The rules we hold ourselves to

What counts as a source

For anything specific to an operator — who holds the licence, what it permits, when it started, which domains are on record, whether it is active — we use one source and one source only: the Gambling Commission’s public register of gambling businesses, taken from the Commission’s own published datasets.

For statements about UK gambling rules we use the Commission’s published standards and guidance, and primary legislation on legislation.gov.uk. Where a rule has a commencement date, we cite the date.

We do not treat another comparison or affiliate website as evidence of anything. We do not treat an operator’s marketing as evidence of its regulatory position. If the register and a website disagree, the register wins and we say so.

The three states a claim can be in

• Verified. Supported by a current authoritative source, with the date we checked it recorded.
• Editorial. Our own judgement, built on verified facts and presented as opinion. Match scores, the running order and the assessment prose are all editorial.
• Omitted. Not sufficiently evidenced, and therefore absent. We do not estimate, approximate or reconstruct a plausible figure to fill a gap in a table.

That third category is why you will not find bonus amounts, wagering requirements, minimum deposits, payment methods, withdrawal speeds, support hours, game counts or provider line-ups anywhere on this site.

The match score, in full

The match score is an editorial figure out of 100. It is not awarded by anyone official, it is not a safety rating, and it says nothing whatever about your chances of winning. It measures how closely an operator fits four criteria we chose, all of which are derived from register data. Here is the arithmetic.

Casino record — 40 points

The number of years the remote casino activity has been continuously authorised, divided by fifteen, capped at one, multiplied by forty. Fifteen years is used as the ceiling because it comfortably exceeds the longest record in the current set, so nobody reaches full marks by default.

Casino focus — 20 points

Twenty multiplied by (0.4 + 0.6 ÷ n), where n is the number of authorised remote activities on the licence. A casino-only licensee scores the full twenty; a licensee with four permissions scores eleven.

Product breadth — 20 points

Twenty multiplied by (n − 1) ÷ 3. This is deliberately the mirror image of focus, so a specialist and a generalist are each rewarded for what they are rather than punished twice for the same fact.

Register clarity — 20 points

• Ten points where the domain we link to appears on the register and is marked Active.
• Six points where the licensee has declared an active trading name corresponding to the public brand.
• Four points where the licence is Active with no end date recorded.

Worked example: 888 Casino

The remote casino activity began on 1 November 2014, which is 11.80 years before 20 August 2026. That gives 11.80 ÷ 15 = 0.787, multiplied by 40 = 31.5. The licence carries four remote activities, so focus is 20 × (0.4 + 0.6 ÷ 4) = 11.0 and breadth is 20 × 3 ÷ 3 = 20.0. The domain 888casino.com is on the register and Active (10), the trading name “888” is declared and Active (6), and the licence is Active with no end date (4), giving 20.0. Total: 82.5, published as 82%.

Every operator’s component scores are shown on the comparison page, so you can check the sums.

What the score deliberately ignores

Bonus generosity, game selection, interface quality, payment options and customer service. Not because they do not matter to players — they obviously do — but because we cannot verify them to a standard that would justify turning them into a number. A score built partly on solid data and partly on guesswork is worse than a narrower score built entirely on solid data, because you cannot tell which half you are reading.

Commercial influence, stated honestly

Spin Watch House earns affiliate commission. Commercial relationships determine which operators we are able to feature at all, and that is a real limitation on the comparison: this is a selection, not a complete survey of the licensed market. Anyone claiming otherwise about an affiliate site is not being straight with you.

What commercial arrangements do not do is change the numbers. The scoring inputs are dates and permissions published by the regulator. We cannot make a licence older, add a permission or alter a domain record, and every figure links to the source so a false one would be trivially caught.

Re-checking

Register data is re-read against the Commission’s published datasets and the pages are updated when something has moved. We are not going to advertise a fixed review cycle we cannot guarantee to keep; instead, every page that carries register data states the date it was last checked, so you can judge for yourself how fresh it is. Anything with a stale date should be treated with corresponding caution, and told to us.

A re-check is triggered whenever a reader reports a discrepancy, whenever we add or remove an operator, and whenever we become aware of a licensing change affecting a brand we cover. If an operator’s licence ceases to be active for the casino product, it comes off the site rather than being quietly downgraded.

No invented people, no invented numbers

There are no bylines on this site because inventing an author to make the writing look more authoritative would be a lie about the most basic thing on the page. For the same reason you will find no user review counts, no testimonials, no “operators monitored” totals and no years-of-experience claims. The only counts we publish are ones you can verify by reading the site: five operators, four criteria, and the date of the register check.

Getting it wrong

We will, at some point. When it happens, the corrections process applies: tell us at desk@spinwatchhouse.com, we check it against the register, and we fix it.