How We Test Casinos

Last updated: 26 April 2026 · By: Oliver Smith, Senior iGaming Editor

Every casino review on this site comes out of a hands-on test. Not a desk-research write-up, not a rewritten press kit, not a summary of what other reviewers said. We open an account, we put real money in, we activate the bonus, we play through it, we ask awkward questions to the support team, and we request a withdrawal. The protocol below is the one we follow on every single review, and it takes between three and ten working days per casino depending on how the operator handles KYC and payouts.

Why this much work? Because the gap between a casino's marketing copy and a player's actual experience is the thing we exist to close. A welcome bonus that says "instant credit" can take six hours to appear. A "24-hour withdrawal" can mean four hours by Skrill and four working days by bank transfer. A "fully licensed" casino can be holding a sub-licence that does not actually cover UK players. Reading the small print is necessary; only testing reveals the rest.

Who runs the tests

The author writing the review carries out the test personally — usually Oliver, occasionally one of the freelance contributors who specialise in a sub-area (live dealer, mobile UX, crypto payments). Tests are not delegated to outside writers working from second-hand notes. The reviewer keeps a private spreadsheet for each test with timestamps, screenshots, support transcripts and balance changes; that document is the source for the review and for the rating spreadsheet that backs the How We Rate system. The full set of editorial standards behind the testing — what gets published, what does not, how corrections are handled — sits on Editorial Policy.

Test deposits come from the editorial budget (which is, in practice, the team's own bank accounts, reimbursed against affiliate revenue). We do not accept "press accounts", "test credentials" or any pre-funded balance from operators — those are usually fast-tracked and unrepresentative of what a regular player encounters at registration.

Stage 1 — Pre-test analysis

Before any money goes in, we check the operator on paper.

If the pre-test surfaces a hard fail — no valid licence for UK players, an open Commission action, a complaint pattern that suggests systematic player harm — the review either does not happen or is reframed as a warning rather than a recommendation.

Stage 2 — Registration

We register a fresh account from scratch on the device the typical player would use — usually a 2024 iPhone SE for the mobile-first test, occasionally a desktop browser when the desktop experience is meaningfully different. The reviewer uses real personal details. Stopwatch on the phone for the timing.

What we measure: total time from "Sign up" click to confirmation email; number of mandatory fields; clarity and visibility of bonus opt-in; presence and prominence of responsible-gambling tooling at registration (this matters more than people realise — limit-setting offered at the start is far more often used than limit-setting buried three menus deep); cookie banner behaviour and consent granularity.

What we record: screenshots of every screen, the exact wording of any pre-ticked checkbox, any dark patterns in the funnel.

Stage 3 — KYC and verification

Every UKGC-licensed casino must verify identity before play under the LCCP rules; offshore operators usually verify before the first withdrawal rather than before the first deposit. We submit standard documents — passport, driving licence, recent utility bill — and time the response.

What we measure: time from document upload to verification approval; clarity of what was needed; whether the operator asked for excessive documentation (we have seen casinos request bank statements covering six months for a £20 deposit, which is disproportionate); whether source-of-funds requests were proportionate to the deposit volume; how rejections were communicated when they happened.

A rejected KYC document with no explanation is one of the clearer signals that an operator is poorly run. We note it.

Stage 4 — Deposit and bonus activation

The standard test deposit is £20-£50 — small enough that we are not exposing the editorial budget to outsized losses, large enough that the deposit triggers any low-tier-deposit handling the casino has. We deposit through at least two payment methods if the casino offers more than one for UK players: typically a card (Visa) and an e-wallet (Skrill or Neteller).

What we measure: deposit speed (instant or delayed); presence of fees on the player side (there should not be any in 2026 at any reputable UK-facing operator); bonus credit timing; minimum deposit thresholds vs. what the homepage advertised; clarity of bonus terms displayed at the cashier.

The bonus is activated through the operator's intended path — usually opt-in on the deposit screen or activation in the profile area — and we record exactly how visible the activation step was. Bonuses that activate by default with no clear opt-out are a red flag; bonuses that require a four-step process to activate are a friction point worth noting.

Stage 5 — Gameplay and wagering

This is the longest stage of the test. We play through the bonus or a substantial portion of it, recording everything that matters.

For the Fortunica Casino review specifically, I ran the wagering test across four evening sessions of 30-45 minutes each on £1-£2 stakes, mostly on Book of Dead and Gonzo's Quest — both 100%-weighted slots. The bonus balance counter ticked down in real time in the account header, which is the right answer; I checked it at random intervals to confirm the operator wasn't batching updates. One small thing I noticed and noted: the wagering progress display lagged by about 7-12 seconds after particularly fast spin sequences. Not a problem, but the kind of detail that goes into the testing sheet because it is the kind of detail readers occasionally ask about.

Stage 6 — Withdrawal

This is where casinos sort themselves into "well run" and "not". We request a withdrawal in two payment methods — typically the same e-wallet we deposited with, plus a card or bank transfer — and time the full cycle.

What we measure: time from withdrawal request to processing; time from processing to funds in the player's account; presence and reasonableness of any verification step at withdrawal; fees on the player side (there should not be any from a reputable operator); minimum withdrawal thresholds; weekend and bank-holiday handling.

For Fortunica Casino, the Skrill withdrawal I requested at 17:42 on a Tuesday cleared at 23:00 the same evening — 5 hours 18 minutes door-to-door, which is genuinely fast for a UK-facing operator. I screenshotted the request timestamp, the "processing" notification at 19:14, and the Skrill credit confirmation. The same withdrawal method through a poorly-run casino can take 72 hours or longer; the worst I have personally recorded was eleven working days via international bank transfer at a Curaçao operator I would not recommend to anyone. Honestly, withdrawal speed is one of the few signals you cannot fake from marketing copy.

Stage 7 — Customer support

We contact support twice during the test — once with a deliberately straightforward question (bonus terms clarification) and once with a deliberately awkward one (something around responsible gambling, account limits, or a borderline bonus interpretation). The point is to test the support agent's depth, not just their speed. For the Fortunica review, my live-chat queue time was 1 minute 42 seconds at 14:30 on a weekday; the agent's first substantive answer arrived 38 seconds after the greeting. The awkward question — about whether a deposit limit could be reduced mid-bonus without forfeiting the bonus — got a correct, T&C-cited answer on the second exchange. Out-of-hours response on the same chat queue at 02:15 was slower at around 4 minutes, which is reasonable.

What we measure: live-chat queue time; agent's first-response time once connected; quality of answer (factually correct? confidently delivered? cross-referenced to the actual T&Cs?); willingness to escalate when the question requires it; out-of-hours coverage. Email support is tested in parallel with the same questions; a 24-48 hour email turnaround is the modern minimum.

What we record: full chat transcripts and email threads. They go into the testing notes verbatim and excerpts make it into the review where they illuminate something the prose alone would not.

Stage 8 — Mobile, security and post-test review

The mobile test runs in parallel with the rest of the protocol on the phone we registered with. We also spot-check the experience on Android (typically a Pixel device). What we look at: native app vs. mobile web parity, biometric login support, mobile cashier usability, live dealer stream quality on mobile, performance on slower 4G connections. The RG toolkit is checked here too — visibility of deposit limits in the cashier, accessibility of self-exclusion controls, signposting to GamCare and BeGambleAware. The full set of player-protection criteria we verify is on Responsible Gambling.

The security spot-check covers: TLS version (1.3 expected in 2026), HSTS enforcement, security headers (CSP, X-Frame-Options, Referrer-Policy), session-cookie attributes (Secure, HttpOnly, SameSite), 2FA availability for player accounts. SSL is the old name for the protocol; "TLS" is correct in 2026 — operators still calling it "256-bit SSL" usually have not updated their security copy in years.

Post-test, the reviewer compiles the notes, screenshots and timing data, and writes the review against the structural template. The 8-criterion rating is calculated from the rubric on How We Rate. Both the review and the rating sheet go to Oliver for sign-off before publication. Anything ambiguous gets re-tested before the review goes live.

Re-test cadence

Reviews are not one-off pieces. We re-test every casino we recommend on a 3-6 month cycle and faster when something material changes — a bonus structure shift, a payment method dropped, a regulator action, a complaint pattern emerging. The "verified" date on each review tells you when the figures were last checked. If you spot a review where the verified date is more than six months old, write to [email protected] and we will move it up the queue.

Limits of the testing

Worth being honest about what the protocol cannot do. We test one account per casino, so we cannot speak to the experience of a high-roller account that has been with the operator for three years. We test on a 3-10 day window, so genuinely slow patterns (a casino that pays fast for the first six months and then starts dragging) are visible only over multiple re-tests. We cannot independently audit RNG outcomes; that is the testing labs' job. And we cannot replicate every edge case a player might hit — the test is representative, not exhaustive.

What the protocol does very well is catch the things that matter to most players most of the time: bonus traps, KYC friction, withdrawal speed, support quality, RG provision, mobile usability. Those are the areas where a bad casino reveals itself, and that is where we focus.

The rating system that turns the testing notes into a number on the review page is documented in detail on How We Rate.