We are a team based across the UK — London, Manchester, and Bristol — with backgrounds spanning gambling journalism, player advocacy, regulatory analysis, and consumer rights. Our work began in 2020 as a private research project to map the non-GamStop casino landscape for a group of colleagues who’d found the existing review content commercially biased and practically unreliable.
What started as an internal spreadsheet became a publicly accessible resource when we recognised that other players faced the same problem: a genuinely difficult-to-navigate market, populated with operators ranging from outstanding to predatory, and almost no independent guidance that wasn’t commercially compromised. We made it public because the information was useful and because the people who needed it most were being poorly served.
Today, our site specifically covers Book of Dead not on GamStop — one of the most-searched sub-categories within the non-GamStop space, and one where the quality of available guidance has historically been particularly poor. Book of Dead is a game with a dedicated, sophisticated player base. Those players deserve reviews produced with the same level of rigour they’d apply to any other financial or consumer decision.
We publish on a rolling schedule. Reviews are updated quarterly at minimum, and major changes — licence issues, withdrawal policy shifts, bonus structure changes — trigger immediate updates rather than waiting for the next scheduled cycle. If something important changes about any site on our list, we update the content the same week.
Our team does not have investors, advertisers, or operator partnerships. We are funded through a fixed-fee editorial model — we charge a transparency-oriented subscription to a small number of industry research clients for aggregated market data, entirely separate from our consumer-facing content. This means no operator has any financial lever over what we write.
Meet the Team
James Hartley – Lead Reviewer
James spent nine years working in gaming journalism across print and digital media, covering everything from poker tournament strategy to sports betting market analysis. He joined our team in 2021 after leaving a senior editor position at a UK-based gambling trade publication, where he became increasingly uncomfortable with the commercial pressures that influenced coverage of operators. His transition to independent consumer advocacy was deliberate and, as he describes it, long overdue.
James leads the casino review process for all 12 sites currently covered on this platform. He conducts all real-money account registrations, KYC testing, and initial deposit and withdrawal sequences personally. He’s tested over 80 non-GamStop casinos since 2021, and his approach is methodical: every review starts with a standardised test script and ends with a documented summary of findings against each criterion. He does not accept press junkets, operator briefings, or complimentary accounts. Every site he reviews is accessed as a standard player would, with his own money, under standard terms.
James has developed particular expertise in the mechanics of bonus wagering requirements and their real-world impact on player outcomes — a topic he considers chronically undercovered in mainstream gambling content. His analysis of wagering requirement structures across non-GamStop casinos is the foundation of our scoring methodology in the bonus category.
Outside of his gambling industry work, James holds a BA in Journalism from the University of Sheffield and is a qualified CISI compliance associate, giving him a meaningful framework for evaluating regulatory environments and consumer protection standards across different licensing jurisdictions.
Rachel Osei – Responsible Gambling Editor
Rachel’s background is in health communications and consumer protection, with a seven-year career at a UK mental health charity that included a dedicated focus on gambling harm. She joined our team in 2022 because she saw an opportunity to embed genuine responsible gambling expertise into a content format — the gambling review site — that had traditionally treated player safety as a box-ticking afterthought.
Rachel is responsible for the responsible gambling sections across all reviews, the risk warnings published throughout our content, and the editorial standards that govern how we write about self-exclusion, GamStop, and player protection tools. She reviews every piece of content before publication to ensure that the guidance we provide on sensitive topics is accurate, empathetic, and aligned with current best practices in harm reduction.
She works closely with GamCare on an informal advisory basis, and her writing on responsible gambling reflects that relationship — grounded in practical guidance rather than regulatory box-ticking. Rachel is adamant that information about non-GamStop casinos can be provided responsibly, provided it is accompanied by honest risk disclosure and genuine signposting to support. That commitment shapes every page of this site.
Rachel holds an MSc in Public Health from the University of Edinburgh and completed additional training in motivational interviewing and behavioural change communication. She brings a clinical clarity to the responsible gambling elements of our work that distinguishes our content from the cursory risk warnings common on most gambling affiliate sites.
Our Mission
Our mission is simple to state, harder to execute: produce the most honest, useful, and thorough independent guide to Book of Dead not on GamStop casinos available to UK players.
We don’t pursue traffic volume at the expense of accuracy. We don’t publish reviews of sites we haven’t tested. We don’t soften our assessments of operators who have slow withdrawals, poor support, or misleading bonus terms because we’re worried about losing a commercial relationship. We have no commercial relationship to lose.
We want a UK player who finds this site to finish reading better informed than when they arrived — not just about which casinos to consider, but about what questions to ask, what risks exist, what their rights are, and where to go if gambling stops being recreational and starts causing harm.
This means our content includes things that most affiliate sites avoid: clear and prominent risk warnings, detailed breakdowns of where non-GamStop sites fall short compared to UKGC-licensed alternatives, and genuine acknowledgment that the sites we review operate in a regulatory grey area from a UK consumer protection standpoint. We believe players deserve this information rather than a purely promotional framing of the non-GamStop market.
Why We Are Different
The non-GamStop gambling content market is dominated by sites that operate as marketing platforms for the operators they appear to review. The pattern is consistent: a list of casinos is presented as an independent ranking, but every site on the list is connected to the publisher via an affiliate agreement. The publisher earns a commission — typically a percentage of lifetime player losses — for every player they refer. This creates an obvious conflict of interest that most sites do not disclose.
We earn nothing from the operators on our list. We receive no commissions, no referral fees, no cost-per-acquisition payments, and no cross-promotional value from any casino we review. The operators covered on this site are reviewed entirely independently, and our editorial judgements are not reviewed by, shared with, or influenced by any operator prior to publication.
This is verifiable. If any operator listed on this site claims a commercial relationship with us, we invite readers to contact us directly with the claim and we will investigate. We have not received such a claim to date because no such relationship exists.
Beyond commercial independence, we invest significantly more time in each review than most affiliate sites. Our average per-site review process — from account registration through to final scoring — takes approximately 40 hours across a team of two reviewers. Most affiliate sites produce reviews based on publicly available information, without real-money testing. The difference in quality is significant and directly affects the usefulness of the guidance.
Editorial Independence
Editorial independence means our rankings and assessments reflect our genuine findings, regardless of how those findings reflect on any operator. It means we don’t remove critical commentary when an operator objects to it. It means our ratings change when the evidence changes — upward when an operator improves, downward when it deteriorates — without any negotiation.
In practice, this has resulted in sites being removed from our list when withdrawal issues were identified, in ratings being adjusted downward when bonus term changes made welcome offers less player-friendly, and in clear critical language being published about operators whose support quality fell below our standards during testing. These are decisions that would be commercially difficult for a commission-driven affiliate site to make. For us, they are straightforward obligations.
Our editorial process includes a two-person review of all published content before it goes live: one reviewer who conducted the hands-on testing, and a second reviewer who reads the final piece independently and flags anything that reads as promotional, inaccurate, or insufficiently evidenced. Rachel’s responsible gambling review adds a third layer for any content touching on player safety, self-exclusion, or harm minimisation.
We will not accept paid placements, sponsored reviews, or “partnered content” from operators in any form.
Our Commitment to Responsible Gambling
We take our responsibility to players seriously, and that means taking the risks of gambling seriously. Playing at non-GamStop casinos carries real risks that don’t exist on UKGC-licensed platforms — no mandatory UK consumer protections, no guaranteed access to dispute resolution, and a self-exclusion landscape that is more fragmented. We never minimise these risks or present non-GamStop casinos as straightforwardly superior to their UKGC-licensed counterparts.
Every review on this site includes a clear risk disclosure. Our site-wide responsible gambling guidance is written by Rachel and reviewed against current GamCare and NHS guidance on gambling harm. We publish the contact details and services of UK gambling support organisations prominently, not buried in a footer.
If you’re reading this site and gambling is causing problems in your life — with money, relationships, mental health, or work — we want you to know that help is available and accessible. You can speak to a trained counsellor at GamCare free of charge. You can self-exclude from all UKGC-licensed sites in one step at GamStop. The UK Gambling Commission also publishes a comprehensive list of support organisations and guidance resources.
We believe information about non-GamStop casinos can be published responsibly. The existence of this site is our commitment to proving that.
Get in Touch
We welcome feedback, corrections, and questions from readers. If you believe a review on this site contains an inaccuracy, we want to know about it. If you’ve had an experience with one of the casinos on our list that significantly differs from our assessment — positive or negative — please contact us. Player experience data directly informs our quarterly review updates.
For general enquiries, feedback on reviews, responsible gambling queries, or to flag a concern about any operator on our list, contact us at editorial@[yoursitedomain].co.uk. We aim to respond to all correspondence within 48 hours.
We do not accept unsolicited review requests from casino operators or their marketing representatives.
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