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What this site is
A small publication with one subject: online casino brands that hold a Great Britain licence, and how those brands treat the person on the other side of the screen. Six operators are covered at present, each measured against the same eight checks, in the same order, so the marks mean something when placed side by side.
Chip Route House is not a gambling operator. It holds no gambling licence because it needs none — no games are offered here, no accounts exist, no stake is ever placed or handled. It is not a regulator either, and it has no authority over any brand it writes about. What it has is a checklist and the patience to apply it consistently.
Why protection carries the most weight
Plenty of casino comparison sites rank on bonus size. That produces a league table of marketing budgets, which tells a reader almost nothing useful. We took a different line: roughly two points in five come from licence conditions and the account controls a player can actually reach — deposit limits, time-outs, session reminders, self-exclusion.
The rest is the experience: how deep the games library goes, whether the live tables are worth sitting at, how the site behaves on a phone, and whether support answers questions rather than reciting terms. It is a deliberate order of priorities, and it explains why a small, plain site can score respectably while a flashier one does not automatically win.
Where the money comes from
Affiliate commission, and nothing else. When a reader follows a link from this site to an operator and opens an account, the operator may pay us. That arrangement pays the hosting bill and the time spent writing.
Three things it does not do. It does not buy a place in the list. It does not buy a higher percentage, a badge or a kinder sentence. And it does not give an operator sight of a write-up before publication. If a brand pays more per referral than another, that fact is invisible to the scoring, because the scoring happens against the checklist rather than the rate card. The affiliate disclosure sets this out in full.
How the write-ups are put together
- The licence is confirmed on the Gambling Commission's public register before anything else is written.
- The account area is examined for the controls a GB licence requires, with attention to how many steps it takes to reach them.
- The games lobby is browsed as a visitor would browse it — filters, categories, live section and all.
- Offer types are recorded as the operator states them. Headline figures change often, so we describe the shape of an offer rather than quoting numbers that may be stale by the time you read them.
- Anything that is an opinion is written as an opinion. "In our view" is not a hedge here; it is a signal that you might reasonably disagree.
