This page explains how we produce every casino review and ranking on this site, so you can judge whether our conclusions are worth anything. It is deliberately specific: the general version of this page — “our experts test every casino thoroughly” — tells you nothing, and most affiliate sites publish exactly that.
We cover one province. Every brand we review is checked against the iGaming Ontario register, and brands that are not on it are never ranked, whatever they are worth elsewhere.
What we score, and what each score means
Each casino gets five sub-scores out of 5. The sub-scores are judgements, and the paragraphs below say what evidence moves each one. The overall score is not a judgement: it is the weighted average of those five, so a reader who disagrees with one of them can work out what the total should have been.
Game selection and quality
We count the lobby rather than repeat the operator’s figure, and record the split between slots, live tables and table games. An operator that publishes an exact count scores above one that publishes “2,000+”, and well above one that publishes nothing at all. Naming the studios counts too: Luxury Casino names fourteen, and most brands name none.
The reason we count is that the published figures are often wrong. The industry number for Betway, repeated for years including on this site, was two hundred games. The real lobby holds 1,657 — wrong by a factor of eight. 888 Casino runs the error in the other direction: its own app advertises “100+” slots on a catalogue of 1,942.
Payments and withdrawals
The heaviest single factor, because it is the part of the product you feel. We record the published processing time per method, the minimum and maximum, whether there is a pending hold before processing even begins, and whether the banking page agrees with the help centre.
An operator that commits to a number in writing scores above one that says “fast withdrawals”, because the first is accountable and the second is not. Of the 32 registered brands we have reviewed, exactly one publishes a processing target: PlayOJO, at 11 hours. We also mark down contradictions — PointsBet states two different Interac timings on two of its own pages, and 888 Casino quotes up to six business days on a card withdrawal while its app calls cash outs instant.
Mobile experience
Whether there is a real app on both platforms, who publishes it, what it scores in the Canadian stores, and how old a phone it will run on. We check the publisher name against the entity in the register, which is how we found two Ontario store listings that do not cleanly match it. The full method is in our Ontario casino app comparison.
Customer support
Live chat hours, whether a human is reachable before you have an account, published response times for document review, and whether the help centre contradicts the terms. Support is the sub-score where the whole market is weakest, and a brand that answers a specific question with a specific answer stands out more than it should.
Overall experience and trust
Registration and verification friction, how the responsible gambling tools behave in practice, whether the company named on the site matches the entity in the register, and how long the brand has actually operated. This is where a site that overstates its own product loses ground, and where a plain, honest one gains it.
How the five become one score
The overall score is the weighted average of the five sub-scores, rounded to one decimal place. Payments and games carry the most weight because they are the part of a casino you use every session, and support carries the least because it matters most on the rare occasions something goes wrong. The weights are the same for every brand, and we do not adjust them to move a result.
| Sub-score | Weight |
|---|---|
| Game selection and quality | 25% |
| Payments and withdrawals | 25% |
| Overall experience and trust | 20% |
| Mobile experience | 15% |
| Customer support | 15% |
Publishing the weights means you can check us. Multiply the five sub-scores on any review by the figures above and you get the score at the top of that page; if the two ever disagree, the review is wrong and we want to know. It also means two brands can show the same rounded score without being tied, because we rank on the unrounded figure — which is how 888 Casino sits above BetMGM at the top of our ranking when both display 4.4.
Rules we hold ourselves to
- We do not estimate. Where an operator publishes no figure, our tables say not published. Roughly half of this market publishes no withdrawal time at all, and hiding that behind an average would misrepresent it.
- No operator pays for a position. No brand can buy a score, a rank or an inclusion. The ranking is identical whether or not a commercial relationship exists, and we earn money only when a reader chooses to open an account after reading, at no cost to them.
- Unregistered means unranked. Twelve of our 44 reviews cover brands that are not in the iGaming Ontario register. We keep the reviews, because people search for those brands and deserve to know where they stand, but they are never ranked against registered operators. Their score is held at 1.0, which marks a brand that cannot be played legally in Ontario rather than a judgement of the casino itself.
- We re-check the register before every update, because operators join and leave it.
- Corrections are made in place. When a payout time, minimum or catalogue count changes, we change it in the ranking and in the review, rather than leaving two versions of the same fact on the site.
- One fact, one source. Everything we publish traces to the operator’s own pages, the Canadian app store listings, or the register — never to another affiliate’s summary of them.
What we cannot tell you
Being clear about the edge of our method matters as much as describing it.
- Our payout times are the operator’s published figures, not our stopwatch. Where we say 11 hours or five minutes, that is a published commitment we are holding the operator to, not a measurement of your withdrawal.
- Catalogue counts move. Lobbies change weekly. A counted figure is accurate on the day it was counted and drifts afterwards, which is why we date the pages and recount rather than carrying old numbers forward.
- We are not a dispute service. If a registered operator refuses a withdrawal, the escalation path is the operator’s complaints process and then the AGCO — not us.
- Nothing here is financial or tax advice.
Corrections and contact
If a figure on this site is wrong, we would rather hear it from you than leave it up. Operators change minimums, processing times and catalogues without announcing it, and a page that is right in March can be wrong in September. Write to us through the contact page with the page and the figure, and we will check it against the operator’s current published terms and correct it in place.
Who publishes this site, how it is funded and what that funding does not buy are set out on our about page.
The ranking those standards produce is our best online casinos in Ontario, and the app testing that feeds the mobile sub-score is our Ontario casino app comparison.
19+. You must be physically located in Ontario to play. Gambling should be entertainment, not income — free, confidential support is available around the clock from ConnexOntario.