In our minds, reviewing gambling sites and online casinos comes with a lot of responsibility. We want to provide valuable opinions and in-depth analyses of these platforms so that you can feel comfortable when playing and depositing money. In that regard, our in-house evaluation methods and overarching philosophy are very strict. We want to be able to say that all of our reviews are 100% honest and brutally objective so that you can easily find the best online casinos in the UK.
We’re not interested in trends, casino opinions or any other factor that may stop us from achieving objectivity and transparency in our reviews. With that in mind, we wrote this page for you, so that you can see exactly how we operate and approach every new gambling platform we come across.
Our goal is to be completely transparent with our community so that you can rely on our opinion when choosing a platform to play on. We want everyone to know that everything we say is done so with honesty in mind – and in order for us to prove this to our community, this page covers the evaluation criteria and methodology we use when approaching any review and playtest.
We want to point out that these differ drastically depending on the platform in question. Online slot sites are evaluated differently compared to betting sites or online casinos. This is because in order to determine quality, we have to focus on the specifics and evaluate the things that matter to players.
With that in mind, we wanted to create a big summary of our evaluation methods, side-by-side with our philosophy, that applies to all of the different criteria we take into account.
If you’re interested in our specific evaluation criteria, we urge you to check out our subpages, where for each we’ve included the specific methods we followed when determining scores and writing our reviews.
Our Achievement & Award System
Apart from writing reviews and testing platforms, we convey our opinions through our own, in-house, ‘Achievement’ and ‘Award’ systems, which, we believe, help point out certain achievements and allow specific aspects to stand out.
These awards help us highlight the platforms that particularly excel in the aspects we consider important, and below, we’ve provided an explanation for each award:
Personal Favourite
‘Personal Favourite’ awards are given to platforms that we would personally play on based on a variety of reasons. For some, we liked the game selection, and for others, perhaps we liked the convenience regarding payments.
Safe and Secure
We give out these awards to the casinos and platforms that we think are particularly secure and clear about their player protection policies. Many of the platforms we review deserve this, but we felt the need to still create differentiation within our review methods so that you can quickly and reliably see if a platform’s security is above average.
Gaming Hub
This award is given to platforms that have an abundance of high-quality titles or sports on offer that provide varying player experiences. It’s our way of quickly telling players that the platform is suited for everyone since it features a variety of gaming genres.
Fast Payment Processing
As gamblers, we want to be able to manage our funds quickly and easily. This award was created to recognise the gambling platforms that go out of their way to provide fast payment processing.
Multiple Platforms
Playing on multiple gaming platforms is a modern experience that we should all be able to enjoy. We believe that gambling sites that go out of their way to provide compatibility for multiple platforms such as mobile, tablet, browser and client deserve praise. This award was created to recognise that and make that information visible on our reviews.
High-Roller Friendly
Gambling platforms with this award allow high-stakes betting and/or gambling. We encourage players who want to deposit and win big to check out these platforms since they support that type of gameplay.
Generous Bonuses
If you’re looking for outstanding bonus offers on online gambling or betting platforms, look for reviews with this award. We give this to the casinos and betting sites that we believe provide better than average bonuses to new players. When giving out this award, we also consider the platform’s policies on bonuses. There’s no use for a large bonus if you’re required to roll the amount over so much that in the end you lose it all.
Helpful Support
We hold customer support in high regard when reviewing gambling platforms. This reward was created for the platforms that exceed our expectations and go out of their way to provide multiple support channels or have fast response times. We also make sure that the support is actually helpful to players before giving out this award.
User Experience
Our overarching philosophy is based heavily on the importance of the experience players have when gambling. User experiences are what drive the community forward more than anything else, and so in our reviews, we always focus on this ‘metric’ heavily.
Judging the quality of the user’s experience doesn’t come easily. We look at a number of different factors that directly influence this, as well as our own experiences with the platform. It should be noted, however, that what may be considered fun for someone, may not be fun for someone else, and with that in mind, we always note that the opinions we’re sharing are our own.
Sharing our own experiences with the platform is, after all, what the reviews are all about – and besides the technical aspects of a gambling platform, we feel that it’s important for readers to get this ‘human input’ in order to truly appreciate a platform without having to try it themselves.
Casino Policies
Online gambling platforms are known for their intricate policies and complicated terms of service. For us, this means that we take great care when evaluating them so that we can determine if these terms and policies are player-friendly.
Surprisingly, these terms vary drastically from casino to casino, and it is our mission to make them as simple as possible and point out things that we believe unideal for most players.
We cover many areas of interest when analysing a platform’s terms and policies. Mainly, we focus on the policies regarding deposits, withdrawals and bonuses. Bonus policies are especially important for us because we know that many players base their choices on them without being properly introduced to the platform’s rollover requirements.
Game Selection & Quality
Another important element for us is the selection of games and the quality of the software that the platform offers.
When we playtest platforms, we test a plethora of games and game genres to make sure that the player experience is on par with what we, as passionate gamblers, would want to see ourselves.
We believe that the hobby in its ‘online state’ is heavily influenced by the level of quality and gameplay that a platform brings to the table. We want to see well-polished games from reputable developers with provable RNG systems.
Customer Support & Support Channels
Because it’s a critical part of any industry that deals with money in a direct way, like the gambling industry, customer support should be a number one priority for all the parties involved. Players should not tolerate sub par support, and casinos need to do everything in their power to go above and beyond to provide excellent service, not only resolving issues but surpassing expectations.
We have a very strict approach when evaluating customer support. As experienced gamblers, we know how frustrating it can be when a problem arises and you simply can’t get a hold of anyone to resolve the issue.
Multiple support channels are also a must today, and having only email support, in our opinion, shows a lack of dedication towards player convenience.
Licence, History & Background
When evaluating gambling platforms, we also take into consideration the platform’s background, general history and licence. We want to make sure that we only feature and recommend fully licenced operators who make their data publicly available and are as upfront and transparent as possible.
Platforms, RTP & Other Specifics
As we mentioned above, our criteria includes the elements mentioned here, as well as a number of platform-specific criteria that are considered during our reviews, which we haven’t featured here.
Things like ‘Available Slot Types’ for slot sites and ‘Manual Flush Availability’ for online casinos are examples of highly influential criteria. These aspects are taken into account when reviewing specific platforms.
We look at things like mobile availability, high RTPs (where relevant) and a number of different specifics that are highlighted on every subpage where we feature review tables of gambling platforms. The specifics of each criterion are covered on the relevant subpages as well as on the relevant reviews specifically.
By Gamblers for Gamblers!
We hope that this article helped shed light on the way we do things at Stefan’s List. Honesty, transparency and objective critiques are what we are driven by, and with our overall goal of creating a real gambling community, we hope to be the first to say that our reviews are written by gamblers for gamblers.