Safe Blackjack Casinos

Making sure that a blackjack casino is safe is the first thing you should do before you sign up. Nothing else matters. Not the bonuses, deposit options, games or graphics.

Aren’t these important things, too?

Sure. But I’ll tell you what; you won’t give those things another thought if an operator runs off with your money, or takes weeks or months to pay you your winnings. So safety, trust, reputation and reliability are far more important when it comes to choosing an online casino for your blackjack exploits.

The easiest (and fastest) way to find a safe blackjack site is to use our recommendations. Shameless plug, sure, but we take the time to review blackjack casinos so that you don’t have to. So if you want to save hours of your time and play blackjack within a couple of hours versus a couple of days, then selecting a casino from our list below is your best bet.

Further down the page you can learn more about what makes a blackjack site safe, how to spot and prevent signing up to rogue casinos.

Safe blackjack sites are going to have numerous things in common. These traits are 99% nonnegotiable. Safe blackjack sites…

• Are licensed. Operators have to meet and maintain a certain criteria in order to be licensed. They also have to pay fees, which can be as much as $25,000 (or more).
• Are tested for randomness. Casinos have companies come in and test their algorithms to make sure that the cards, dice, reels, etc are not fixed, but chosen randomly.
• Have secured and encrypted software. This is to prevent players from finding holes to exploit (like seeing cards), stealing player information and funds.
• Have a positive reputation. While no blackjack site is perfect, the best blackjack sites maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, complete transactions in a fast manner, are not known for scams or ripping off players and run fair games. The turnover rate for new casinos is high, so if a casino has been in business for a few years, they’ll usually be ok.
• Have responsive support. If it takes more than 24 hours to get back to a question or request (and that’s pushing it), then I wouldn’t consider that casino reliable.

This also sums up what makes any company reliable and safe to work with or use for a service. You should hold online casinos to the same standard.

There are a number of things you can do to prevent signing up to an unsafe blackjack site.

• Read reviews. Visit gaming forums and see what customers have to say about the casino you’re considering signing up to.
• Follow our recommendations. We don’t recommend rouge casinos, but casinos that have stood up to our review process. All of the casinos we recommend have great support, secure software and are licensed.
• Make sure the casino is licensed first. If the casino won’t pony up the time and money to get a license, how serious do you think they are about their business? What about your money?
• Make sure the domain name ends in .ag, .lv or .eu. This is (mostly) for US blackjack players. If you want to play at a casino that claims to accept US players, but has a .com, .net or .org for a domain name, I’d pass. The casino itself might be safe, but the fact that a .com domain name can be seized by the Dept. of Justice makes your funds unsafe.
• Test their support. See how long it takes for the casino to get back to you.
• Ask your friends or peers.
• Avoid new blackjack sites. At least until they’ve built some sort of positive reputation.
• Stick to blackjack sites that have been around for a couple of years. Sites that have been able to get past their first year, two or three, (usually) tend to stick around for a little while. They can accomplish that only if they’ve treated players well.

It’s not 100% possible to prevent signing up to an unsafe blackjack site. But there are tells that you can pick up on that will signal to you that an online casino is on a downward spiral. Here are things to watch out for:

• Support response time is progressively getting worse. If it used to take 4 hours to get a response, but is not taking 2 days to get a response and is getting worse, that could be a sign that a casino is failing.
• Support is giving you the runaround. I have first hand experience with this. If the casino constantly tells you that a solution is right around the corner, or that they’re working on it, and they’ve been working on it for days, weeks or months, that’s another sign a casino is having problems.
• Negative comments or reviews in forums, fan pages, tweets, etc. If a casino used to get positive reviews, but are now taking a turn for the worse, you’ll find out via social media outlets.
• Payments aren’t being made, or are taking a long time. If the casino used to take a few hours, days or weeks (depending on the method) to get your payment to you, but are now taking 2-4x longer (or worse), that’s another sign of a casino going downhill.
• Casinos that change terms on a whim (into their favor). This happens often in terms of bonus payments.
• They don’t pay affiliates. Most gambling affiliate programs are so-so, some worse than others. However, most pay. Those that don’t or start to slack in that area eventually do the same to customers. So paying attention to affiliate program reviews, forums and the like can be a good way to find out well in advance that a casino is no good. Then you can focus on getting your money back before sh-t hits the fan.

Of course, this isn’t an end all to casinos going rouge. Some casinos skip all this altogether and just pack up shop (almost literally) overnight, without telling or paying anyone. So you can’t always prevent signing up to or playing at a rouge casino. But with a trained eye, diligent review process and high standards, I think that you’ll find yourself at more safe blackjack sites than not.