body in our eleven, that takes account of one. That separation is the habit worth taking away!

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