Our Online Casino Blacklist

In the process of providing exhaustive lists and reviews of all the really great online casinos out there, we sometimes come across or hear about casinos that aren't so great. Ones that you should avoid, for one reason or another. These are the casinos that make it onto our online casino blacklist. The ones that we recommend you stay away from.

We go into a lot of detail about what we look for in a really good casino. We play as many as we can, to get an in-depth idea of what they're like for players. We review and rate them, and we highlight the ones that stand out as being particularly good. Our aim is to make sure that our recommendations will give you a rewarding, fulfilling and enjoyable playing experience - and hopefully make you some money as well.

We don't pay a lot of attention to the bad casinos. We feel they're best not discussed. After all, you're not really interested in reading about that - you're after the ones that you can actually have a good experience with. And we should mention that although there are plenty of casinos that don't necessarily offer a top notch experience - the second rate ones, so to speak - this doesn't mean that we discourage you from playing there. These are all still legitimate, decent places to play that are fair and trustworthy. They're just not the best. These are not the casinos we target with our blacklist. We're after the really bad guys. The ones who don't follow through on their promises. Who let players down - or even wilfully cheat them.

Casinos that we advise you to avoid at all costs

How do we identify a blacklisted casino?

We use a combination of our own experience and reports from players and other operators and participants in the online casino industry. Sometimes we will personally experience shoddy treatment while we're playing at a casino for review purposes. Other times we'll get complaints from players that we have referred to a casino.

We're careful to evaluate these experiences and complaints properly. After all, we want to give all the casinos a fair shake. Sometimes there are simply misunderstandings and we don't want to penalise a casino when there has merely been a mistake or a miscommunication from an otherwise reputable operator.

We also look for patterns. Sometimes we'll receive numerous complaints about a particular casino over the course of time. Or we'll try out a casino and find a slew of problems. Problems that the casino doesn't bother to try and solve, or doesn't even communicate with us about at all.

These are the things that get an online casino blacklisted in our book.

What gets a casino blacklisted?

We try to be as rigorous and fair as we can when assessing a casino's behaviour and practices. We need to make sure that we don't erroneously place an otherwise fair casino on our blacklist. So it's the obvious unacceptable crossing of lines or breaches of faith that we look for.

Here are some of the things that get a casino onto our blacklist...

Not paying out winnings

Of course this is the quickest way for an online casino to find itself on our blacklist. It's the cardinal sin; the ultimate betrayal of a players trust.

Let's face it - while people play casino games for enjoyment, for fun, for the thrill of it, at the end of the day they're trying to win money. Goodness knows with the house edge and the odds that we face, it's difficult enough as it is. So when a player does win and the casino refuses to pay out, or finds all kinds of obfuscating reasons to delay paying out for as long as possible, that's completely unacceptable.

Of course there are variations in the payout procedures of the different online casinos. Some of them provide immediate withdrawals. Others require verification steps, like proof of address, before they will pay out. Some of them pay out over a 30-day period. And if a player hits a particularly huge progressive jackpot, some will pay this in instalments. All of these are acceptable parts of the payout process. We don't blacklist casinos for these things.

The ones that are blacklisted are those who simply never pay, using delaying tactics to keep telling you that "the cheque is in the mail" - when ultimately it never arrives. Or they find all kinds of minutiae in their terms and conditions to prevent having to pay out. Of course if those deposit terms or bonus conditions are clearly stated up front, that's another matter. But some casinos go out of their way to hide onerous payout requirements to deliberately create a situation where players are enticed to play, but never have the right grounds to be eligible for payouts.

Spamming

We all hate spam. It clogs up our inboxes and just generally irritates. It's become an absolutely annoying aspect of the communication channels that the Internet creates. There are plenty of ways to go about telling players about promotions, bonus offers and general casino news. The key to this is the opt-in process where you give permission to the casino to market to you. The good casinos adhere to codes of behaviour when it comes to communicating with players. They respect your right to not receive emails if you don't want to. They respond quickly to your request to be removed from their marketing mailing lists. By contrast the casinos that make it onto our blacklist don't do this. They email you whether you have opted in or not. They don't remove you from their mailing lists when you request it. And they just keep spamming you.

Misleading advertising

There are few things more devious than making advertising promises that aren't kept. Or worse - deliberately misleading players into making deposits or playing games or participating in tournaments. One of the most common ways of doing this is to advertise free money bonuses without clearly telling players about the terms and conditions attached to them. Creating the impression that this money is freely available to players when it actually isn't. And then making players go through all kinds of red tape to sort out when they can withdraw winnings that are linked to these bonuses. Or making the wagering conditions impossibly high so that players can effectively never receive their so-called free money.

These are practices that very quickly land an online casino on our blacklist.

Rigged software

True randomness is critical to casino software. Proper random number generators are required to ensure that the games are fair, and produce a statistically correct distribution of winning hands, throws and spins. All reputable online casinos have third-party oversight, vetting and testing to make sure that their games are truly random and thus fair.

The dubious operators don't use proper random number generators. They don't simply rely on the house's statistical edge found in a truly random game. They stack the odds artificially against players by effectively rigging the number generators in the games software.

This can be difficult to ascertain, because even a completely random number generator can throw out anomalies - long losing streaks that seem to defy the odds. But this is a normal part of statistical distributions - you are going to get streaks, both losing and winning.

So we make sure that we can reliably identify that a casino's randomness is not true before we blacklist.