How this desk sources a number

Most of what goes wrong in writing about gambling and crypto is numerical. A payout timing gets repeated from one site to the next until nobody knows where it came from; a return figure is quoted for a game that ships in four configurations; a licence is described in terms of a regime that does not cover the reader. None of that requires dishonesty, only the absence of a rule about where figures come from.

This is ours, written down so it can be held against us.

The rule

Every number on this site is traceable to a named source, and where we could not trace one, the sentence does not exist. That applies to timings, ranges, multipliers, rates, thresholds and dates.

In practice it has three consequences that are visible on the pages:

• Figures appear as quotations with the source named, not as our own assertions. When a piece tells you cards take three to five working days, it is quoting our payment-methods guide and saying so, so you can see what the claim rests on.
• Ranges stay ranges. Where a source says twenty-four to forty-eight hours, we do not average it into a single number, because the range is the information.
• Explanations outnumber figures. Most of what a reader needs is mechanism: what a confirmation does, what a pending status means, what voids a bet. Mechanism can be explained correctly without inventing a single quantity, which is why the pieces in crypto and payments are written that way.

What we do not do

We do not publish a figure we cannot attribute

If a sentence needs a number and the number has no source, the sentence is cut rather than estimated. An article that is one paragraph shorter is better than one that is confidently wrong.

We do not restate operator marketing as fact

A promotional claim is evidence about the promotion, not about the world. Where we describe an operator's rule, we describe it as that operator's rule — the early-payout example in void versus settled is attributed to the book that has it, because another book does not.

We do not average, round or tidy a source's figure

Tidying a number destroys the only thing that made it checkable.

We do not run our own analytics on readers

There is no tracking script on this site, which the privacy page sets out in full, including the one piece of JavaScript we do run and what it stores.

Where the figures on this site come from

Overwhelmingly from our own market and method guides, which were written against the markets they describe: the payment-method timings, the slot volatility bands, the betting settlement rules. Those pieces are the primary material this desk works from, and the newer explanatory pieces are built on top of them rather than beside them. That is why nearly every article here links back into one: the link is the citation.

When a guide ages, the figures in it age with it. We would rather you could see the source and judge its age than read a number with no provenance at all.

What we get wrong

Two things, predictably. Timings drift, because operators change their processing and payment systems change their rails, and a sourced figure from last season is still last season's figure. And market rules change faster than anything else on the site — a jurisdiction can rewrite its licensing regime in a year, which is why the licence piece teaches you to check a register rather than giving you a list to trust.

If you find a figure here that does not match its source, or a source that has moved on, that is worth telling us about: the contact route is on the contact page, and corrections are what this rule exists to make possible. The full version of our editorial approach, including how we handle commercial links, is on the editorial policy page.