How We Rate Casino Apps
Every app we review in full on this site gets a rating out of five. This page explains where that number comes from, so you can decide whether you agree with it, and the same method sets the order of our list of the best online casino apps in South Africa.
We rate five things. Each one is scored out of five and the headline rating is the average, rounded to one decimal place. We do not weight the score by anything an operator pays us, because that would make the number worthless.
The licence and who holds it
Licensing is the first thing we check. We look for a South African provincial licence, published by the operator on its own website, with the company name and the licence number. The nine provincial boards issue these licences. The National Gambling Board does not.
An operator with a Western Cape or Mpumalanga bookmaker licence scores well. An operator that buries its licence, or publishes one belonging to a company registered somewhere else, scores badly. An offshore casino with no South African licence can still be reviewed, but it scores low on the licence, and the review says plainly that no South African board oversees the account.
The casino itself
How many slots, and from which studios. Whether there are real live dealer tables or only a video feed of automated wheels. Whether the crash games are there, and which ones. Whether lucky numbers are there too. A casino section with forty games from one studio scores lower than one with hundreds across a dozen.
Money in and money out
Deposits are easy everywhere, so the score is mostly about withdrawals. We look at how many routes out there are, whether you can take cash at an ATM or a supermarket till, what the minimum is, and whether the operator publishes a withdrawal time. An operator that publishes a clear time beats one that stays quiet about it.
The app
An operator with no app at all, only a website in a browser, is marked down and we say so plainly in the review.
The welcome offer once you read the terms
A big number at the top of a promotions page is not the score. We read the wagering requirement, the minimum odds, the expiry, the maximum you can win from free spins, and whether the bonus is staged across several deposits. A R50 free bet with one-time wagering can score higher than a R20,000 match that has to be bet through 30 times on casino games.
What does not affect the score
- Advertising spend. An operator that advertises heavily on television gets no credit for it here.
- How well known the brand is. A smaller licensed operator with a better app beats a household name with a worse one.
- Anything commercial. Our commercial arrangements are set out on the affiliate disclosure page and they do not move a rating.
When a rating changes
Ratings are not fixed forever. If an operator drops its app, loses a licence, changes a welcome offer, or starts holding withdrawals, we change the score and the review. Anything we cannot confirm at source comes out rather than sitting there quietly going stale.