About Pilot's Friend

Pilot's Friend is an independent editorial project run by a small Canadian team focused on the variable that determines long-term outcomes more than any other: Return to Player (RTP). The phrase 'best paying casino' is one of the most heavily marketed and least precisely measured claims in the online gambling industry. Our role is to cut through the marketing copy and identify platforms whose published RTP figures are backed by third-party audits and whose actual session outcomes match expectations.

We are not an operator and we are not owned by one. Income comes from referral commissions paid by the casino brands we feature, but our ranking criteria — licence credibility verified on the regulator's public register, eCOGRA/iTech Labs/GLI audited portfolio RTP, individual game RTP verification, wagering requirement reasonableness, and the AskGamblers/Casino Guru complaint-resolution history — are applied uniformly to every operator. When a casino fails our criteria, it does not appear on our list.

Our lead reviewer, Jake Wells, and the editorial team open real accounts at every casino we list, complete KYC verification on registration day, deposit, play through documented spin samples to compare empirical returns against published RTP, request a minimum-threshold withdrawal, and document each step. Every claim on this site — from "River Belle's audited 96.76% portfolio RTP" to "Blood Suckers II returned 94.04% over 500 tracked spins" — comes from a documented test, not from a vendor marketing sheet.

Payout performance changes when casinos update game catalogs, switch testing labs, or alter their bonus terms. We re-test our top picks on a rolling quarterly schedule. If something on this page no longer matches what you see at the operator, let us know via the contact form.