How we verify every entry

What we read

We read each venue’s own website and, where the venue belongs to a network, the operator’s pages about it. Every page we read is downloaded and stored, so a quote can be checked against the exact text it was taken from. So far that is 1,398 pages for 103 venues.

How an entry is made

A language model reads each stored page and proposes values, each with a quotation. Code then checks that the quotation appears word for word on the page and that it is not about another venue; for numbers and names, it also checks that the value itself is in the quotation. A proposal that fails is dropped. Short descriptions — parking, smoking, ID rules, payment and the like — are the model’s summary of the quotation shown beside them, so tap one to read the venue’s own words.

In the most recent reading of each venue’s website, these checks dropped 2,523 proposals. The profiles show 4,116 entries that passed.

Which sources count

The venue’s own website comes first, then its operator’s pages — a casino network or a provincial Crown corporation such as Loto-Québec — and then the provincial government or regulator. We do not use Google Places data, and we do not copy ratings from Google, Tripadvisor or anyone else: the review links on each profile open a search on those sites. Every website quoted so far is listed on Sources.

Dates you can see

Tap any entry to see its quote, the page it came from, the day it was last checked and how many times it was found on the venue’s pages. Each profile also shows the day the venue’s website was last read.

When sources disagree

When two pages of the same website give different answers to the same question, the profile shows both under “Where the sources disagree” instead of quietly choosing one.

Figures in the tools

House edges, pay tables and rounds an hour in the odds and cost tools come from published tables, not from venue pages: Wizard of Odds for house edges and pay tables, Jim Kilby’s rounds an hour as Wizard of Odds prints them, a Las Vegas Strip rating table and Harrigan and Dixon (2009) for how fast games are played. Table rules come from published rule documents — BCLC’s Rules of Play for B.C. casinos, Loto-Québec’s rules for its casinos, and the “Playing Blackjack” rules of Fallsview Casino Resort and Casino Niagara — and are used only as labelled presets in the tools, never as a fact on a venue’s profile. Where we work a figure out ourselves, the page says so and shows the arithmetic, and our code checks the result against the published figure.

What we do not publish

No ratings, scores or “best casino” rankings: we have nothing to calculate them from. No visitor numbers and no bonus offers. Every figure about a venue comes from its own pages, its operator or its regulator; figures we work out ourselves, such as the price of an hour of play, say so and show their sources. When a restaurant, bar or other listed place disappears from a venue’s website, it stays on the profile marked “no longer listed since …” instead of vanishing silently.

Photos and illustrations

Photos published under open licences on Wikimedia Commons, Flickr and Mapillary are credited with their author and licence. Images marked “Illustration” are not photographs and may differ from the venue in details such as signage, lighting or season. The full list is on Image credits.

Limits

Websites change, and holiday hours often differ from the regular ones. Before a long trip, confirm opening hours and entry rules with the venue.

If you spot a mistake

Every page except Contact, which has its own form, ends with “Spotted a mistake on this page?”. Tell us what is wrong there, with a link to a page that shows the right information if you have one. We use reports to check entries against their sources, and they are not published.