How We Rate Casinos — High Payout Online Casinos

We rate casinos on six checks, all of them about what comes back to the player and whether the games are honest. We write our decisions in the first person because they are decisions: we reject a brand that fails one check, we verify each figure ourselves, and we close the question before a review goes live.

1. We verify the licence. We take the number from the casino footer and look it up in the public register at gamingcommission.ca. If it does not match the operator named in the terms, we reject the brand and go no further. Everything else depends on this being genuine.
2. We read the return in the paytable. We open the game info screen and note the stated return of every title we test. We accept 96%+ on slots and recognise up to 99.9% on video poker where a full-pay version is offered. We reject any page that attaches the top figure to slots, because the best slot builds sit nearer 96 to 98 percent.
3. We check the table rules. We sit at a blackjack table and read the payout line. It has to say 3:2, not 6:5. A six-to-five table quietly raises the house edge, and we reject the brand if it runs one by default.
4. We compare studios with their published sheets. We confirm that the lobby holds titles from Pragmatic Play and Games Global, which was formerly Microgaming, and we compare the paytable figures with those studios' own game documents. A mismatch between the two means we ask the casino, and if no answer comes, we drop the title from our testing.
5. We time the withdrawal. We ask for a payout from a funded account and record the minutes between approval and arrival. We compare that with the window on the payments page. New steps added after the request are noted in the review and count against the score.
6. We test the safeguards. We set a deposit limit, a loss limit and a session limit ourselves, then start a time-out. We check that self-exclusion can be found in the account menu. Each brand handles self-exclusion separately, and we say so rather than imply otherwise.

We use a real funded account for every brand. We write each reading down as we take it, the paytable figure, the table rule, the withdrawal time and the number of clicks to each safeguard, and only then do we assign a score. A second editor goes through the record and challenges anything vague before publication.

We are paid a commission when readers register through some of our links. We have set the rule that this money never changes the order of our list. A casino that fails any of the six checks is not listed, whatever the commission. Our readers must be adults of legal age only (19+, or 18+ in AB, MB, QC). See our responsible gaming page for support.