The rules these pages are written under

The blank-field rule

An empty field means we did not read it. Never that it does not exist, never zero, never no limit.

This is not politeness but a guard against the easiest mistake in this industry. An unpublished payout limit read as the absence of a limit converts missing information into an operator’s selling point, and missing information is exactly what a reader deserves warning about.

The rule cuts the other way too, and there it hurts more. An operator whose country exclusions we failed to read is not an operator that leaves Poland off them. A player reading that blank as consent would learn the truth at the first withdrawal.

How much could actually be read

The set behind the table on the home page holds 100 brands. Field coverage across it looks like this:

• licence number — 67 brands;
• identity clause — 48 brands, of which 5 state an actual threshold figure;
• list of excluded countries — 38 brands, with Poland on 11 of those lists;
• list of supported coins — 30 brands;
• payout limit — 14 brands.

Not one of those numbers is complete, and none pretends to be.

We publish them together precisely so the proportions show. A site displaying a full set of data for a hundred brands in every column either read a hundred contracts in a day or supplied some of the figures itself. Our table has blanks in those places, and the difference is one of method rather than of diligence. What stands in the clauses we did read is unpacked on the page about operator documents.

A brand is not an operator, and we count both

All the figures above concern brands, meaning the names services trade under. A name is not an entity, though, and in this industry the two come apart visibly.

A licence number is quoted by 67 brands. Distinct numbers among them come to 52.

Nine entries serve several sites apiece, 24 brands between them. We could read the name of the company an entry was issued to in 42 cases, and six of those companies stand behind fifteen brands: one runs five services, the other five run two apiece.

Two figures therefore describe the same market and both are true.

That is why every proportion here says what its denominator is. “Eleven out of thirty-eight” refers to country lists that were read, not to eleven independent firms: four of those eleven brands belong to a single company. A compilation that fails to separate the two shows a market broader than the real one, and it does so without a single false number.

The same caution runs in the other direction. We do not claim that brands whose company name we could not read are independent, because we did not check that. All we know is how many entries could be joined up, and that is the figure we give.

Three findings that first looked like our own mistake

Each of the three below looked, on first reading, like an error in our own file, and each turned out to be the state of things. We describe them because they show what checking looks like, rather than showing a result.

The same amount four times. Four of the five operators that publish a verification threshold at all wrote in 2,500 units. It looked like a copied row. It was not: three of those entries sit in clause 6.6, the fourth in clause 11.4, and two currencies are involved, euro and dollar. Two of the three documents belong to one company, and that is the real cause of the coincidence.

One number under three brands. An entry repeating across three rows looked like a duplicated record. In the register, though, there is one entry and three brands, because what gets registered is a company.

Valid in the footer, revoked in the register. The discrepancy looked like a stale register page. The status comes from a register field, however, and the stale item is the site footer. In such cases the body that issued the document always wins.

The shared lesson of the three is one: a discrepancy gets checked at the source before anyone calls it a typo of their own.

Where each document came from

A set of terms is sometimes available, sometimes moved, and sometimes not reachable at all, and those are not the same state of affairs.

Of the 100 brands, 37 sets of terms were read directly from the operator’s own site, 41 from an archived copy of the document, and 22 could not be reached by either route. A brand in the third group has nothing but blanks in the table and stays in the set as an unread entry rather than as an operator with no conditions.

An archived copy is, by construction, older than the day of reading.

A stricter rule therefore applies to a figure from such a source than to one taken from the operator’s live site: it records what the terms said when the copy was made. The operator may have changed them since and owes nobody a warning. Checking at the source, before depositing, stays with the reader, and no table replaces it.

What you will not find here

No ranking, no star ratings, no visitor counter, no countdown, and no notice about how many people are looking at this page right now. Not one instruction for getting past any block, including the kind phrased as advice against doing so.

And no figure from a document we did not open.

Sentences of the sort “we tested”, “the payout arrived in two hours” or “we checked with our own money” do not appear, because they would be untrue. We hold an account with no operator.

Why no bonus amount appears anywhere

Bonus is a field our set does not hold at all. Not at some of the brands: at none of the hundred.

A bonus amount does not come from a contract in the way a verification threshold or a payout limit does. It sits in promotional material, changes from week to week, differs by country and by the route taken onto the site. A clause number under which anyone could verify it is usually missing.

A figure with no address in a document reaches none of our tables, and this is the purest example of that.

Why there are almost no screenshots

A photograph of a casino’s front page proves nothing that these pages assert.

What we assert concerns clause 6.6, a list of countries and the status of a register entry. A lobby full of animated slots contains none of that, so as evidence it is decoration. Decoration standing where evidence should be is worse than a gap, because it looks like confirmation.

A screenshot therefore appears here only where it settles something by itself: beside the domain register and beside the text of the statute, two state documents.

Everywhere else, instead of a picture, there is an address where a reader will see the same thing and a clause number to look under. That is a longer road than glancing at an image, and the only one that ends in a check.

What happens when we get something wrong

An erratum stays visible. A wrong sentence does not quietly disappear. A correct sentence replaces it, and a dated note about the change stands beside it.

One such mistake has already cost us a result. We looked for Poland on the lists of excluded countries by searching for the word Poland, and part of those lists is written in two-letter codes, so the search found nothing and a list looked clean. Only a second pass, searching for the code PL, produced the true figure of eleven operators.

The rule that came out of it: the tool used for checking is part of the finding.

The same rule applied to government pages. A service can answer an ordinary network request with an error and open perfectly in a browser, and a conclusion drawn from the first result would be false. That is why a statement about availability here says what it was checked with, and not only what we saw.

What this site is

Not an operator. Not a government page, not a mirror of any casino, with no login form and no password field.

It runs no ranking and awards no stars.

Row order in the table is not a judgement of an operator’s quality and has no bearing on the contents of the columns. Every figure in them comes from a document that opens in a tab alongside, and it reads the same whichever row it sits in. If anything outside a document could change that figure, the rest of this would lose its point.

A date of reading stands beside every quotation from a provision, because law changes. Which version of the provisions about the player we read, and on which day, is given on the page about what the statute says.

Where to find help

Krajowe Centrum Przeciwdziałania Uzależnieniom, the National Centre for Addiction Prevention, runs a free helpline on 801 889 880, daily from 17.00 to 22.00, weekends included. The Centre also runs a service about behavioural addictions at uzaleznieniabehawioralne.pl, which describes how to reach free therapy. It is a state institution, not an operator and not a comparison site.

Anyone holding an account and a dispute with an operator has no Polish authority to settle the matter for them, because an operator with no Polish permit falls under no Polish supervision.

That is one of the real consequences of the divide described on the page about where the lawful online casino stands. The other is that everything a player can do in this situation is done before the deposit rather than after it: read the verification clause, check the country list, search the domain in the register. The first of those three is unpacked on the page about casinos without identity checks.