An independent comparison desk, not a casino

Why the licence comes first

The name on a casino's front page is rarely the name of the company you are actually dealing with. Sign up to one of the six sites we compare and, depending which you pick, your account will be held by a company registered in Malta, Cyprus, Denmark or Jersey — and on one of those domains, four separately licensed companies share the same web address between them.

None of that is hidden. It is all sitting on the Gambling Commission's public register, free to search. It is just not the sort of thing anybody puts in a welcome banner, and it is the single most useful thing to know if a dispute ever escalates past an operator's own complaints team.

So that is where we start every entry. We look up the domain on the register, find the licensed company behind it, check that the remote casino authorisation is active, and print the reference number so the claim can be checked without taking our word for it. If a site fails that check, it does not appear on this website at all.

What we do

• Match casino domains to the licensed companies that hold their Great Britain remote casino authorisation, and publish the licensee, account number and licence reference.
• Record what else each licence covers — bingo, betting, gambling software — because that shapes what the site can legally offer you.
• Note anything published against a licensee in the register's regulatory actions section, including settlements, whether or not it flatters the operator.
• Describe products only from the operator's own published pages, and only what we have actually seen.
• Write short editorial verdicts that are clearly ours, and label them as ours.
• Explain the safer gambling tools and support available in Great Britain, and link to the organisations that provide them.

What we do not do

• We do not offer gambling. No games, no stakes, no accounts, no player funds, no wallets, no payment processing.
• We are not a regulator, a public body or a complaints service, and we have no authority over any operator.
• We do not publish bonus amounts, wagering requirements, minimum deposits, payment methods, withdrawal times or game counts that we have not verified. If we cannot confirm a figure, it is not on the page.
• We do not invent review scores from readers, and we do not display user ratings we have not collected.
• We do not claim any endorsement from the Gambling Commission, Gamstop, GamCare or GambleAware. We link to them; that is the whole relationship.
• We do not present gambling as an investment, an income, a route out of money trouble or a way to improve your life.

How we are paid

Reel Checkpoint is funded by affiliate commission. When a reader follows one of our outbound links and later opens an account with an operator, that operator may pay us a share of what it earns from the account. Readers pay nothing and the price of anything is unaffected.

That arrangement is a genuine conflict of interest, and pretending otherwise would be worse than disclosing it. It influences which operators we have relationships with and it can influence the order brands appear in. What it cannot influence is a licence reference on a public register, which is exactly why we build the comparison around those and print the numbers in full. The affiliate disclosure sets out the arrangement in more detail.

Where the name comes from

A checkpoint is a place where something gets verified before it goes any further. That is the job this site does, and the reels are the part of a casino that most readers picture first. It is a description of a process, not a claim of authority — we check records that anyone can check, and we have no standing beyond that.