Matt Wojciow
Gambling journalist
What this byline covers
Slots, live games, crash games and table games. In practice that means opening the game’s own rules screen, reading what it states for return to player, volatility, maximum win and bet range, and setting that against what the studio publishes on its own website. Where the two disagree, both numbers are printed and the disagreement is the point of the page.
How the articles here are made
Every figure traces to something a reader can check for themselves. A return to player figure comes from the game’s rules screen or from the studio’s own page, and the page says which of the two it came from. Screenshots of the screen the figure was read from are published next to it, and the date of the reading is stated, because studios reconfigure games and an undated figure has no shelf life.
Where a studio does not publish something, the page says it is not stated rather than filling the gap with a number borrowed from another listing. Several games have turned out to state a figure that no aggregator carries, buried behind a collapsed heading in the help panel, and several have turned out to state nothing at all.
What is not claimed
No page under this byline claims real-money play. Games are opened in the free demos the studios host themselves, which is enough to read a paytable and a rules screen and nowhere near enough to say anything about outcomes. Nothing here reports a session, a win rate or a count of spins. A few hundred spins says nothing about a figure quoted across millions of them, and a page presenting it as evidence is selling something.
The site states plainly on every game that the game is built to return less than it takes.
Corrections
Studios change configurations, rules screens are rewritten and demos get pulled, so anything here can go out of date. If a figure on a page carrying this byline is wrong, send it to [email protected]. It gets corrected on the page itself with the date and a note of what changed, rather than quietly edited away.