How we score casinos
Every casino we cover gets a score from 0 to 100, with a letter grade, so you can compare operators at a glance. This page is the whole method, including what the score cannot tell you.
Each score is built from five pillars. For offshore operators the weights are:
Moderated reports from players who actually withdrew.
Volume and recency of complaints, and any regulator action.
Domain age, hosting and site health.
Screening against sanctions lists and the jurisdiction it operates from.
Whether a licence number is published and checks out against the registry.
Payout reliability comes from moderated reports submitted by real players, not from claims made by the operator.
Licence claims are checked against the published registry of the authority named, rather than taken from the operator's footer.
Scores are recalculated on a schedule, and every page shows the date it was last checked.
Scores are set by Otto Bergström, who has spent 18 years auditing iGaming operators. No operator sees a score before it is published, and none can request a change.
We record which US states an operator accepts or blocks, and which countries it is offered in, so a ranking can be filtered to where you actually are.
Where we have not established availability for an operator we leave it in the ranking rather than guessing, so a blank record never reads as a rejection. Check the operator's own terms before you deposit.
Niekie earns an affiliate commission on some of the links we publish. Commission never changes a score. A casino cannot pay to raise its grade.
Are Niekie's rankings objective?
The order of a ranking is not chosen by hand. It is the score, sorted. The score is produced by a fixed formula from recorded data, so the same inputs always produce the same score, and any two operators with the same record rank the same way. The judgement in the system is the weighting of the five pillars, which is set in advance, applied identically to every operator, and published on this page. No operator is moved up or down outside that formula.
Can a casino pay to rank higher on Niekie?
No. Niekie earns an affiliate commission on some links, and that commission is not an input to the score. An operator cannot buy a position, buy a better grade, or pay to have a complaint or a regulator action removed. Operators with no commercial relationship to Niekie are scored and ranked on the same basis as those with one.
How is the Niekie safety score calculated?
Every operator gets a score from 0 to 100 built from five pillars: payout reliability at 30 points, reputation and complaints at 20, domain intelligence at 20, sanctions and jurisdiction at 15, and licence and transparency at 15. Each pillar is computed from recorded data rather than from anything the operator tells us, and the pillar scores are summed into the total.
Who scores the casinos?
Scores are set by Otto Bergström, who has spent 18 years auditing iGaming operators. No operator sees a score before it is published, and none can request a change.
How often are scores updated?
The checks run on a daily schedule and scores are recalculated from the latest data. Every page shows the date it was last checked, so you can see how current the figure is rather than having to trust that it is recent.
What does the score not tell me?
It is a measure of whether an operator pays out and behaves, not of whether you will win. It does not predict your results, and it is not a recommendation to gamble. It also does not cover game fairness testing, which is the job of the testing houses an operator contracts.
Why is a casino missing from my country's ranking?
We record which countries and US states an operator is offered in, and filter the ranking to where you are. If we have not established availability for an operator we leave it in the ranking rather than guessing, so a missing record never reads as a rejection. Always check the operator's own terms before you deposit.