Our methodology

What this methodology covers

Most methodology pages on gambling sites describe how casinos are scored. This one describes something different, and for a reference site it is the bigger job: establishing what the rules of a game actually are, deriving the arithmetic that follows from them, deciding which variant to explain, and deciding what to leave out.

That is where our own work lives. A house edge on this site is recomputed, not copied; a payout comparison is worked out from a paytable; a rule is traced to a published rule set rather than to the twenty affiliate pages repeating each other. The sections below set out how.

It sits alongside our editorial policy rather than duplicating it. That page covers sourcing standards, the pre-publication fact-check and how corrections are made. This one covers the research decisions that come before all of that.

The lines we hold

A method is easiest to describe by its limits, so here they are, stated plainly.

• We do not invent statistics. No survey we did not run, no sample size we did not have, no percentage we cannot derive.
• We do not publish a figure we cannot stand behind. Every probability and house-edge number here is recomputed from the rules of the variant being described. If it cannot be derived and checked, it does not go on the page.
• We do not treat other affiliate sites as sources. A figure repeated on twenty pages is not corroborated; it is one page, twenty times.
• We do not let commercial arrangements decide what a page says. The site is funded by affiliate commission, which our advertising disclosure sets out in full. What that money does not do is change a page: no rule, figure, warning or conclusion here has been added, softened or removed for a commercial reason, and the rules, strategy, glossary, payments and game pages carry no affiliate links at all.
• We do not claim credentials. Pages are bylined so you know who is answerable for one, but a byline here never carries a qualification, an accreditation, an award or a career history it does not have.

The operator lineup

Some pages here (the online-casino pages, the bonus and free-credit pages, real-money poker and poker apps) end in a numbered lineup of casino brands. Those are our commercial partners: operators we work with and are willing to put in front of readers. The links are affiliate links, they pay us a commission when a reader signs up, and the order reflects those partnerships. Every page that carries the lineup says next to it that these are partner operators and that a signup pays us; the arrangement is set out in full in our advertising disclosure. The pages that carry a lineup are indexed on the casinos page, if you want to see the whole of that side of the site at once.

What sits around it is short and plain. The lineup carries no review scores, no star ratings and no payout-speed claims, because we did not measure any of those things. It carries no offer figure either until our affiliate team has confirmed it with the operator, because a stale bonus number is the most common way gambling sites mislead people. And a partnership buys a place in the lineup and nothing else: not a rule page, not a comparison, not a softened warning.

What this page describes is the other half of the work, and the larger one: games, their rules, the arithmetic that follows from them, and the payment rails people in Malaysia actually use.

Where the rules come from

A game's rules are established before a page is drafted, not while it is being written. In order of preference we work from:

1. Published rule sets and long-settled casino procedure. Blackjack, baccarat and the standard poker variants all have rules that are fixed, public and consistent across serious sources. Where a governing body or a widely accepted published rule text exists, that is the reference.
2. The structure of the game itself. Much of what a reader needs is not a rule at all but a consequence of one: how many hands beat a flush, how often the dealer busts showing a six. That is derived, not looked up.
3. Documented regional and house variation. For games that are genuinely folk-transmitted, described below.

What we do not treat as a source is another affiliate site. Card-game content on the open web copies itself relentlessly, and a figure repeated on twenty pages is not corroborated. It is one page, twenty times. Where a claim can only be traced to other content sites, it does not go on the page.

Where reputable sources genuinely disagree, we say so. In practice most apparent disagreements dissolve on inspection: two sources are describing two different rule sets and neither says which.

How the numbers are checked

Every probability, house-edge and payout figure on this site is treated as a claim that has to survive three questions before it is published.

Can it be derived? Combinatorics and house edge follow from the composition of the deck, the number of decks in the shoe, the drawing rules and the paytable. Those are recomputed from the rules rather than copied from a source, because recomputing it is the only way to know it is right for the variant we are describing.

What conditions does it depend on? A bare percentage is treated as an error here even when the number is correct, because almost every figure in these games is conditional. Baccarat's banker bet carries a house edge of about 1.06% with an eight-deck shoe and the standard 5% commission; change the deck count or the commission and the figure moves. Blackjack basic strategy is not one chart but a family of them, and whether the dealer hits or stands on soft 17 changes both the correct play and the edge. So a number is published with the rule set it belongs to attached, or it is not published.

Does it survive rounding honestly? Figures are given to the precision they actually have. Two decimal places on a house edge is meaningful; the same precision on something estimated is false precision, and we would rather write "a little over 1%" than manufacture digits.

Payout ratios get particular attention, because they are the one number a player can see at the table and act on. Where a variant pays worse (blackjack at 6:5 instead of 3:2 is the standing example), the page says so and says what it costs.

Variants and house rules

This is where most card-game writing quietly goes wrong, and it matters more in Malaysia than in most markets, because several of the games people here actually grew up playing have no single authority behind them. Big Two is dealt one way in one family and another way three streets over. Niu Niu and San Gong carry local scoring conventions. There is no committee to appeal to.

The rule we follow is: name the variant, then note the variation. A page states which version of the game it is explaining, explains that version completely, and then lists the common local departures from it rather than pretending they do not exist. Where a variation changes the maths, the page says which direction it moves in.

Two related habits follow from the same principle. We do not average away a disagreement between two rule sets into a vague middle that describes neither. And where a house rule is common but bad for the player, the page says that too — a reference that only ever reports neutrally is not much use at a table.

How we decide what to cover

Subjects are chosen by what readers in Malaysia are actually trying to find out, which we judge from search demand and from what people write to us and ask for. Where an English term is what people search, whether poker hands, free credit or flush, the pages use that term, because a reference that insists on formal translations of words nobody uses is a reference nobody finds.

A page is only written when we can say something complete about the subject. The test is the one we apply to every draft: if you read the page and still could not sit down and play the game, it has failed, whatever its length. That test rules out the thin overview page that circles a topic without teaching it, which is the standard failure mode of this genre.

The three language versions are written separately against the same subject and the same standard. None is a translation of another, because the way a rule is explained in Malay is not the way it is explained in English.

The limits of all this

A method is only worth publishing if it also says where it runs out. Ours runs out in three places.

We cannot audit the inside of a gambling business: how quickly it pays, how it handles a dispute, whether its games are certified to the standard it claims. So we publish no claims about any of that. Our operator lineup tells you who our partners are; it is not a laboratory report, and no site's list is.

Folk games have no definitive text. However carefully a page documents Big Two, someone's family plays it differently, and that family is not wrong.

And nothing here can be a guide to whether to play. We can tell you the house edge on a bet and we can tell you plainly that no betting pattern overcomes it. The Martingale does not, and a baccarat roadmap predicts nothing, because past results do not change future odds. What we cannot do is make that decision for you.

If any of this looks wrong to you, that is worth an email: corrections@pokokpedia.com.