How we rate casinos

The formula

Each casino is scored from 0 to 10 on five pillars. The overall score is the weighted mean of those five numbers, rounded to one decimal place. That is the whole calculation — there is no adjustment afterwards.

We publish the pillar scores on every review page alongside the overall, so you can check the arithmetic and, more usefully, disagree with our weighting. A player who only cares about live dealer should mentally re-weight the catalogue pillar upwards and read the list differently. We would rather give you the components than ask you to trust a single number.

What each pillar measures

Rand handling — 25%

What we look at: Whether the account holds rand from deposit to withdrawal, or whether your money is converted on the way in and again on the way out.

Why it carries this weight: A conversion spread of two to three percent each way costs more over a year of play than almost any bonus difference gains you, and it is invisible because it never appears as a fee. This is the single biggest hidden cost in South African online casino play, which is why it carries the joint-heaviest weight.

Banking — 20%

What we look at: Which South African payment rails actually work: instant EFT, Ozow, SID, Capitec Pay, FNB eWallet, cards, vouchers.

Why it carries this weight: An operator that only takes cards excludes a large share of South African players outright, and forces everyone else through the slowest rail available. Breadth here is a genuine measure of whether a site was built for this market or merely accepts it.

Payouts — 25%

What we look at: How long withdrawals take to clear, what the caps are, and how the verification process behaves in practice.

Why it carries this weight: Getting money out is the only part of the transaction the operator has any incentive to slow down. It is weighted equally with rand handling because a bonus you cannot withdraw is not a bonus.

Catalogue — 15%

What we look at: How many software suppliers are in the lobby, and whether live dealer tables are genuinely available.

Why it carries this weight: Most rand-facing casinos run a single supplier, which caps what you can play regardless of how good the banking is. We weight this lower than money handling because the difference between a good catalogue and a great one matters less than losing three percent on every transaction.

Support — 15%

What we look at: Whether support runs in South African hours, which channels exist, and whether anyone answers them.

Why it carries this weight: It only matters when something has gone wrong — but when something has gone wrong it matters more than everything else on this list combined.

Verifying welcome offers

Bonus figures are the most frequently fabricated numbers in this industry. Comparison sites copy them from each other, the original was often wrong, and nobody re-checks. We do not publish a figure unless we loaded it ourselves.

Our process is deliberately dull. We follow the sign-up link exactly as a player would, land where the player lands, and read what that page says. If it says 150% up to R1,000, we print 150% up to R1,000 and record the date. If the page is geo-blocked, dynamic, or resolves somewhere unexpected, we print no figure and explain the gap on the review page.

6 of our 9 ranked casinos currently carry a verified figure. The remaining 3 do not. We consider that gap a feature of the method, not a failure of it.

What we do not score

We do not publish return-to-player percentages for casinos. RTP is set per game by the software supplier, not by the operator, and a site-wide "96.4% payout" figure is not a measurable property of a casino — it is a marketing number. You will find those figures on most comparison sites. You will not find them here.

We also do not count games. Catalogue size is trivially inflated by counting regional variants of the same title, and a lobby of 300 well-chosen slots beats 2,000 duplicates. We score the number of suppliers and whether live dealer genuinely exists, because those are the things that change what you can actually play.

Conflicts of interest

Casino Insider earns commission when a reader opens an account through a partner link. Every such link is labelled on the page it appears on and carries rel="sponsored" in the markup.

The safeguard against that money distorting the rankings is structural rather than a promise: the score is computed from published components and the components are printed next to it. Our directory marks every brand we earn nothing from, so the boundary of our commercial relationships is visible rather than asserted.

What we do when we have no link

Most operators marketed at South African players have no affiliate programme we can reach. We review them anyway — but we have nothing to link, so the call to action on those pages opens Hollywoodbets instead.

That is a commercial choice and we are not going to dress it up as a public service. What we will not do is disguise it: the button says "Play at Hollywoodbets instead", the note beside it states in bold that it does not open the brand being reviewed, and the review itself says we earn nothing from that operator. The industry norm is to make the same substitution silently. The substitution is not the problem — the silence is.