The Atlas of Where and How to Play Casino Online, Worldwide.

What This Site Covers

Real-money casinos, sweepstakes casinos and social casinos are treated as three separate things, because only the first is a licensed real-money gambling product. A list of one kind is never mixed with another unless every row in it shows which kind it is. A second distinction matters as much: the companies that build games and the companies that run casinos are licensed separately, so a familiar supplier's name on a site is not a check on the site.

A Licence Is the Test, and a Licence Is Territorial

The most useful single fact about an online casino is who licenses it, and for which market. The Gambling Commission is responsible for issuing personal gambling licences for individuals and gambling operating licences for businesses operating in Great Britain, and it states the territorial limit in one sentence: a gambling licence issued in another country does not permit an operator to provide gambling to consumers in Great Britain. It adds that, in the absence of a valid defence, it is also a criminal offence to advertise unlawful gambling to consumers in Great Britain. Other regulators draw the same boundary from their own side. The Malta Gaming Authority issues a business-to-consumer licence to offer or carry out a gaming service, and separately a business-to-business licence to supply and manage the material elements of a game. Sweden's regulator states that a licence is required when offering gambling for money. Singapore's Gambling Regulatory Authority states that it is unlawful for any person to provide unlicensed remote gambling services in or from Singapore, or from outside Singapore to persons situated in Singapore. A licence held in one of those markets says nothing about any of the others, which is why status has to be read per country and per vertical rather than described as a global licence.

What a Licence Requires, in Checkable Terms

Licensing is worth using as a safety test because the obligations behind it are specific. In Great Britain all gambling products must have been tested by an approved test house before they are released to the market. Once a game has gone live, gambling businesses are required to check the performance of the games they offer, to make sure that the products are fair and achieving the designed Return To Player. The Commission is careful about its own role here: it does not approve games or test results, it requires operators to get the game tested by an approved test house and then submit the game and test report prior to release. Its technical standards require that random number generation and game results be acceptably random, and that games may not falsely display near-miss results. Its testing strategy requires licensees to keep RTP monitoring in place for both under and overpayments. In most cases the minimum legal age for gambling in Great Britain is 18. An account also has to be verified before a withdrawal can be paid, so details that do not match a player's own documents cause problems at exactly the point where they matter most. None of that makes any operator safe in the abstract; it makes a set of claims about an operator checkable, which an unlicensed site does not offer at all. The Michigan Gaming Control Board puts the other side of it: consumers who use illegal sites face the risk of unfair or manipulated games, withheld winnings, misuse of personal and financial data, and no meaningful avenue for dispute resolution.

The Mathematics Does Not Change

Casino games are built to keep a share of the money staked. The Gambling Commission calls it the house edge and defines it as a measure of the percentage that a casino would expect to keep, on average, from each hand or spin, given normal patterns of play. The published return to player figure is the other side of the same number, and the Commission is blunt about how to read it: the percentage is an average achieved over a significant number of game plays and not each time the machine is played. Its own example is that a machine displaying 85% RTP should not lead a player to expect to win an average of 85 pence for every GBP 1 staked in a session. It also states that the odds of achieving a win in the current game remain constant and are not affected by wins or losses in previous games. House edge is a property of a game and its rules. Choosing a licensed operator, a bigger bankroll or a different time of day does not alter it.

Where You Live Decides What Is Available

Where a player lives matters more than anything else on this page. Not every casino accepts customers from every country, and what is licensed in one market may be prohibited in the next, so an operator's standing has to be read market by market rather than as one global ranking.

Affiliate Disclosure

OnlineCasinoSites.com has an affiliate relationship with casino operators listed on this site, and may be paid when a reader opens an account with one of them.

Casino Game Categories

Casino games fall into a few broad categories: table games, slots, video poker, specialty games such as keno and bingo, and tournament formats built on top of those games. Larger operators also offer poker, skill games and sports betting alongside the casino. Each category has its own page in the games section.