Gambling is a subject full of confident claims. Forums swear by patterns, adverts hint at easy money and old myths get repeated until they sound like facts. Our job is to cut through that, which means being choosy about where information comes from. This page explains the kinds of sources we lean on, the ones we handle carefully, and the checks a fact has to survive before it reaches an article.
Material we treat as solid ground
Official game rules and paytables
The rules of a game, as published by the people who make or run it, are where every explanation starts. For a slot, that means the information screen and paytable; for a table game, the house rules that set things like the number of decks or zeros. These documents tell us how a game actually works rather than how people think it works.
Regulators and public registers
Gambling regulators publish licence registers, technical standards and guidance for players. They are the best place to confirm whether an operator holds a licence and what protections a licensed site is expected to offer, such as deposit limits and self-exclusion.
Laws and official guidance
When an article touches on legality, we go to the legal text or to official government guidance, not to someone's summary of it. Even then we keep the wording general, because rules vary by country and region and change over time.
Sports governing bodies
For betting articles, the laws of the sport itself matter: how extra time is handled, what happens when a match is abandoned. Governing bodies publish these, and they shape how many bets are settled.
Mathematics we can show
Probabilities, house edges and implied odds can often be worked out from first principles. When we do this, we show enough of the working for a reader to follow it, as on our page about reading the odds.
Material we handle with care
| Source type | How we use it |
|---|---|
| Operator terms and conditions | Useful for understanding how a type of bonus or rule works; never taken as neutral description. |
| Press releases and launch announcements | A signal that something exists, not proof of what it does. |
| Published research | Cited only when we have read the work itself and can describe its limits honestly. |
| Player forums and social media | A source of questions and experiences, never of facts or figures. |
What we do not rely on
We do not take figures from casino ranking sites, tipster services or anything selling a "system". We do not repeat statistics we cannot trace to their origin, and if a number cannot be checked, it stays out of the article. Where we use a number to illustrate a point, we say clearly that it is an example.
How a fact gets checked
- The writer notes where each claim comes from while drafting.
- A second team member reads the draft and questions anything that looks too neat or too certain.
- Any figure is traced back to its source or recalculated from the rules.
- After publication, reader corrections are checked against the original source.
Read more about our wider routine on How We Work. If you think we have relied on the wrong source, we would like to hear it — the contact page has our address.
Checking our facts
The path a claim takes before it is published
Every figure and rule in an article has to make it through these stages.
Note the origin
While drafting, the writer records where each rule or number came from.
Go to the primary text
Summaries are swapped for the rulebook, the regulator's page or the legal text itself.
Redo the maths
Edges and probabilities are recalculated from the rules rather than copied from elsewhere.
Question the neat bits
A second reader challenges anything that sounds too tidy or too sure.