Our Review Methodology
Most casino review sites publish a welcome offer copied from an operator's global homepage — the one nobody in Ireland is actually shown. Everything on this site is read off the Irish-facing version of each site instead. This page sets out exactly what we check, what we deliberately do not publish yet, and what puts a casino off the list no matter what it pays us.
The principle
A casino review is only worth reading if the figures in it are the figures you will actually see. Most are not. The welcome bonus quoted on an affiliate site is usually lifted from whichever version of the operator's homepage the writer happened to load, and the version served to an Irish visitor is frequently a different offer — or, in one case on our list, an offer that only appears once you open the bonus selector.
So the rule we work to is narrow and, we think, more useful than a broad one we cannot keep: we publish what the screen showed us, and nothing else. Where the screen showed nothing, the gap stays visible on the page.
The four steps, every casino, in the same order
Open the site from Ireland
Not a VPN-flattened global version — the pages an Irish visitor is served.
Capture the offer
We screenshot the welcome exactly as presented, whether it is on the homepage, the registration form or buried in a bonus selector, and publish that figure rather than a tidier one.
Record the cashier and the lobby
Every payment logo the site actually displays, and which games it pushes to Irish visitors. Where a site shows no payment list before sign-up, we say so instead of assuming.
Mark what is missing
Offer not shown, operator not named, licence not found, site unreachable — each is stated plainly on the casino's entry rather than quietly filled in.
How the running order is decided
Since there is no score, the order is editorial judgement rather than arithmetic, and we would rather say that than dress it up as a formula. What goes into it: how substantial the offer actually shown to Irish players is, whether the site displays a payment mix that works from Ireland, whether it bothers to localise for this market at all, and how much of itself it is willing to show before you hand over an email address.
What does not go into it: what any operator pays us. Two casinos on the list show Irish players an identical package, and we say so on both entries rather than letting them occupy two separate slots as if they were independent choices.
What disqualifies a casino outright
Some findings are not a scoring deduction. They remove a casino from the site regardless of its other qualities or its commercial terms:
A withheld payout
If a legitimate withdrawal is refused or indefinitely stalled without a defensible reason, nothing else matters.
No verifiable licence
We need to be able to check the licence exists and is current. An unverifiable claim is treated as no licence.
Terms that make winning impossible
Maximum-win caps set so low that the advertised bonus cannot pay out meaningfully.
Retroactive term changes
Altering the conditions of a bonus after a player has accepted it.
Obstructive verification
Verification demands that escalate specifically when a withdrawal is requested, rather than at account level.
How money changes hands, and what it doesn't change
We earn affiliate commission when a reader opens an account through our links, at no cost to the reader. That is how the research gets funded.
What that funding does not do is set the order or the wording. Commission rates differ between operators and if we ranked on them the list would look different. The specific commitments we hold ourselves to:
- Commercial terms are never an input to a ranking position.
- A casino that fails a disqualifying check is removed regardless of what it pays.
- We do not accept payment for a specific position or for favourable wording.
- Every page carrying affiliate links says so, in the footer, on every page.
- Where we have not checked something, we say we have not checked it rather than repeat the operator's claim.
That last point is the one we would ask you to hold us to. Every figure on this site can be traced back to a screen we captured. Where something is unverified, it is marked as such rather than filled in with a plausible number — and the two casinos we could not open from Ireland carry no offer, no screenshot and no write-up at all.
When we check again
A welcome offer is not a fixed property of a casino. Operators rotate packages, change the figure by market, and occasionally drop an offer entirely — so a bonus quoted six months ago is close to worthless, which is most of what is wrong with the lists this one is competing against.
So we re-check periodically, and out of cycle when something prompts it: a change in ownership or licensing, a pattern of reader reports, a shift in the terms, or a site that starts or stops serving Ireland. The site-wide date in the bar at the top of every page tells you when the lineup was last looked at as a whole.
Reader reports
What we can see from the outside has a hard limit: an offer screen tells you what is promised, not what happens after you deposit. Your own experience is the part we cannot capture, and where the two disagree we want to know — a consistent pattern of reader reports is one of the triggers that sends us back to a casino. If your experience does not match what we have published, tell us.
We do not publish user ratings, and that is a deliberate choice. Unverified rating widgets on affiliate sites are trivially gameable and tend to say more about who has an incentive to fill them in than about the casino. We would rather publish a small number of things we have actually seen.
Over a decade of combined experience in online gambling and payments. Every review is written and checked by hand. See how we work →