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Bryan Bailey, founder of Casinomeister.com
Interview
Bryan Bailey
The Industry Watchdog
by Ian Sherrington
June 2025
Series – The Online Gambling Industry
The Paperwork – Jurisdictions, Legal and Compliance
The Casinomeister is who you call
Who Are You Gonna Call?
Bryan Bailey is a seminal figure in the online gambling industry, best known as the founder of Casinomeister.com, a platform he launched in June 1998.
Initially a hobby project, Casinomeister evolved into the world’s leading authority on online casino fairness and player advocacy.
After 25 years of processing player feedback (read: complaints) and building trust with operators and suppliers, Bryan must have assembled the fattest address book in the industry.
Not only that, Bryan’s efforts in promoting fair play earned him recognition, including a Lifetime Achievement Award at the iGB Affiliate Awards in 2022 .
After his recent retirement and as part of my series of articles about the online gambling industry, I had the chance to chat with Bryan an to document some of his story. Here’s what the man says.
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Welcome to the Internet…
Ian: What was the beginning of your journey on the internet?
Bryan: It really started for me in San Diego in the mid 1990s. I was working on a Master of Fine Arts at San Diego State University, and working as an assistant professor teaching Creative Writing, English Lit., and English Comp 101. The task at hand was how to teach students short stories and criticisms using Power Point presentations. It was all new, and I was able to hone some basic skills with MS Paint and the shareware version of Photoshop.
The Internet was mostly bulletin board services which you’d dial up directly via your modem. Then came the browsers. I was fascinated with HTML – how simple it was to create a webpage, and add an image – voila, a website! I bought my first “How to” HTML book (which I still have), and I began experimenting. Using my knowledge of creating images with Photoshop, I was able to successfully create HTML pages and began designing my first websites in Notepad. One of my first webpages was about the Frankenstein castle in Germany. It’s still live here: https://blitz21.com/frankenstein/
Pirates are everywhere
Ian: How did you become aware of online gambling or gambling in general?
Bryan: While teaching in San Diego, I was also working at a translation firm that was translating websites. I knew enough HTML and had Photoshop skills that allowed me to recreate translated images, and replace the content with the translated text. We had taken on a client (World Gaming I believe) in early 1998 – we translated their casino webpages – which were real cheesy, and subsequently they failed to pay us. I chalked it up to crooks online – and we had to take that hit on the chin.
It was about then that we had a meeting with some folks from a local land based casino in San Diego, who wanted an online presence. They had a couple of casino sites, the Joy Luck Club and Australia Casino I think – these were Cryptologic sites, and we were in discussions about a European language translation (five languages) which was a bit pricey. They were acting a little apprehensive saying that the price was high and “how would anyone know that we’re the good guys – a proper casino, not a crooked joint out of the Caribbean?” which got me thinking…I told them that I could build a website showcasing their casino as one of the good guys, and a list of crap casinos (like the ones that didn’t pay us for the translations) as the bad guys. I’d name it “Casinomeister” and set this up on the world wide web.
Casinomeister.com was unique in its approach. Click on the image to open up an old edition via archive.org
I thought the word Casinomeister was the best fit. Americans know the word “meister” (Jagermeister, Beermeister, grillmeister, etc.), so it sounded natural to me.
Websites in 1998 were very simple – a home page, a contact us page, and maybe some content like a guest book, some news, and maybe a forum. Casinomeister to me was merely a hobby website. I had not a clue about gambling, much less about gambling online. I used to go to Vegas in the 90s for the buffets only. So I started the forum as a means to gather more information about this “hobby”. “Post your tips, tricks and advice on how to play online” I’d ask, and lo and behold – visitors would open up accounts in the forum and share their ideas. It was marvelous since I was quite the lost puppy.
To me, there was no reason to have a website if it had no way to communicate with folks. So that began the forum – (many of these early pages are still there in the forum’s archives). And another thing began to happen. People started posting complaints about not being paid. Instead of letting these posts just linger, I was always keen on assisting folks and adding value to my website. So I would simply look for the casino in question and send an email to the casino support – which in most cases were the owners. Most of these casino operators were adamant to take care of their players – and they also reached a swift conclusion that to squelch player problems in public was good for business. This was the catalyst of our community – and it grew to what it is today.
“If I was going to do this, then it had better be fun”
In November 1999, I found myself back in Germany and within a few months I found out I was working for a dot bomb company. I was jobless and had a load of obligations – a wife and two kids and an ex-wife and three more kids, so it was imperative that I come up with a plan. And yep, necessity is truly the mother of invention. I had this website that was getting some traffic. I had already figured out that I could sell ad space, and so far this was merely supplemental income. So I figured if I put 100% of my effort into this website, I could make it work.
I could not care less about gambling. Sure I liked playing Black Jack as a kid for matchsticks, or five card stud with my siblings – but as an adult, casinos and gambling were not on my life radar. So the first challenge was how to make this website interesting for me – so I could stick it out in the long run. It was easy – I brought in my writing skills for the newsletter (which not many folks were doing in the 90s), and I had a knack for podcasts and webcasts (I studied screenwriting as a grad student).
And I have always leaned towards the absurd, so I hired a robot sidekick who joined me in loads of podcasts, I had Bierfests, Scavenger hunts, YouTube dance-offs with forum members, and other sorts of campiness. If I was going to be doing this for a living – it had better be fun. 12 years in the military taught me that, so that is probably why I stuck it out for so long. I designed my job to my own tastes. I never dreaded Mondays – I always looked forward to them.
“You copy my site – I breaka you face”
Ian: What was the tech stack you used to come online?
Bryan: Tech stack? Like in the beginning? Well, I created all the pages using Allaire 2.0 then on to Homesite, the graphics were all mine using the early versions of Photoshop. It was hosted on a shared server somewhere in Texas until 2004 when I got hit by a DDOS that took down their entire company – 35,000 websites. Needless to say, I needed another hosting service.
Back in those days you could learn HTML by looking at the code that other websites were using and just copy and paste, and modify it for your own. Some of us early webmasters would write either jokey stuff, or put Easter eggs in the code – usually for other webmasters to find. “You copy my site – I breaka you face”, or “if you’re reading this, you must be really bored”, silly stuff like that.
Ted Loh introduced Bryan to ICE
Ian: Casinomeister.com was known for publicizing disputes between players and operators. Often you would mediate and help solve an issue. What motivated you to do that and please tell me about some of your most famous cases?
Bryan: As I mentioned earlier, this all started with some of the very first posts in the forum. People posting that they either weren’t getting paid, or that the casino wasn’t responding. I would look up the domain registrant (most people didn’t know how to do that), and I would be able to get an email address. It was usually the email address of the actual owner. This was before this information was all hidden by proxy addressed and from prying eyes like mine. I guess the motivation was to help people out – because I knew I could do it.
It really kicked off in 2001, when I was convinced to attend my first conference by Ted Loh, one of my closest webmaster buddies. The London ICE was coming up in January, and he talked me into coming to London saying everyone is going to be there. I didn’t really know who he meant by everyone, but I found out.
My first day at the ICE I was able to find the Online Casino section which was upstairs, and there were maybe twenty booths or so. Like 10×12 foot booths with office partitions, a table, some chairs, placards and pamphlets. That was pretty much it – except these weren’t just sales people, these were the CEOs, COOs, CFOs and all of the other C people from Microgaming, Cryptologic, RTG, Boss Media, to name a few. I knew no one, but it seemed that they mostly all knew me. You see, most of they had been using my website as a reference point, and many of them had been subscribing to my newsletter listening to what I had to say. I was publishing the only newsletter that showcased what players were experiencing. So right there I established my initial go-to contacts, and this gave me the ability to actually solve player complaints from the top down, and for years to come.
“..this gave me the ability to actually solve player complaints..”
We have had thousands of complaints – and some have been real doozies. One of the most bizarre and highly publicised complaints happened in 2004. This was a guy nicknamed the Pirate who was a high roller and won a little over a million dollars playing Blackjack at an RTG casino. Well at first the casino claimed he used software to manipulate the games, and they tricked him on the phone to admit using software (which they recorded and posted in our forum). He only made that statement under duress – he just wanted to get paid. The casino claimed he was using a mouse tracker – and the owner/operator posted this “fact” in our forum.
Well, the forum members thought this was really odd, and the CEO of RTG thought it was even odder – to which he posted in our forum that the casino operator was full of it. And then MSNBC picked up on it and they reported what was going on – that this player was being ripped off of over a million dollars. Long story short – the Pirate was paid an undisclosed sum, and the operator’s casino properties were sold to a different owner operator . The entire problem is laid out here in real time. https://www.casinomeister.com/forums/threads/rtgs-caribbean-21-lie.3458/
But probably the worst, most gut wrenching and scandalous one was in 2009 with the Playtech Joyland Casino. This incident involved a player named Sylvia P., who hit a massive progressive jackpot worth over $4.1 million on Beach Life at Joyland Casino. Here’s where things got ridiculous – Joyland had a $9,000 monthly withdrawal cap, and they decided to apply this same limit to her jackpot win.
The math is staggering – at that rate, it would have taken nearly 39 years for her to collect her full winnings. What followed became one of the most corrupt affairs in the history of online gambling.
It is yours but you can’t have it…
She contacted the casino and she didn’t feel it was right to be paid $9k per month. At first they told her take it or leave it. Then they decided to cut a deal with her – they would pay her half with a stipulation that she would play a big chunk of the winnings back. She did not know about Casinomeister back then – and I sure wish she did.
She’s French Canadian, and all of her correspondence were in her native language. The casino operator did NOT use a casino connected official email account – the person used a free yahoo email account. It’s all in French and you can tell she was completely over her head with this. She would agree to anything to get paid.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later that William Hill purchased Joyland Casino. Sylvia P.’s brother saw this and contacted me asking me to find out if she could receive the rest of her $4.1 million dollars. Ironically, Joyland Casino listed her as a $4.1 million winner with her profile picture in full display on their winner’s page. She wanted this removed.
I contacted the COO of William Hill and explained what had happened. He said that “They purchased the assets, not the debts.” So I contacted the CEO of Playtech, and he said he’d run it before the board of directors They came to the conclusion that she signed up with the terms in place “max $9k per month to include progressive jackpots.” So no, she was not going to be paid the remainder because she cut a deal. I wasn’t surprised with the hubris of their response – I could only imagine who was on this board of directors. Playtech was never known for being player focused back in those days.
The question that should have been dancing in everyone’s minds though was where was the rest of the money? These were funds that were contributions from all of the Playtech casinos that shared that progressive pool. Half of the progressive funds were never paid out to Sylvia P. Where did they go? I can only assume that they were confiscated by the owner – who else would have access? It was all in her account – I’ve seen the screenshot, and Playtech knows it as well. It doesn’t take much imagination or many Google searches to find out who the owner was back then, so I will just leave it to that.
This incident was a pivotal point for me running Casinomeister. I was perplexed by the lack of alarm and interest from not only the companies involved, but the mainstream media – absolutely no one cared. (The 100% factual exposé is still up on Casinomeister after all these years later). But one thing I can claim responsibility for is having that term removed from nearly all casinos online: Playtech, RTG, some Microgaming. If a casino chooses to limit withdrawals to $9k, that is their prerogative – but to apply that limit to funds that the casino doesn’t really own – that is outright thievery. Casinomeister was instrumental for operators agreeing to having this term removed. Any casino that published that term in their terms and conditions was fast tracked to the Rogue Pit.
https://www.casinomeister.com/gambling-news/industry/playtech-progressive-jackpots-scandal/
Ian: What were the major problems experienced by users in the early days?
Bryan: The major problems involved predatory terms – like Sylvia P. experienced. Others were mostly crooked bonus terms – automatic bonuses added to player accounts without being requested, retroactively changing bonus terms. Or no-pay casinos that would disappear, and reappear elsewhere with the same operators. This was during the cowboy days where the only regulation was self regulation – or being listed in our infamous Rogue Pit.
But operators were targets as well. There were some “jackpot winners” that were enraged that they never received their jackpots – and to prove it they would send in screenshots of amateurish Photoshoped jackpot wins. This was in the early 2000’s and some of the members and I became pretty proficient in breaking down these files – we did our own detective work. This one woman who sent in some doctored jackpot wins from 32Red was also selling phoney letters from Lizzy Bordan on eBay. You can’t make this stuff up. This is also when I started the Evil Player of the Year award which we dished out annually to the worst imaginably behaved players.
The “Lovemeister”
Ian: Can you share a particularly memorable moment or experience or two from your time running Casinomeister?
Bryan: After running the site for 25 years, it’s difficult to pinpoint certain memorable moments – there were so many of them. Definitely all of the Meister Meetings that we had in London – those ran from 2008 to 2024. They were all pretty awesome – meeting the forum members and having pretty good chats, and loads of meanderings in London. There were the conferences as well – the ones I spoke at – detailing the ways that online casinos can market themselves and behave ethically. Those were very good experiences in the early days since operators really cared about their brands, and they didn’t want themselves to be the baddies in the Rogue Pit.
The forum in its entirety has always been a great experience. There have been romances among forum members. One of whom moved from Sweden and married his sweetheart who he met in our forum. I almost renamed the site Lovemeister” lol.
The legendary Ted Loh was an inspiration to many, including me. Sorely missed. Here’s a link to the Casinomeister In Memoriam https://www.casinomeister.com/ted-loh-memoriam/
But the top experience is the fund raiser that the late Ted Loh and I organized after the Boxing Day Tsunami killed hundreds of thousands of people. Ted Loh was my webmaster buddy and we’d known each other since around 2000 when he joined my forum. He lived in Bangkok at the time, ran the Got2bet.com website, and was there during this disastrous time. We both brainstormed on what we could do to help the victims, and we decided to both auction off the top right hand corner ad space of our respective websites, and the highest bidder would get that spot for a year. The auction price would be the donation to charity.
So I downloaded some cgi based software that mimicked eBay, and started the bidding at I think at $10,000, and slowly the bids began to come in. There was a certain apprehension that a “rogue” operator would win the auction – but we were intent to sell that space to anyone as long as they were the highest bidder. The bottom line is that we raised $110,000 for Unicef thanks to Intercasino and Wagerlogic being the final winner at 11:59:59 on the nail-biting day of closing. It was a real amazing experience knowing that we made a real difference in people’s lives.
There is a forum thread that covered the auction in real time:
https://www.casinomeister.com/forums/threads/auctioning-adspace-at-casinomeister-and-got2bet.6876/
You had to behave yourself to be trusted
Ian: How did you maintain the credibility and reliability of the information and reviews on your site over the years?
Bryan: It probably has to do with my approach to the site – my main focus during the early years was to ensure a) that the site functioned and wasn’t broken, b) that Casinomeister was poignant to the visitor, that there was always something for someone to return for – whether it was an off-the-wall podcast, or a list of baddies to stay away from, and finally c) marketing.
I was never motivated by money, and in the beginning 98% of our revenue were media buys. I never accepted advertising from casinos that did not meet our standards for casinos to abide by. And the casinos that were listed on the site probably paid the cheapest rates on the Internet. I kept my pricing low so that I wouldn’t have to entertain any pressure from casino operators that their casinos weren’t getting enough players from the site. They were paying for branding – not players. I also made it very clear that I would remove them from the site if they messed up.
Players got this. They watched over the years how some big name casino groups were removed from our Accredited Casino section – sometimes being tossed into the rogue pit with scathing reviews. There were no sacred cows at Casinomeister – both the operators and players knew this. Marketing was never a top priority – my priority was being of service to our visitors and our members, and to enjoy the ride along the way.
“It was tough letting it go”
Ian: What was the driving force behind your decision to ultimately sell Casinomeister.com, and how do you feel about this transition?
Bryan: The main thing that pushed me was that I had had enough of the industry and the general apathy towards players not just from the industry, but from licensing jurisdictions as well. It was time for me to go – I had done a fairly good job of creating a level playing field for folks. I could have held on to the site and let others run it – that was sort of the plan, but I still had 100% of the risks involved with running a small business, and I’m 66 – beyond the retirement age, and I knew that I didn’t need that stress anymore.
I also think my body was giving me a message around that time as well – perhaps subconsciously. During the sale I was diagnosed with prostate cancer – with absolutely no symptoms btw (side note: guys, get your PSA checked) – and so it was time to focus on myself.
It was very tough letting go. It was my creation – and something to be proud of. There are scores of people who would not have had the same friends as they have now if it wasn’t for my forum, and I would include myself at the top of this batch. But time goes on and now it’s a different chapter for me. I have more that enough interests and hobbies to keep me busy for the next 30 years. I’ve handed over Casinomeister to the membership in my opinion – there are plenty of personalities there to carry it forward.
Will the legacy continue?
Ian: How do you envision the future of Casinomeister under the new ownership?
Bryan: I would like to see them flesh out what my intentions were with Casinomeister in the first place. The sale wasn’t just for Casinomeister, but for Gonegambling.com, CasinoGazette.com (as well as all of my gambling connected domains like wankerbets.co.uk). The potential for Gonegambling is enormous. Back in the day this site developed bespoke casino games for the membership who could win prizes from sponsoring casinos. It was brilliant and extremely successful for years. Gentoo has everything, the know-how, the trademarks, the graphics, and the content to include the 25-year-story behind Gone Gambling. Gone Gambling was intended to be the Disneyland for online players, while Casinomeister was the pub.
Then there is Casinogazette.com, which was a portal not only for the online casino industry, but it was focused on affiliate and player news. Casinogazette was to showcase podcasts, webcasts, and choice articles written by the forum members. There aren’t many portals that focus on news for players – unbiased real reporting, and that was the void that Casinogazette was to fill.
I hope in the near future, some of the this will become a reality. But it’s certainly a fleeting hope since the only thing that makes sense to most industry folks these days is the bottom line – the Benjamins. There is no monetary value in potential – no matter how promising or enormous it might be. Putting the cart before the horse seems to be the go-to mode to be in.
For better or worse?
Ian: Lastly, how do you see the online gambling industry developing – for better or worse?
Bryan: It’s kind of hard determining whether it will be better or worse. One thing for sure, it’s different – gone is the excitement of coming up with an idea, spend $35 on a domain name, and launch a competitive business on your own. Yeah I get it, it’s not the ‘90s anymore. But saying that, there is always room for entrepreneurship, something different, something out of the ordinary that benefits players, industry folks – or both.
You can see that happening with companies like Rightlander, or Statsdrone just to name a couple. These businesses identified a need and started with I’m guessing a brainstorm or epiphany – and you can see how they are developing into a very competitive and crucial business that many affiliates and operators rely on. My hat’s off to them.
Bryan’s army days before all this is documented here https://www.casinomeister.com/author/bryan/
Legacy and Impact
Bryan Bailey, founder of Casinomeister.com, was one of the first and most influential advocates for fairness, transparency, and player protection in the online gambling industry. Launching his site in 1998, he helped shape industry standards by exposing rogue operators, promoting ethical casino practices, and providing players with a platform to voice complaints — long before formal regulation took hold.
Through tools like the “Pitch a Bitch” complaint system and his infamous “Rogue Casinos” list, Bailey held operators publicly accountable and forced many to clean up their practices. His voice became a trusted authority in a largely unregulated and often murky environment, earning respect from both players and operators.
Over 26 years, his independent stance and tireless advocacy helped push the industry toward legitimacy and regulation. As a result, Bryan Bailey is widely regarded as the conscience of the online casino world — a rare mix of critic, mediator, and reformer.
Thank you Bryan for your time and especially for your heroic and knightly ways!
