Editorial Standards and Ethics
We cover a business we’re also connected to. Some pages on this site earn us money through affiliate links when you sign up with a poker room, casino, or sportsbook. If that makes you wonder whether it shapes what we write, that’s a fair question, and this page is the answer.
Our news isn’t for sale.
No poker room, casino, or sportsbook pays for coverage, gets a preview of a story before it runs, or has any say in what we report or how we report it. That includes operators we have affiliate deals with. If a room we recommend has a bad month, an outage, or does something worth calling out, we call it out the same as anyone else’s. The commercial side of this site has no say in the newsroom, and it never has.
What we cover, and how we decide.
If it matters to someone who plays this game, it’s fair game: tournament results, legislation that changes where you’re allowed to play, a room opening or shutting down, a player worth knowing about. Win, loss, or otherwise. We also cover the harder stories, the losses that hit the community personally, not just the ones that make a highlight reel. What doesn’t get in: anything written because someone paid for it, or because it was easy to pad a slow news day. We’d rather run short than run filler.
How a piece actually gets made.
A story starts with one of the three of us, Earl, Dan, or Jake, writing it start to finish. Not a template getting filled in. For news, that means watching the event or source ourselves whenever we can and writing it the same day it happens, not queuing it for later. For reviews and guides, it means using the process laid out on our how we evaluate page before a word gets written, not after.
Nothing goes up without a second look. Whoever wrote it isn’t the only person who reads it before it publishes. A second pair of eyes among the three of us checks the piece against its sources before it goes live. On a small team, that’s not a formality. It’s the point of having more than one byline on this site.
How we verify what we publish.
That second-read habit extends to every fact in a piece. A tournament result, a player detail, a dollar figure, each one gets checked against the source closest to the event: an official tournament tracker, a room’s own numbers, or something we saw ourselves. When we’re working from someone else’s original reporting rather than our own, we say so instead of presenting it as firsthand.
That verification doesn’t stop at publish. Poker rooms change bonuses, ownership, and legal availability more often than most readers realize. Where a room is legal to play from depends on your state or country, something we flag rather than gloss over. Review and guide pages get rechecked regularly, and sooner if we hear something’s changed.
Affiliate relationships, in plain terms.
Some room, casino, and sportsbook pages on this site include links that pay us a commission if you sign up through them. That doesn’t buy a better review, and a partner doesn’t get to remove an accurate criticism. A review isn’t worth publishing if it only repeats what the room’s own marketing page says. Our reviews hold to the same standard as our news: real pros, real cons, written by someone who’d tell a friend the same thing they’re telling you. Full details on how these relationships work are on our advertisers disclosure page, and the process behind how we test and rate a site lives on our how we evaluate page.
Where AI tools fit, and where they don’t.
We use editorial tools, including AI, to help organize research and speed up parts of the writing process, the same way any newsroom uses the tools available to it. What those tools don’t do is decide what’s true. Nothing gets published based on an AI-generated claim, statistic, or quote that a person here hasn’t checked against a real source. Nobody on this site claims to have played a hand, tested a cashier, or sat in a room they haven’t actually sat in. That kind of firsthand detail comes from Earl, Dan, and Jake, or it doesn’t appear at all.
If we get something wrong.
We fix it, and we don’t quietly bury the fix. A correction gets a note on the piece itself, not just a silent edit. If you spot something off, a stat that’s changed, a room that no longer offers what we said it does, tell us. We’d rather hear it from you than leave it wrong.
Who’s accountable.
Earl Burton, Dan Katz, and Jake Mitchell write and stand behind what’s published here. If you have a question about a specific piece, our contact page gets you to the person who wrote it.