How We Review Casinos and Poker Rooms

This page describes what we check before a site appears on RakeRace, who does the checking, and what makes a site lose its place. We would rather publish a shorter method we actually follow than a longer one we don't.

With our poker partners the evidence is structural rather than anecdotal. We run leaderboards on these rooms every month, which means we see their rake reporting, their prize settlement and their payment timing from the inside, on real player volume — 3,315 paid places across 69 promotions in the last twelve months alone. When a room's reporting drifts or a settlement runs late, we find out because our own players are waiting on it. That record is public on our payouts page.

With casinos, our reviewers hold their own accounts, funded with their own money, opened through the public signup flow with no operator assistance.

Before any site is listed we verify its licence directly in the issuing regulator's register and record the operating company. That block appears on every review. If a licence lapses or is revoked, the recommendation is pulled.

We claim the welcome offers we describe. We check that the advertised match percentage, free spins and rakeback actually arrive, and we read the terms the way a player experiences them: wagering requirements, game weighting, maximum bet during wagering, and withdrawal caps on bonus winnings. If a casino bonus looks generous on the banner and hostile in clause 14, the review says so.

We withdraw from every site we recommend, with our own money, and we document what actually happened: which verification documents were requested, at what point, how long the review took, and whether the stated limits held. What we report is what our reviewer experienced on their own account — we do not publish a payout time we have not personally seen.

We verify the game lobby against the review claims — provider count, table limits, live dealer coverage — and where a site advertises provably fair games, we run the verification ourselves at least once. A bitcoin casino that offers provably fair mechanics but hides the verification tool scores lower than one that makes it obvious.

Each reviewer opens support conversations with real questions — including at least one deliberately awkward one, such as a bonus dispute or a delayed withdrawal query. We record how long the answer took and whether it actually resolved the issue.

Reviews are written by the named reviewers on our team page, and every commercial page is fact-checked by a second person before publication: bonus figures, licence data and payment limits are verified against the operator's current terms on the day of publication. Commercial deals are negotiated by different people from the ones who write and score reviews, so that a commission cannot quietly become a score. Our Why Trust Us page sets out how that separation works.

A site is removed from our recommendations, regardless of commercial relationship, if a verified player payout is refused without a terms-based reason, if its licence lapses or is revoked, if bonus terms change retroactively on active players, or if the operator ceases trading. Removed sites keep their review page, marked clearly as no longer recommended, with the reason and the date — we don't quietly delete the history.

Every review carries the date it was last checked. Poker room deals are verified monthly as part of normal leaderboard operations. Casino reviews are re-checked and the date on the page is the date of a real re-check, not a cosmetic refresh.