Why Trust RakeRace

Every affiliate site says it is independent. This page is our attempt to make that claim checkable rather than just repeatable — by showing you the rules we operate under, the money trail, and a record you can verify without taking our word for anything.

• Rankings cannot be bought. Positions on our toplists come from the checks described on our How We Test page. If an operator makes a listing conditional on a guaranteed position, we decline the listing.

• Commissions never touch scores. The people who negotiate our commercial deals are not the people who write and score reviews. That separation is the reason the rule is enforceable rather than aspirational.

• Negative findings get published. If a withdrawal is slow, a bonus clause is hostile or support is useless, it goes in the review — including at partners. A review with no drawbacks section does not pass our own editorial check.

• Every commercial link is labelled. See our affiliate disclosure.

Every commercial page goes through three hands before publication: the reviewer who played, the editor who challenges the text, and a fact-checker who verifies every number — bonus figures, wagering requirements, licence numbers, payment limits — against the operator's current terms. When we get something wrong anyway, our corrections policy describes how to report it and what we do about it.

RakeRace has been settling player promotions since 2007. In the twelve months to August 2026 we paid $348,247 to 3,315 leaderboard places across 69 promotions; since launch the cumulative total has passed $1 million to more than 5,000 players. The month-by-month breakdown, with the partner room and the number of paid places for every month, is on our payouts page.

This is the part of our record that cannot be reworded. A review site with no money of its own on the line can describe an operator however it likes; a site that has been paying out its own leaderboards for nineteen years has players who would notice immediately if the numbers were fiction. Every figure traces back to a promotion page that was public before the race started and is still public now that it has settled.

RakeRace earns referral commissions from poker rooms and casinos. That funds the site, the team and the promotions we run. It also creates an obvious conflict of interest, which is exactly why the rules above exist and are written down. The short version of our position: a player who wins a rake race this month and trusts the payout is a player who is still here in five years — that is worth more to us than any single operator's commission.