The five criteria
Every position on this site comes from the same five criteria, weighted as shown. The weightings are published because a ranking you cannot audit is only an assertion.
| Criterion | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Terms you can check | 30% | Whether the welcome offer, its code, its rollover multiple and its minimum deposit are all on record, and crucially whether the rollover is scoped to the product it belongs to. An unscoped multiple is worth less than a smaller scoped one. |
| Wisconsin access | 25% | Whether the operator's own restricted-state instructions include Wisconsin, and how much of the rest of the country it accepts. Taken from the operator lineup, with the date on the row. |
| Cost of entry | 20% | The minimum deposit. How cheaply a reader can test an operator before committing anything matters more in an unregulated market than in a licensed one. |
| Value of the headline | 15% | What the advertised percentage is worth once the multiple, the ceiling and the deposit needed to reach it are applied. |
| Ongoing offers | 10% | Whether anything recurs after the welcome. A season is longer than a sign-up. |
How the checking actually works
This is documentary work and we would rather describe it plainly than dress it up. Brands, running order and restricted-state instructions come from our operator lineup. Welcome figure, bonus code, rollover multiple and minimum deposit come from our bonus source, and each is recorded with the date it was read. When we re-check, we re-check the whole set rather than the rows that look stale, and we publish the result even when the result is that nothing moved.
Where a figure is not published anywhere we can cite, we write that it is not published. We do not estimate it, and we do not borrow the same brand's figure from another country's offer sheet, because a percentage that was never offered to a US customer is not a fact about this market.
What we deliberately do not score
- Payout speed. We have not timed a withdrawal at these operators, so no page here carries a payout-time column and no review claims one. It is the most quoted and least verifiable number in this market.
- Odds, line movement and market depth. We have not priced a market or compared a line across books, so nothing here says one operator prices better, runs deeper props or offers more in-play markets than another.
- Betting limits. Not published by these operators in any form we can cite.
- Which licence a named brand holds, unless it was checked against the issuing regulator's own register on a date we can give. An unverified licence attribution is the most damaging error a page like this can make.
Ratings and the merit curve
Star ratings are set on a descending curve across the whole lineup rather than awarded in isolation, so 4.9 means first of fifteen on these criteria and not an absolute score. Sub-scores inside a review are marked out of ten against the same five criteria, which is why an operator can score 9.5 on Wisconsin access and 6.5 on what it fails to publish in the same card.
One operator in the lineup carries no welcome offer at all. Its welcome terms were scored on nothing rather than scored as zero, and its position reflects the criteria we could actually apply to it.
What a ranking here is not
It is not a safety rating and it is not a legal opinion. Every operator we rank is licensed outside the United States, none is licensed or supervised in Wisconsin, and no ordering of them changes that. Ranking first on these criteria means an operator publishes terms you can check and accepts Wisconsin sign-ups. It does not mean a Wisconsin regulator will help you if something goes wrong, because none will.
Independence
Some links here are commercial and are marked at the foot of every page. Commercial terms do not reach the people writing, no operator has been moved up for paying more, and no operator sees a review before it publishes. If an operator's terms get worse, its position falls, and the criteria above are the reason we can say that and be held to it.
Corrections
Welcome figures move and restricted-state lists move. If something here is out of date or wrong, write to editorial@pewaukeegolfclub.com with the page and the operator, and we will re-check it against source and re-date the row.