What this address is for, and what it cannot do

This is a guide written by a masthead rather than by a "support department", and the honest thing to put at the top of a contact page is the list of things the address cannot settle. The site holds no accounts, moves no money, runs no games and has no access to anybody's balance (we are readers of registers, not an operator), so an email here about a withdrawal (the commonest message this address gets) will be read with sympathy and answered with a pointer to somewhere more useful.

What the address is genuinely good for is the material on these pages. A figure that looks wrong, a licence that has lapsed since it was read, a "seed" (the figure a jackpot level restarts from) quietly changed by a supplier, a game renamed by its own maker, a dead link: all of those are worth an email. So is a passage reading as though it claimed something we are not entitled to claim, whether a "test" nobody carried out or a "verified" figure that is merely a copied one.

What gets answered, and in what order

Corrections come first, and they come first for a plain reason: they are the only messages that change the site (everything else changes, at most, a reply). A message with a source attached ("this register says 95.70 and your page says 95.30") is dealt with ahead of everything else. The page it concerns then takes a new revision date on the day of the change rather than at the end of the month; a date that moves on a schedule is not a date at all.

After corrections come questions about the method. These are welcome, and they quite often turn out to be worth a paragraph on how we review, the page setting out the five ranks of source, rather than a private reply to one reader.

If a reader has had to ask where a figure came from, the page has failed to say so plainly, and the defect is in the page rather than in the reader.

Press and research enquiries are answered, and so are requests to reuse one of the ten tables with attribution. Nothing on these pages sits behind a "licence" of our own: the figures belong to the suppliers and the regulators who published them (we hold no rights in a number), and only the arrangement of them is ours. A table taken from here with a line of attribution is a table used properly; a table taken without one, which is what this trade does to itself every week, is how an error that began as a guess ends up in forty places that all look independent.

What does not get answered is the rest of the inbox. Offers to buy a link, to place a "guest post", to insert a paragraph into a page that already exists or to supply what is always called "unique content" go unanswered as a matter of standing policy. A programme offering a better commission in exchange for a better position is told, once, that the position is not for sale!

A complaint about a casino, and the route that actually works

A reader with a real dispute needs the right door rather than a sympathetic one, and the route has three steps that have to be taken in that order (skipping the first is the usual reason a "formal complaint" stalls at the second).

• The operator's own complaints procedure, in writing, keeping the reference number it gives. Nothing further works until this has been done, and the terms state the time the house has to reply.
• The alternative dispute resolution body named in the operator's terms, which handles the case free of charge for the player. Every licence worth the name requires one to be named, and its name is in the terms rather than on this site.
• The regulator that issued the licence, which takes a complaint about the operator's conduct rather than about the outcome of a game. The authority for each house in our list is written on its card, which is the practical reason the cards carry a regulator instead of a bonus.

A game that paid less than a player expected is almost never a complaint any of those three will uphold (the regulators say so in their own guidance), and the reason sits in the arithmetic rather than in anybody's bad faith (which is not a comforting answer, and is still the right one): a "return to player" is a long-run figure (tens of thousands of spins, in the supplier's own modelling), and a single evening is not a "long run" by any definition. Where a jackpot slot takes several points of return out of the "base game" so that it can feed its pool, the gap between what you expected and what you actually met widens accordingly (and widens fastest on the titles whose base return is lowest), and responsible gambling sets out what that costs.

Who we are not, and why it matters here

Best Jackpot Casino is not a casino, not an operator, not an agent of one and not a licensing body.

The name is unhelpful enough on that point (the word "casino" sits in the middle of it) to be worth a sentence of its own, and the sentence is this one. Nobody here can open an account, close one, verify a document, release a withdrawal or restore a player who has "self-excluded", since the register is held by the scheme and by the operator and never by a guide. Anybody receiving a message from this address asking for a password or a payment is being approached by somebody else entirely (we ask for neither, ever, under any circumstances).

We are also not the other sites in the same group, and we do not sign for them. A page on this domain carries the name of this domain, and a figure here is ours to correct whatever another site may have copied from it. The reverse holds too: a figure on one of those sites is not ours to defend.

The identity of the owner of this site, in the form required of a data controller, is on privacy together with the address for an exercise of rights. That is the same address as the one above, and the duplication is deliberate, because a reader who is looking for a person should not have to guess which of nine pages keeps one. The "legal notices" of a site are usually where an identity goes to hide, and the arrangement here is meant to be the opposite.

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