How We Calculate Casino Similarity

What is a similarity score?

Each casino pairing gets a score from 0 to 1, split into four bands: Perfect match (0.80–1.00) — nearly identical casinos across licences, payment methods, bonus profile, and focus; Good match (0.60–0.79) — strong alternatives with minor differences in bonus type or market focus; Fair match (0.40–0.59) — partial overlap on licences or payment methods but a notably different bonus setup; Low match (0.00–0.39) — quite different, an unlikely alternative for most players. One caveat: casinos with no active bonus at all don't appear in similarity results, since they can't be fairly compared on a factor that matters this much to players.

What we compare — the 24 criteria

The 24 criteria fall into two groups. Casino Fundamentals account for 61% of the total score: licences held (~15%), deposit methods (~10%), withdrawal methods (~10%), casino categories (~8%), game providers (5%), supported currencies (5%), interface languages (4%), operating company (3%), restricted countries (2%), casino type (2%), overall rating (0.5%), year founded (0.25%), and minimum deposit (0.25%). Bonus Programme makes up the remaining 39%: number of no-deposit bonuses (8%), NDB quality score (7%), NDB generosity score (6%), total bonus count (4%), overall bonus quality (3%), bonus specialisation/NDB focus (2%), overall bonus generosity (2%), deposit bonus focus (1.5%), and bonus types, categories, and free-spins focus (0.5% each).

Because every casino accepting Australian players is, by definition, operating under an offshore licence — commonly Curaçao or Malta — the licensing comparison does a lot of heavy lifting here, since it's the clearest signal of how an operator handles disputes when there's no local regulator like the ACMA to step in.

If a casino is missing data on a criterion — say, no game provider information on file — that weight is redistributed automatically across the remaining factors, so the total always adds up to 100%.

Bonus specialisation — what it is and why it matters

A headline bonus count doesn't tell the whole story. We classify each casino's bonus focus into one of five bands: NDB-focused (50%+ no-deposit), NDB-friendly (30–49% no-deposit), Deposit-focused (70%+ deposit bonuses), Free spins-focused (60%+ bonuses include free spins, the go-to for slots players), or Balanced (no single type dominates).

Two casinos can post near-identical totals while sitting at opposite ends of the focus spectrum — and for Australian players comparing alternatives, that focus difference is usually more noticeable in day-to-day play than the raw bonus count ever is.

How the maths works

We use one of two formulas depending on whether a criterion is a list or a number.

For lists: Jaccard similarity — Similarity = Shared items ÷ All unique items combined. Used for licences, payment methods (including AUD-friendly options like POLi and PayID), game providers, bonus types, and currencies. Example: Casino A offers Deposit, Free Spins, and NDB bonuses; Casino B offers Deposit, Free Spins, and Cashback — 2 shared of 4 unique items combined, a similarity of 0.50.

For numbers: proportional distance — Similarity = 1 − (difference ÷ maximum difference in database). Example: Casino A has 38 bonuses, Casino B has 35, and the widest spread across the database is 64 — that's 1 − (3 ÷ 64) = 0.95.

For bonus focus: percentage distance — Similarity = 1 − |Casino A % − Casino B %| ÷ 100. Two casinos at 21% and 23% NDB score 0.98; two casinos at 21% and 66% NDB score just 0.55.

A real-world example

Take a balanced reference casino with 38 active bonuses, 8 of them no-deposit (a 21% NDB rate). Here's how three alternatives stack up:

• KatsuBet — 35 bonuses, 8 no-deposit (23%), Deposit-focused → 0.73
• LevelUp Casino — 29 bonuses, 19 no-deposit (66%), NDB-focused → 0.71
• Bitstarz — 20 bonuses, 9 no-deposit (45%), NDB-friendly → 0.70

KatsuBet ranks highest because its bonus count and NDB volume line up closest with the reference casino, despite a slightly different overall bonus mix. LevelUp Casino has a bigger raw number of no-deposit bonuses, but 66% of its entire programme is NDB-driven — meaning it's a different type of casino altogether, not just a bigger version of the same one — which is what pulls its score down next to KatsuBet's. These scores update automatically whenever a casino's bonuses, payment methods, or licences change, so what you're looking at always reflects current data.

Why licences carry the most weight

Licensing makes up roughly 15% of the total score, the single biggest factor in the whole calculation. With no domestic licensing option for online casinos under Australian law, the offshore regulator behind a casino tells you far more about withdrawal reliability and complaint handling than matching game libraries ever could. It's also the hardest data point for an operator to fake or change overnight, which is why it anchors the comparison.

Payment methods come next at roughly 10% each for deposits and withdrawals. For most Australian players, a genuinely useful alternative is one that supports the same AUD banking rails — PayID, POLi, or a familiar e-wallet — rather than one that forces a whole new deposit process to learn.