Our Editorial Guidelines

Last updated: February 26, 2026

At Beat The Fish, the integrity of our reviews is the most important thing we can uphold. For more than 20 years, we’ve never wavered from delivering what fellow players deserve: honesty, transparency, in-depth testing, and accurate ratings.

Every review at Beat The Fish has undergone our standardized and rigorous process before it’s published. This includes putting our own money on the line in order to test deposits and payouts. Reviews are also regularly updated (at least every 3 months) to ensure accuracy. We don’t want to miss passing along important changes to promotions or Terms and Conditions.

Finally, every review is fact-checked by an additional Beat The Fish staff member to rule out mistakes, omissions, or oversights.

For complete transparency, we’d like to share our exact review process below. While every online poker or casino site is different, there are common tests we do at every single one.

1. Company Background Check

We’re trained investigators of online poker and casino sites. There’s a lot you can learn by scrutinizing an operator’s website, reputation, and background history before even playing there.

1. The website itself. We expect a poker or casino operator to post background information about itself, such as where it’s based, its history, and who audits the software. Red flags include a lack of transparency, grammatical errors, contradictory information, or expired dates.
2. License. At minimum, poker and casino operators should be licensed from some government or gambling agency. That ensures at least some form of oversight and compliance. We’ll let you know where a site is licensed from and analyze it. Not every license is the same, however, with some amounting to little more than a business permit.
3. Is it Offshore? The earliest online gambling sites were offshore and many remain so to this day. It’s the only way to serve some markets where official gaming licenses aren’t offered. We do review and trust many offshore sites, which are among our personal favorites for where we play. We also know offshore sites are a sticking point for many players, so we’ll always make it clear when a site is.
4. Complaints elsewhere online. We don’t pretend to be able to test every possible problem that can come up for players. We regularly search for players complaints about an operator at other sources, such as Reddit and industry forums. Every operator in history will have complaints from players alleging unfair games, uncredited bonuses, and refused payouts. Our job is to investigate these for validity. We will either disclose serious complaints on a review or refuse to release a review entirely.

2. Make a Test Deposit

How can we expect you to put your hard-earned money at risk if we aren’t willing to do the same? We always make a test deposit are part of our review process, unlike many of our peers.

1. Methods available. Does a gaming operator make it easy for players to deposit by offering the most commonly-used methods? Do they pass on their own processing fees to customers? Are cryptocurrencies an option?
2. Speed of funds credited. Especially with cryptocurrencies, we’ve found there can be a big difference between sites of when you make a deposit and when it’s actually credited to your account.
3. Test the software. After we’re loaded with our funds, we need to actually play for real money at a variety of games on the site.
4. Platforms available. We’ll let players know how they can access the games, whether that’s in-browser, if there’s a dedicated mobile app, and which desktop operating systems are options.
5. Record any bugs or glitches. Nothing is more frustrating than being involved in a big pot, only to have the poker software freeze up and either fold your hand or place you on all-in protection. Similarly, we’ve had slots or blackjack tables just hang and force the games to be reopened. We’ll pass along any software bugs we encounter and shame operators who routinely allow them.

3. Test Poker Cash Game Quality

At Beat The Fish, we’re all big cash game players. The quality of these will always be one of the most important factors of if a site earns our recommendation.

1. Player traffic. Cash game traffic is quietly one of the most important parts of an online poker site. Does a site draw enough players to fill lots of tables at a variety of limits? Are you stuck with the same small pool of players who are analyzing you?
2. Limits. Closely related to traffic is which stakes get filled? Naturally, there are fewer players at higher limits. Big players will care about how high the stakes go before the tables are empty. Small players will care about the minimum stakes. We’ll detail all of that.
3. Competition. The average quality of the competition is a huge determinant of if you win and how much you win or lose at the tables. Most other poker review sites miss this. We don’t. We analyze numbers like average players per hand, pot sizes, and add our personal gameplay to determine how tough a poker site is.
4. Player anonymity. We’re big fans of anonymous online poker tables, which protect casual players from getting exploited. We’ll review how private a poker site keeps you or if you’re open to tracking software.

4. Test Tournament Quality

Tournaments are a staple at every poker site and we know many players will play them exclusively.

1. Traffic. There’s nothing more anticlimactic than playing a multi-table online poker tournament against 50 players. We’ll test average tournament player counts for you.
2. Guaranteed prize pools. Guaranteed tournament prize pools can get over $1 million at the largest sites, but at the cost of competing against huge fields or perhaps the buy-in is extremely large. We’ll also alert you to overlay opportunities, where the guarantee exceeds the total buy-ins.
3. Types offered. There are so many tournament variations these days that are exclusive to certain poker sites. We’ll alert you to gimmicky types aside from the stand-by Sit and Go, bounty, or other game types like Omaha or Stud.

5. Test Casino Game Options

Every online casino is going to have table games and slots. The real question we want to answer is who are the game providers and how interesting is the selection?

1. Table games. Table games are still the backbone of casinos. We’ll review how many variations an online casino has of the most popular games as well as if there are any unique poker options or baccarat.
2. Live dealers. Almost every online casino now hosts live dealers. We’ll test these to pass along how many games have live dealers, who the provider is, and how large the spread is for limits.
3. Slot developers. Even many of the largest online casinos outsource their slots development. We’ll review who the provider is and if there are more uncommon games like plinko, fishing, or scratch cards.

6. Ensure Promotions are Accurate

This may be the most important part of our review: testing all those promotions that poker sites try to hook new players with right off the bat.

1. Review Terms and Conditions. While we aren’t attorneys, we’ve seen our enough Terms and Conditions pages to know predatory rules when we see them. Poker sites and online casinos hope players don’t notice, but we’ll dig through the weeds to tell players what they actually need to know from the T&C’s.
2. Truth in advertising. As new players, we’ve all seen it before from a poker site. “100% bonus, up to $1,000!” Then, you only have 30 days to rake thousands of dollars to release it all. Almost no bonus is given immediately, so we’ll review what average players will actually earn of it.
3. Ease of releasing bonsu. Where possible, we’ll alert you to methods and gameplay to will expedite your bonus release.

7. Test Player Support

Inevitably, we’re all going to need support as players, whether it’s an issue of our bonuses getting stiffed, a slow payout, or document verification. Player support methods and time frames can vary drastically.

1. Methods. Even as most of us would rather not call someone, I still appreciate when gaming sites give players the option to talk with someone immediately. Live chat is nice, but we’ll shame any sites who are too lazy or secretive to offer phone support.
2. Response times. If you’re sending in an email, especially about your money, you deserve to hear back within an hour or two. Live chat wait times should also not be more than a few minutes. We’ll test those times for you.

8. Test Payouts

Payout ease and speed is still paramount when it comes to online poker and casinos. Besides the entertainment, most of us play to win money at the end of the day. Aside from doing a test payout (usually in Bitcoin), we’ll continue to monitor payouts multiple times per year.

1. Methods. For many of us, cryptocurrency serves both deposits and payouts just fine. We still review and divulge every payout method, fee, and processing time to players.
2. Time frames. Another one of our most important jobs is reviewing how long a poker site or online casino takes to get you your money. There’s no excuse for an operator to delay a rightful withdrawal request. It’s also our responsibility to keep on top of this, as payout time frames can change drastically from even one month to the next.
3. Ease of withdrawals. Any gaming operator can send you quick payouts when business is booming and time are good, but how much can you trust a site to send you your money when times are hard or they lose a payment processor? We literally have it on our calendars to let no more than three months go by without updating every review.

9. Independent Fact-Check

To wrap up our review process, we require that every word be fact-checked by another member of our staff. Individuals can have blind spots, subconscious bias, or simply just make mistakes.

Our fact-checking process ensures that what we express in every poker site and casino site review is a consensus, arrived upon by multiple experts.

Honesty is Everything

In the gambling world, a person’s word is everything. Why shouldn’t that extend online?

At Beat The Fish, we’re only as strong as the faith of our visitors. Through the in-depth review process we’ve perfected above, we hope to reward your faith in us to deliver you unbiased and unfiltered honesty in the online poker and casino world.