How We Test Poker Rooms and Casinos
No poker room or casino gets a full review on this site until someone here has opened an account, deposited their own money and played on it.
This page sets out how that testing works. It covers who runs the tests, which operators we agree to cover, what we check on a poker room, what we check on a casino, and where the limits of that testing are.
There are things we do not test, and operators where parts of the process do not apply. Those are stated here rather than left out, because a methodology that only describes its strengths is not much use to anyone deciding whether to trust it.
VIP-Grinders has been publishing since 2013 and earns money through affiliate commission. How that works, and what it does and does not change, is covered at the bottom of this page and in more detail on our about us page.
Who Runs the Tests
Three people do the hands-on work. Writing and testing are separate jobs here, so the name on a review is the person who wrote it, which is not always the person who opened the account.
| Who | Role | What they do on operator testing |
|---|---|---|
| João Mourato | Head of iGaming Product | Opens most of the accounts and runs the testing personally. In iGaming since 2014, including professional sports betting and operations roles on both the sportsbook and casino side |
| Kirill Seregin | Contributing Writer and Tester | Cashier testing and casino verification, working through deposits, withdrawals and payment method behaviour |
| Marton Kovalovszki | Support and Testing | Funded account testing and cashier checks. A former poker player, which is why he is the one judging whether a payout arrives when it should |
Marton does not have an author page because he does not write the reviews, and author pages here are for bylines. You can see who writes what on our authors page.
Which Operators We Cover
We do not review everything. An operator has to clear three things before anyone here opens an account.
- Player safety. A verifiable licence, a payment record with no pattern of unexplained delays or confiscations, and terms that do not give the operator open-ended discretion to void winnings.
- Liquidity. For poker rooms, enough traffic at the stakes a reader will actually play. A room with a good rakeback deal and no games at your level is worth nothing to you.
- Game quality. A game selection worth playing, and for poker rooms, a player pool that is not entirely made up of professionals.
An operator that fails any of these does not get covered. Where one fails after we have already published, the review says so rather than quietly disappearing.
Our Testing Process, Step by Step
Every review starts the same way, whether the operator is a poker room or a casino.
From that point the checks split. What makes a poker room worth playing is not what makes a casino worth playing, so the two are judged on different things.
How We Judge a Poker Room
Poker rooms are judged on what a player actually keeps. A headline rakeback percentage is a marketing number, and the figure that matters is what lands back in the account after the room’s own conditions have been applied.
| What we check | How we measure it | What makes it fail |
|---|---|---|
| Effective rakeback | Value returned against rake generated over a full period in a funded account | The real figure lands materially below the advertised headline rate |
| Rake structure | The percentage and the cap at the stakes a reader will play, not the best case | The headline is only reachable at stakes almost nobody plays |
| How rewards are released | Whether the rate is fixed or requires climbing tiers, and whether unclaimed value expires | Rewards expire, reset, or need volume a normal player cannot reach |
| Bonus release rate | Rake required to release each unit of bonus, and the window to do it in | The window makes the bonus unclaimable in practice |
| Traffic and games | Player numbers at the stakes and formats a reader wants, checked against SharkScope data | Games do not run at the advertised stakes outside peak hours |
| Software and tool policy | What tracking software and HUDs are permitted, and whether the policy is enforced consistently | The policy is unclear, or applied to some players and not others |
A room can pass every one of these and still be wrong for a specific player. Someone playing two tables an hour and someone putting in fifty thousand hands a month want different things from the same room, so the reviews state who a deal suits rather than declaring a single best.
If you want the mechanics behind these numbers rather than how we judge them, we explain the concept in rakeback explained, and you can run your own figures with the rakeback calculator. The rooms themselves are covered in our poker room reviews.
How We Judge a Casino
Casinos are judged on whether the money comes back out and what a bonus really costs to clear. A welcome offer is worth whatever remains after the wagering requirement, the game weighting and the maximum bet clause have all been applied to it.
| What we check | How we measure it | What makes it fail |
|---|---|---|
| Licence and jurisdiction | The licence number verified against the regulator’s own register, and which markets it actually covers | The licence cannot be found on the register, or does not cover the market the casino accepts players from |
| The cashier | Deposit and withdrawal methods, minimums, fees and how long a payout takes in practice | Fees or limits are not disclosed before you deposit, or payouts run well past the stated window |
| Cost of clearing a bonus | Turnover requirement calculated from the terms, then what it costs to meet at the game weighting the terms allow | A maximum bet clause, a short window or heavy weighting makes the offer unclearable in practice |
| House edge and RTP | Published figures per game type, and whether the same figures apply while a bonus is active | RTP is not published anywhere, or the version running under bonus play is lower |
| Game library | Whether the advertised providers and titles are actually present and playable from the markets covered | Headline providers are missing, or blocked in the markets the casino markets itself to |
| Provably fair verification | Whether we can change the client seed, retrieve the server seed and verify a past result ourselves | The verification tool does not exist, or a result cannot be reproduced from the seeds given |
The last row applies to crypto casinos rather than every operator. A casino running third party slots relies on the provider’s own certification instead, and the reviews say which of the two applies.
Many operators run a casino and a sportsbook on the same account. Where that is the case, the cashier, verification and licence checks cover both, and the review says so.
The concepts behind these checks have their own pages. We cover what an operator keeps in house edge explained, how turnover requirements work in wagering requirements explained, and the seed and hash mechanism in provably fair gambling. The operators themselves are in our casino reviews.
What We Do Not Test
Every methodology page lists what a site checks. Far fewer list what they do not, which is the part that tells you how much weight to put on the rest.
None of this is a reason to distrust the reviews. It is the opposite. A page that claims everything has been tested is making a claim nobody can check, and this one tells you exactly where the evidence stops.
How Often We Go Back
We do not run a fixed re-testing schedule, and we are not going to claim one. VIP-Grinders is a small team, and a promise to re-test everything monthly would be a promise we could not keep.
What we do instead is re-check when something changes. These are the triggers:
- The offer changes. A rakeback rate, a bonus amount or a set of terms moves, whether the operator announces it or not.
- The rewards system is rebuilt. Rooms replace loyalty schemes regularly, and a rebuild can change what a player earns more than a headline rate ever does.
- Players tell us something is wrong. A pattern of the same complaint from different people is the strongest signal we get, and it is usually earlier than anything we would find ourselves.
- Payments slow down or stop. This is the one that ends coverage rather than updating it.
- The operator rebrands, moves licence or changes owner. Any of the three can change how an account is treated.
Every review carries its publication date, and the date of the last update where there has been one. If that date is old, or there is no update date at all, that tells you something real, and it is more use to you than a claim about how often we say we check things.
Bonus terms change without notice and rakeback structures get rebuilt with no announcement. Where a page is behind, we would rather you could see that than have it hidden behind a schedule we do not keep.
When an Operator Fails
The test of any methodology is what happens when an operator we already recommend stops being worth recommending.
Duelbits is the clearest example. Payments became unreliable, and once that was established we could not keep recommending it. The page now opens with this:
“Due to ongoing payment issues, we can no longer recommend Duelbits Casino.”
Notice shown to every visitor on our Duelbits page
We could have deleted that page instead. Deleting it would have been better for us and worse for you, because people search for Duelbits and land somewhere, and if that somewhere is not us it is a page with no warning on it at all.
So the page stays and carries the warning. The same applies to any operator that fails after we have published: the page is marked rather than removed, because a player who is already signed up needs the information more than a player who is not.
When We Get Something Wrong
We publish a lot of numbers, so some of them will be wrong. Rakeback rates move, bonus terms get rewritten, and a page that was right in March can be misleading by June.
If you find something that does not match what you see in your own account, tell us through our contact page. A player inside a live account can see things we cannot, and that is usually how we find out first.
What happens next is that we check it against the operator’s own terms, correct the page if you are right, and note the change on the page where the correction is material. Quietly editing a number and hoping nobody noticed is not a correction.
Our editorial guidelines cover how we research, write and maintain content in more detail.
What Commission Changes, and What It Does Not
There is one revenue stream here. When you sign up to an operator through our link or code, that operator pays us, either a share of what you generate over time or a fixed fee for the signup. It costs you nothing, and it is why the deals we negotiate are better than the ones you would get registering direct.
Commercial terms decide where an operator appears. Some operators hold featured or promoted positions under an agreement, which is standard across the industry, and we disclose it rather than claiming every list is purely editorial.
Here is what those terms do not decide:
- What a review says. If a bonus fails to credit or a cashier runs slow, it goes on the page whatever the commercial arrangement is.
- Whether an operator stays. A deal does not protect anyone. Payment problems end coverage regardless of what the operator is worth to us.
- What we tell you to avoid. The warnings on this site sit on pages we earn from, which is the only real test of whether a disclosure means anything.
The strongest argument we can make on this is not a promise. It is the research we publish, including survey work on gambling losses and the monthly online poker traffic report, none of which sells anything to anyone.
FAQs
Do you really open accounts and deposit your own money?
Yes. Every poker room and casino we publish a full review of has been signed up to with a real account and real money, not a demo account and not a screenshot from an operator’s affiliate pack. We use the same link and the same bonus code a reader would use, so we see the offer exactly as it lands.
Who does the testing at VIP-Grinders?
Three people. João Mourato opens most of the accounts and runs the testing personally. Kirill Seregin handles cashier testing and casino verification. Marton covers support and funded account testing, and is a former poker player. The name on a review is the person who wrote it, which is not always the person who opened the account.
Do you test withdrawals at every operator?
No. We have completed withdrawals at some of the operators we cover and not at all of them, and we are working through the rest. Where a payout has not been tested, the review does not claim that it has.
How often do you update your reviews?
We do not run a fixed re-testing schedule. We re-check when something changes, such as an offer moving, a rewards system being rebuilt, players reporting the same problem, payments slowing down, or an operator rebranding or changing licence. Every review carries its publication date, and the date of the last update where there has been one, so you can see for yourself how current a page is.
Does commission affect what you write?
Commercial terms decide where an operator appears, and some operators hold featured or promoted positions under an agreement. They do not decide what a review says, whether an operator stays on the site, or what we warn you about. If a bonus fails to credit or a cashier runs slow, it goes on the page whatever the arrangement is.
Have you ever stopped recommending an operator?
Yes. Duelbits was dropped over ongoing payment issues and the page now carries a notice withdrawing our recommendation. We mark those pages rather than deleting them, because a player who has already signed up needs that information more than a player who has not.