The eight criteria
Every ranking on this site comes from the same eight criteria, weighted as shown. The weightings are published because a ranking you cannot audit is only an assertion.
| Criterion | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Published sports terms | 22% | Whether the sports offer is stated separately from the casino offer, and whether the turnover, the minimum deposit and any code are published rather than implied. On books running both verticals this is the single most common place a figure gets misrepresented. |
| Turnover cost | 18% | The multiple, what base it applies to, and what clearing it would cost in settled stakes at a realistic bet size. |
| Cost of entry | 14% | The published minimum deposit, weighted heavily, because it decides whether a reader can test a book before committing to it. |
| Jurisdiction transparency | 14% | Whether an excluded-jurisdiction list exists, how current it is, and whether it is legible rather than a run-on string. |
| Offer value | 12% | The headline percentage and ceiling, taken at face value and then read against the turnover rather than instead of it. |
| Code provenance | 8% | Whether a bonus code is plainly the operator's own. A code we cannot attribute is withheld, and the withholding is stated where the code would have gone. |
| Source freshness | 7% | How old each recorded figure is. Every figure carries its own date rather than one blanket date for the page. |
| Internal consistency | 5% | Whether a book's figures agree between its own published sources, and whether anything reads as a superseded offer. |
How the work is actually done
Most of this is documentary, and we would rather describe it plainly than dress it up. For each operator we read the published offer terms, the cashier page and the banking page, and we record the figures with the date we read them. Excluded-jurisdiction instructions come from our own operator lineup and the date sits beside the row. Where a figure is not published anywhere we can cite, we write that it is not published instead of estimating it.
Network behaviour is a separate kind of claim and gets treated differently. Block intervals, confirmation counts and fee mechanics are properties of a public protocol, checkable by anyone against a block explorer, and they are not promises made by any sportsbook. We keep those two categories visibly apart on every page, because collapsing them is how a protocol fact turns into an operator guarantee.
What we deliberately do not score
- Withdrawal speed per book. The most quoted and least verifiable number in this market. If we have not timed a withdrawal at an operator, there is no figure for it here, and we say which part of the wait is predictable instead.
- Accepted coins per book. No source available to us lists them for a full lineup, and a coin menu changes without notice. We will not infer a coin list from a brand's name, its logo, or its presence on a bitcoin betting lineup.
- Which licence a named brand holds, unless it was checked against the issuing regulator's own register on a date we can give you. An unverified licence attribution is the most damaging error a page like this can make.
- Market counts and per-sport quality. We have not audited a market board, so we describe what changes by sport rather than naming a winner for each one.
Ratings and the merit curve
Star ratings sit on a descending curve across the whole lineup rather than being awarded in isolation, so a 4.9 means first of twelve on these criteria and not an absolute score.
Sub-scores in individual reviews are marked out of ten and show the five heaviest criteria above, which carry 80% of the weighting between them: published sports terms, turnover cost, cost of entry, jurisdiction transparency and offer value. Those five are the ones that actually separate operators, which is why an operator can score 9.5 on cost of entry and 6.0 on turnover cost in the same card.
The remaining three are scored but not charted per brand, and we would rather say why than show five bars and imply there were eight. Source freshness is identical across the current lineup because every figure was recorded on the same date. Internal consistency is identical because no brand in it publishes two conflicting figures. Code provenance is the only one of the three that varies, and it varies for one brand, whose review states the position in words instead of burying it in a score.
Independence
Some links on this site are commercial and are marked as such at the foot of every page. Commercial terms do not reach the people writing, no operator has ever been moved up for paying more, and no operator sees a review before it publishes. If an operator's terms get worse its position falls, and the criteria above are the whole reason we can say that and be checked on it.
Corrections
Bonus figures move. Excluded-jurisdiction lists move. Coin menus move fastest of all. If something here is out of date or wrong, write to editorial@swibl-baseball.org with the page and the operator and we will re-check it against source and re-date the row.