What this address is, and what stood on it before

Best Jackpot Casino is a guide to the "progressive" jackpots of the online casinos (the ones that grow on a pool shared between a hundred houses) and to the "fixed" ones that nobody counts, and the author of it is the masthead: no editor is named, no panel is counted, and no qualification is claimed for anybody, because a guide of this sort answers for what its pages contain rather than for the signature at the foot of them.

The domain was registered on 19 December 2005. That is the one claim here a reader can settle in a minute, in the public registry record and in the archive of the web (which between them cover the whole twenty-one years), and it is the only sort of seniority worth anything: the sort somebody else can check.

For most of those years the address carried something quite different, a guide built around the live "tickers" (the counters that show a pool as it grows) embedded from half a dozen outside services in Flash and in the JavaScript of the period.

Every one of those services has since been switched off, and Flash went with them. The part of that site which justified its existence had therefore stopped being visible years before anybody got round to replacing it. What stands here is a rebuild rather than a refresh: the subjects survived the gap and the games survived it, and not one sentence did.

Nobody here has played these games

The plainest thing to be said about this guide is the thing almost nobody in the trade says, so it belongs near the top instead of in a footnote. No account was opened for the purposes of these pages, no stake was placed on any game described on them, no probability was measured by anybody, and there is no tester, no "laboratory" and no "team of experts" standing behind a single sentence on this site.

What was done instead is dull and checkable, which is the whole of the point.

The registers of the gambling authorities were read house by house; the rules and the help screens of the games were read wherever the supplier publishes them; the licence conditions were read for the operators whose regulator obliges them to describe a pool correctly (Grosvenor, BetMGM UK, PlayOJO, Playzee and Pink Casino are the useful ones), and the public jackpot "trackers" (the services that log each level and the day it last fell) were read for those dates.

Every figure carries the day it was read, because a figure without a date is an assertion and a figure with one is a record. Where the best thing available was a comparison site, the line carrying the number says as much, and in a trade where "verified" is very often a synonym for "copied" that turns out to be the harder half of our work!

No scores, and the reason is arithmetic rather than modesty

There are no stars on these pages and no "score" out of ten. A score of that kind rests on one of two foundations, and neither is available here: either the houses and the games have been played for the purpose, which they have not, or the mark is an average of other people's marks presented as this site's own verdict (which is a different animal in the same coat, and which Google itself declines to treat as a rating of ours).

What stands in its place is set out on how we review, and it comes to three things: the regulatory frame of each operator, the jackpot "networks" its catalogue carries, and the date on which both were read in a register you can open for yourself; what it does not come to is a verdict dressed up as a measurement.

How the site is paid, and what the money does not buy

Some of the casino links on these pages are affiliate links, which means that a reader who opens an account through one of them may earn us a commission from the operator, almost always on "revenue share" (a cut of what the house keeps from that player), at no cost to that reader and with no change to the terms of the account.

We say so in the row at the head of every page and we say it again here, because a disclosure that hides in a legal annexe is a disclosure in name only (the row sits above the first line of every page, where a reader meets it before meeting any link).

What the commission does not do is decide anything at all.

The order of the casinos follows the authority whose register we were able to read for each house, and a programme that pays better does not move a card upwards. We write the text of a page before any link is attached to it, and no operator sees a page before you do.

Nothing on this site has been bought: not a mention, not a position, not a sentence. Should that ever change, the change gets written on this page, in these words, with the date beside it, and it says something about the trade that a promise of that kind has to be spelled out at all!

Readers who want the other half of the arrangement will find it on how we review, where the order of the sources is set out line by line.

The limits, written down rather than tidied away

Four of our limits matter enough to state in full, and they are the sort of thing a site that calls itself "independent" normally leaves for somebody else to find out.

The first is the "tracking" identifiers (the parameters inside a link that tell a programme which site sent the reader). The affiliate links here run on two accounts the network has used for years, one with Casino Rewards (RewardAffiliates) and one with Super Partners (the programme of Super Group), and neither yet carries a parameter specific to these pages: a new identifier has been asked of both programmes, and until one arrives the clicks of this site cannot be told from the clicks of the other sites on the same "account".

The second is the counter. No "current" value of a pot appears anywhere on this site, because a figure read at breakfast is wrong by the afternoon and can never be checked afterwards, so what the pages give instead is the "seed" (the figure a level restarts from after it falls), the average of everything that game has really paid, and the "drought" (the interval since the level last went) read against its own "average interval" between wins.

The third is the gaps in the public record, and it is the largest of the four. No supplier publishes the "contribution" (the share of a stake that feeds the pool) of WowPot!, Jackpot King, Dream Drop or Jackpot Madness; no operator holding a licence states the "qualifying stake" for Mega Moolah or WowPot!, and the seeds of whole networks (Red Tiger and the Playtech pools among them) have never been put out by anybody. Where the figure is missing the page says that it is missing, which takes longer to write than a plausible invention and is worth a great deal more.

The fourth is the odds, and the answer is the shortest on this page: nobody publishes them, and the percentages in circulation are either unattributed or flatly incompatible with the recorded intervals between wins (traced back, not one of them has an author).

Where to go from here

How we review gives the order in which the sources are read and what happens when two good ones disagree, which makes it the page to open before trusting a figure on any other. Responsible gambling carries the help services by market, the limit and self-exclusion tools (deposit caps, time-outs and the national registers), and the plain statement that a jackpot is a rare event and never a "plan". Questions answers what you are most likely to have searched for, and contact is the address a correction goes to.

A correction is welcome and we act on it, which is worth saying because the invitation is usually ornamental. If a figure here is wrong, or a licence has lapsed, or a game has been renamed again (it happens more than the catalogues admit), the quickest route to a mended page is a note with the source attached.

Questions