Sebastian Burns

I’m the Online Casino Editor at British Boxing News, and I’ve been reviewing online casinos for a decade. I cover UK casino sites and the offers attached to them — which games are worth your time, what a bonus actually costs you in turnover, and how long the money takes to come back out.

My subject is the maths casino marketing works hardest to obscure. The house edge isn’t a rumour, it’s a published number, and it’s different on every game on the floor: a 96.2% RTP slot and a 94.1% build of the same title sit side by side at plenty of UK sites, and almost nobody tells you which one you’re spinning. I check — RTP and volatility, wagering requirements, game weighting, and the withdrawal terms underneath the headline.

I’ve reviewed more than 200 UKGC-licensed casinos, and I fund every account I write about. That means depositing real money, playing a bonus through to its wagering requirement, submitting KYC documents, and timing the withdrawal from request to cleared funds — because a 200-free-spins headline means very little if the payout takes nine days and three emails. Every site I recommend holds a current UK Gambling Commission licence, every offer is written to ASA advertising standards, and I re-check the terms monthly.

Before any of that I spent four years dealing roulette and blackjack in a Manchester casino, which is where the numbers stopped being abstract.

Away from the laptop I play low-stakes live poker badly, collect gloriously bad 1970s fruit machine service manuals, and have never once been tempted by a progressive jackpot.

Favourite game: French roulette, purely for La Partage.
Worst session: chasing a Megaways bonus buy at 2am in 2021. The maths was never on my side and I knew it at the time.