Meister Awards 2025
Best and Worst in Online Gambling
As tradition dictates, each year in January, we hand out 13 awards, spanning the best, the worst, and forum-only categories.
Assembled with forum input and more moderation hours than we dare to count, now we present to you the full list of winners from the Casinomeister 2025 Awards.
The Best
Casino of the Year 2025
Best Customer Service 2025
Best Casino Manager 2025
Best Player Experience 2025
Best New Casino 2025
Casino of the Year 2025 — 3Dice
Of all the traditional Casinomeister awards, Casino of the Year is usually the toughest to decide, since the forum has many long-standing accredited partners who may not get much attention throughout the year.
Why?
Simply because they fly under the radar by doing everything right, and this certainly applies to 3Dice in 2025. Their overall service is exemplary, and perhaps that explains the longevity of their players, many of whom have been customers there for over a decade.
3Dice offers a superb casino account interface, their own bespoke software (including all the slot games), tournaments, and complimentary chips/bonuses to their users, which often have favourable wagering requirements. When you weigh all that up and add in superb customer service, fast cash-outs, and one of the most popular and diligent reps CM has ever seen, Anna 3Dice, there’s little else we can add here. They set the bar very high, and few others come close.
The other two finalists here were the excellent AllBritish Casino and the new kids on the block, Slots Temple. To shade it from those two was an achievement in itself, so our congratulations, not for the first time, to 3Dice, Casinomeister Casino of the Year 2025!
Best Customer Service 2025 — L&L Group
Providing great customer service should be the aim of all operators in the casino industry, but sadly, that is not always the case. In an average week, Casinomeister receives many gripes, groans, and complaints from members about poor or non-existent customer service.
However, for many operators on the forum, this is not the case. The likes of Videoslots, 3Dice, Betreels, and Slots Temple are examples of operators with very few issues. When something does crop up, it is typically dealt with quickly and with minimal fuss.
There is, however, one operator/group that does appear to have mastered the dark arts of very good customer service, and that is L&L Group, managed by Jan. Anything that comes Jan’s way is swiftly dealt with politely and calmly. We regularly have members start new threads just to thank Jan and his team for their help in resolving a specific issue. Whether it is All British, Quickbet, Hyper Casino, or any of the other L&L brands, Jan is quickly on the case to resolve whatever issue has popped up.
L&L Group is definitely a worthy winner of the Best Customer Service Award 2025.
Best Casino Manager 2025 — Kevin, Slots Temple
This award winner was selected to recognize the sheer dedication of someone tasked with operating and developing the fledgling casino Slots Temple, despite the convoluted processes involved. To successfully navigate this while simultaneously performing rep duties on Casinomeister and going through the accreditation process speaks volumes about their industry and energy!
Kevin managed to arrange a quite detailed forum comp and answered player queries promptly, alongside the other tasks above, in what must have been a very challenging year.
So it just remains to say his effort and management resulted in Slots Temple’s accreditation, happy players, and Kevin’s justifiable selection as Best Casino manager 2025!
Best Player Experience 2025 — Disputed £170k withdrawal from BetMGM
Deserving of their own award is the team that works on the Player Arbitration (PABs) at Casinomeister. During 2025, they managed to recover over €1m for players who had money stuck in accounts or were being withheld by an operator.
One such example towered over the rest when a player who was struggling with a withdrawal from BetMGM for the princely sum of £170,000 stepped onto the forum in February. They had hit the MGM Millions Wheel jackpot whilst playing The Goodies slot, and all seemed to be going well. But when the funds stopped appearing in the player’s account and the casino was becoming increasingly awkward, he quickly reached out for help on the forum. The PAB team got straight on the case, and within 24 hours, the player reported that payments had restarted. In the end, this player got every single penny of his £170k win. It was a huge relief for the player, and the team was very pleased to have helped recover the funds. This was just one of hundreds of cases the PAB team worked tirelessly on in 2025.
Best New Casino 2025 — Slots Temple
This was the easiest award to settle this year, and just seeing the winner’s name will be self-explanatory to many CM forum members.
Slots Temple was formerly an affiliate site that made the brave decision not only to open an online casino, but to service perhaps the most highly taxed and regulated market of them all, the UK. Then they pledged to offer only top-RTP slot games to their customers, even as almost all others were reducing RTP to offset increased costs and taxes. Their strategy was not to offer one-time-only headline bonuses to new players who might take them and run, but to offer activity-based rewards and free tournaments on an ongoing basis.
In their first year, they have added slot games to their portfolio based on player requests, a great Halloween comp for the forum, and an active and helpful site rep in Kevin ST. The player feedback on the forum is testament to their popularity and player loyalty, but, in a way, it is also a sad reminder that, in today’s environment of site closures and consolidation, new casinos like Slots Temple are the exception to the norm.
We have now welcomed HollywoodBets, who, although relatively new to the forum, are in fact an established site.
So we toast a breath of fresh air with the arrival of Slots Temple and are delighted to award them Best New Casino 2025 status!
Wooden Spoon Award 2025 — Del Oro Casino
Well, Del Oro casino, a new crypto outfit, came on board at the end of 2024 and left a trail of destruction in its wake in early 2025. For a casino that initially had a friendly face and seemingly genuine ambition to join the accredited list, like a thunderstorm appearing in blue skies, the atmosphere was darkened in an instant. The rep had sock puppet accounts so they could talk to themselves about how good they were. That was before they went into pre-mod for not following the rules on what they could claim in their promotional posts. If you thought overseeing them like a child was as far as it went, think again!
Offering play to unlicensed jurisdictions, confiscating 12,000 unjustifiably from a player, then taking six weeks to tell the PaB team why, and after feigning innocence, blaming an employee, and ultimately the player. Once they were booted from the forum, they tried to recruit a member to be their rep, but by then, this rotten apple had truly been thrown out of the barrel.
They also have the dubious distinction of coming onboard at CM with the intention of accreditation and achieving the absolute opposite, ending up in the rogue pit!
If ever there was a worthy winner of a Casinomeister Wooden Spoon Award, Del Oro is the one.
Fall From Grace Award 2025 — Bitcasino
Out front this year for the Fall From Grace Award is Bitcasino. They arrived in November 2024, full of promise and energy. This crypto casino ran regular promos and had an engaging and active rep.
Then, out of the blue, in November 2025, the rep reached out to the team to let us know they were stepping down and that there would be no replacement. It is our understanding that the rep did not receive wages for several months, and something was very wrong. No new rep has been installed, while the previous rep and the brands remain in some sort of limbo on Casinomeister.
The Fall From Grace seems appropriate after their hardworking rep got both bitcasino.io and sportsbet.io through a Baptism By Fire (BBF) and worked very hard to build up a trustworthy presence for this company on the forum… and then it all went up in smoke.
Not in the running for this award, but still worth mentioning… one of the industry giants had a bit of a trip and stumbled as far as Casinomeister is concerned.
Bet365 was downgraded from our accredited casino list. The main reason was an unwillingness to provide a rep to engage with the forum or any player issues/complaints. Very much a ‘talk to the hand’ situation.
Of course, their profits remain intact, but it’s just such a shame to see such a reputable brand choose to ignore the community here at Casinomeister.
Weirdest Casino Name 2025 — FlashDash Casino
Now it’s commonplace for new casinos to appear that have ludicrous-sounding names. We accept that some of these may arise from the operators not being native English speakers, so it’s possible they aren’t realizing that joining two words that, in and of themselves, are pretty innocuous.
But FlashDash, well, what image does that conjure up to you? Walking through the park when a seedy-looking man in a raincoat does the unspeakable, and then dashes off into the bushes? If it does, then you know why they are worthy winners here. That’s notwithstanding the fact that they are the sort of outfit you would want to dash away from anyway!
Other notable names are DuckDice — do you duck when someone hurls dice at you, or are they dice that use ducks instead of dots? Jimmywinner — do you win a bloke called Jimmy? Or do only people called Jimmy ever win their games? HelloFortune Casino has, alas, appeared in a PAB dispute, and the complainant inevitably renamed them GoodbyeMoney! As for SimpleCasino, we won’t even go there.
Biggest Disappointment of 2025 — UK Gambling Tax Hikes
The biggest disappointment category seldom conjures up a single straightforward event we can all relate to.
There were even signs of hope last year when the justifiably maligned jurisdiction of Curacao reformed its licensing system, getting rid of the four /JAZ masters and introducing a more transparent system of annual licences for each operator. These actions inevitably increased casino registrations from budget operators with ‘licensors’ under two newer, flaccid, bargain-basement flags of convenience, namely Anjouan and Tobique (the former somewhere in the Comoros Islands and the latter somewhere in the Canadian outback).
So on the opposite end of the scale, perhaps the most highly regulated market, the UK, has also seen action disadvantageous to players — a huge tax hike in the NGR (Net Gaming Revenue) for online gambling operators. This went up 60% from the operator’s perspective (25% to 40%) and will ultimately be paid for by players through product shrinkage. By that, we mean reduced RTP on games so casinos can continue to operate at any level of profitability.
The golden goose has been slain by the chancellor, well and truly. So the exodus to unlicensed or crypto sites from the UK will accelerate, and revenues will do the opposite soon after.
Brilliant forward thinking there and duly wins the Biggest Disappointment of 2025 badge.
Worst Player Experience 2025 — Santeda International B.V.
Sadly, a year cannot pass in the casino industry without a good helping of scum-baggery coming from casinos that are operating for all the wrong reasons.
Without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest scam going around the industry is Black Hole Casinos. We encourage every player to read our warning about Black Hole Casinos and the dangers they pose to players. These sites will swallow your money and vanish into the void, leaving no trace and no recourse for players who’ve been robbed. Chansino, Wovebet Casino, and Winner Club Casino are just a few involved in this deceitful and underhanded practice.
However, we would like to award the worst Player Experience 2025 to Santeda International B.V. Their casinos popped up countless times in PABs for non-payment and questionable business practices. Seeking to create confusion by using multiple different URLs, many with an extra number at the beginning or end, was a common theme.
Casinomeister also had to issue a warning about Santeda for disappearing funds in players’ accounts, confiscated balances, and allegations of accepting bets from minors.
Definitely a worthy winner of the not-so coveted Worst Player Experience award.
Best Casino Rep 2025 — Jan, L&L
Here at Casinomeister, we are blessed with some fantastic reps who do great work every day at the forum. Notable candidates for this award include @EGO, @Team.Videoslots, @3Dice, and @Mark_Lottomart. They have all put in a sterling effort in 2025 and are rightly praised for their polite, efficient responses to anything that comes their way. And when you see some of the stuff they have to deal with, you will understand that it is not an easy task.
Standing tall in this category and picking up the Best Casino Rep for 2025 is @L&L-Jan for his tireless efforts on the forum. Jan ‘lives and breathes’ this industry, and it shows in his work. A regular player and an occasional contributor to winning screenshots, Jan suffers no fools. Any problems that come his way are typically resolved with minimal fuss and normally result in some well-deserved praise on the forum.
Member Kudos 2025 — paul7388
A ‘paleomeister,’ meaning he’s part of the Casinomeister furniture, @paul7388, enters his twelfth year as an active forum member with around 7,000 posts spread over those years. Despite the inclement Scottish weather, a sense of humour is evident throughout his posting, and he has provided input on numerous threads where experience with certain slots and casinos is important.
Only a tiny fraction of new forum members eventually achieve the ‘green’ status on their username, but they are the framework around which the forum is built. We value their presence and the knowledge they bring to the community.
A well-deserved big shout-out and many thanks to paul7388 — Member Kudos 2025 winner!
Funniest Thread 2025 — Gambling Event on a Nudist Campground
On a random Monday morning in late November, a member going by the name of @meandhim arrived on the forum with a rather unusual concept. They wanted advice on how to organise a gambling event at a nudist campground.
First on the scene was our very own @maxd, who couldn’t work out if the whole thing was a wind-up. Other members jumped in with WTF memes and other questions as the forum tried to get its head around what was going on.
It wasn’t long before the OP was sharing some photos of her and her husband and their nudist hobby. Many of the members played along, offering suggestions about how they could organise this supposed gambling event, with some useful practical advice. @ultra100 commented that ‘card games’ could work, as ‘no pockets or sleeves for cheating’.
The thread amassed thousands of impressions and four pages of comments. It was perfectly summed up in a comment by L&L Jan: “And after 13-ish years on CM, I thought I’ve seen it all!”
It mustn’t be forgotten that the rep from DelORO Casino gave the members at Casinomeister hours of entertainment as he did everything he could to whisk players off to their casino, using every trick in the book. After being neutered by the moderators, this poor rep ran out of steam and was eventually let go (we believe) by the owners. He will be missed, but not that much.