EGR Awards ‘Best Casino Operator’ shortlist

If you’re anyone whose anyone in the online gambling industry, chances are you’re dusting off the old penguin suite, shining up the black dress shoes and confirming your flights to old London town.

Next week the EGR Awards, internet gambling’s equivalent of the Oscars, takes place and will crown winners in a number of I-gaming related categories.

From an online casino perspective, the big one…the ‘Best Picture’ if you will…is Best Casino Operator.  And the shortlisted nominees are…

• 888
• Bet365
• Paddy Power
• Party Casino
• Unibet
• 32 Red
• William Hill Online
• Sportingbet

Back in 1999 at Madison Square Garden, Lennox Lewis used Evander Holyfield as a human punching bag landing 349 blows to Holyfield’s 130, and he wasn’t judged the winner of the bout. 20 years ago Milli Vanilli beat out the likes of Neneh Cherry, Indigo Girls and Tone Lōc to win the Grammy for Best New Artist.  Hugh Grant has won a Best Actor BAFTA and Kevin Costner…well, the fact he’s won anything  proves my point.

And that point is, that judges quite often get it wrong.

Back to the EGR Awards it’s also worth noting that some of the event sponsors are corporations directly related to certain nominees.  Can you imagine the back-room politics going on there!  And if that doesn’t muddy the waters a little, many members of the judging panel have close connections with nominees as former holders of positions on their board of directors!

So the winner, and indeed the shortlisted nominees aren’t irrefutably the best online casinos in the world!

But to be fair, this also has to be said. Any casino that has been involved in any significant player scandals, whose integrity is regularly questioned at respected player forums, whose customer support is terrible or whose games aren’t licensed from the best platform providers in the industry wouldn’t stand a chance of getting on this list.

These are all very good operators, regardless of who gets the trophy.  Collectively they’ve serviced over 30 million registered player accounts.

And one final point that I’ve been dying to make since the start of this post….all but one is listed on Livedealer.org.  That one is Sportingbet and they only recently added live dealers and they also may soon merge with Unibet so we couldn’t see the point in adding them quite frankly!

No doubt about it…we know how to pick-em! 🙂

LD