Editorial policy

Why this page exists

Pokokpedia is a reference. The only reason to use a reference is that you trust what it tells you, and trust in a card-game site is easy to lose: publish one wrong drawing rule and every other page becomes suspect. This page sets out how we try to earn that trust, in enough detail that you can hold us to it.

These are commitments about process, not claims about prestige. We list no awards or accreditations, because we have none to list. Our commercial partnerships are a separate matter and are set out on the advertising disclosure.

What we publish, and what we do not

Our subject is how card and table games work: rules, procedure, odds, and the reasoning behind good decisions. Within that subject we publish anything genuinely useful, including material that is unflattering to the games themselves.

Outside it, we publish nothing at all. In particular:

• No casino reviews and no recommendations. Some pages carry a list of casino brands, and those are affiliate links in an order our affiliate team sets on commercial terms. We do not publish operator reviews or ratings, and a position in that list is not editorial advice to use a particular brand. The independence section below sets this out in full.
• No unconfirmed bonus, offer or promotion figure. A figure appears against a brand only once our affiliate team has confirmed it.
• No winning systems. We will not describe a betting pattern as reliable, guaranteed or profitable, because none is.
• No invented experience. We do not write "we tested", "our players report" or any similar first-person claim about work that was not done.
• No invented credentials. Our pages are bylined, so you always know which editor is answerable for one. What a byline never carries is a qualification, an accreditation, an award, a former employer, a length of career or a link to an outside profile — none of which we could evidence, and all of which are trivially faked.

How a page is researched

Every page begins with the rules of the game, gathered from published rule sets rather than from other websites. Where a game has a governing body, a long-established casino procedure or a widely accepted published rule text, that is what we work from. Where a game is genuinely folk-transmitted (as Big Two and several other Asian card games are), we say so, describe the variant we are explaining, and note the common local variations instead of pretending one version is definitive.

Numbers are treated differently from prose. Probabilities, combinations and payout comparisons are derived from the structure of the game itself: the composition of a 52-card deck, the number of decks in the shoe, the paytable in force. They are recomputed rather than copied. A figure we cannot derive or verify does not go on the page.

Where reputable sources genuinely disagree, we say that they disagree. That happens more often than beginners expect, usually because two sources are quietly describing two different rule sets.

How facts are checked before publication

Before a page goes live it is checked against a fixed list. The list is short on purpose, because these are the things that actually go wrong:

• Hand rankings. Verified against the standard order, including the ties and the split rules. In standard poker, suits do not rank; where a game does rank suits, the page says so explicitly.
• Procedure. Deal order, who acts first, forced bets, and the end-of-round conditions, read through as if dealing an actual hand.
• Deterministic rules. Fixed tables such as baccarat's player and banker drawing rules are checked entry by entry, because they are non-obvious and a single wrong row is invisible to a casual reader.
• Every number carries its conditions. A house-edge or probability figure is published together with the rule set it belongs to: deck count, dealer rule on soft 17, payout ratio, commission. A bare percentage with no conditions attached is treated as an error even when the number happens to be right.
• Payout ratios. Checked against the paytable being described, with worse variants named as worse. Blackjack paying 6:5 instead of 3:2 is a real and measurable difference to the player, and the pages here say so.
• No unsupported claim survives. Anything that cannot be derived, cited or directly demonstrated is cut before publication rather than softened with hedging language.

Two failure modes get specific attention because they are so common in gambling writing. The first is the gambler's fallacy, the belief that past results change future odds. The second is the progression system, of which the Martingale is the best-known. Where a page touches either, it must correct it rather than repeat it.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. The policy is to fix them quickly and visibly rather than quietly.

How to report an error. Email corrections@pokokpedia.com with the page address and what you believe is wrong. A short note is enough; you do not need to prove your case, though a source helps us move faster. We read every report, including the ones that turn out to be mistaken.

What happens next. We check the claim against the sources described above. If it holds up, we fix the page. If it does not, we leave the page alone and, where the reader gave us a way to reply, explain why.

How corrections are shown. How visible a correction is depends on what was wrong:

• A factual error (a wrong rule, ranking, probability or payout) is corrected in the text and a dated correction note is added to the foot of that page saying what was wrong and what it now says. The note stays there permanently. We do not delete the record of a mistake.
• A substantial rewrite or a change of conclusion is treated the same way, with the same dated note.
• Typos, broken links, formatting and other cosmetic fixes are made silently. The page's last-updated date still moves.

Every page shows a published date and a last-updated date, so you can always see how recently it was touched.

Keeping pages current

Rules of play change slowly, which is one of the pleasures of writing about them. A correct explanation of how a straight beats three of a kind will still be correct in ten years. Other things move faster: which table variants are commonly offered, the paytables in use, and anything touching law or regulation.

Pages are reviewed when something material changes, when a reader reports a problem, and on a periodic sweep of the whole site. A page that is reviewed and found still correct has its updated date moved and nothing else.

Independence and how the site is funded

Pokokpedia is funded by affiliate commission. Some pages carry a list of casino brands: the online-casino pages, the bonus and free-credit pages, real-money poker and poker apps. If you open an account through one of those links we are paid. Every one of those links is marked rel="sponsored nofollow" and carries a tracking ID, so it is machine-readable as a paid link as well as labelled on the page.

Two things about that list, stated plainly:

• The order is commercial. It is set by our affiliate team and reflects our partnerships, not an editorial score. This site publishes no operator ratings, star scales or review scores of any kind.
• Offer figures go up when they are confirmed. No bonus amount, wagering requirement, minimum deposit or promo code appears against a brand until the affiliate team confirms it. A stale bonus number is the most common way gambling sites mislead people, and it is not a mistake worth making for the sake of filling a column.

What that money does not buy is the rest of the site. The rules, strategy, glossary, payments and individual game pages carry no affiliate links, and no commercial arrangement decides what any page says. A house edge is whatever the arithmetic gives; where a common bet or a popular system is bad for the player we say so, including on the pages that carry the list.

Beyond that we take no money from anyone. There is no display advertising, no ad network and no pop-ups, we do not sell links or publish contributed articles, and the site sets no cookies and runs no analytics. Full detail is in our advertising disclosure.

Current funding arrangements: commission paid by gambling operators when a reader signs up through one of our links.

Use of writing tools

Drafting tools, including AI assistance, may be used in producing pages on this site. That changes nothing about who is accountable: every published page is a human editorial decision, and every factual claim on it goes through the checks described above before it is published. A tool cannot be a source, and no figure appears on the site because a model produced it.

Contact the editors

Corrections, disagreements, requests for a topic we have not covered, or a note that a page is confusing: hello@pokokpedia.com. Published by Pokok Games Ltd..