Why two reviews can rank the same sportsbooks so differently

Reason one: different weights

A review ranks operators by adding up scores for criteria such as price, app and payments. If one review counts price at 60% and another counts the app at 50%, the same scores give a different order.

Example (not an offer): three hypothetical operators scored out of 10 on three criteria.

With the first weighting, the order is A, B, C. With the second, it is B, C, A. No score changed. Only the weights did.

Short answer: a different weighting is enough to reorder a list, even when the facts are the same.

Reasons two and three: dates and provinces

A list is a snapshot. The page date tells you when its author last looked, and a registry can change after that.

Province matters too. In Ontario (ON), private operators are registered with the AGCO and have an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. In Alberta (AB), operators are on the AiGC list.

In British Columbia, Québec and Manitoba, the lawful online option is a public platform. A list written for one province cannot be copied to another.

We have not yet compared the Ontario and Alberta lists by brand, because the registry reading is not complete. The comparison will appear in Brands named in reviews vs registries.

How we will measure the overlap

For each pair of reviews, we compare the two top-five lists. The Jaccard index is the number of shared brands divided by the number of distinct brands across both lists.

Example (not an offer): two lists share 3 brands and name 7 distinct brands together, so the index is 3 ÷ 7 = 0.43.

If they share 1 brand, the index is 1 ÷ 9 = 0.11. If they share all 5, it is 1.00.

The values will come from the reviewer matrix and will carry that page's reading dates.

What the reviews say they weigh

We have not yet recorded the stated criteria of Covers, Gambling.com or Sports Illustrated (SI.com). When we do, each criterion will appear with a quote of 15 words at most, the URL and the reading date.

Until then, the example above is a way to read any list: find the criteria, find the weights, and see whether the weights are published.

A review that publishes no weights gives you no way to see why its order differs from another.

How our score differs

Registration is a gate, not a score: a brand that is not in the registry of your province is not scored for you. We then count documented items with published weights (version 1.0), described on How the standings score is calculated.

It is our opinion, calculated from those weights. We did not test any product, so the score is not a measure of how an app feels or how fast a withdrawal is.

How we checked

1. We built the worked example with fixed hypothetical scores and recomputed each weighted total.
2. We wrote down the Jaccard method before comparing any real lists.
3. We left the measurement table at "Not checked" until the matrix is complete.

Sources

• Our calculation, labelled as an example.
• Review pages of Covers, Gambling.com and SI.com: to be read and dated in the matrix.
• iGaming Ontario registry and Alberta AiGC list.

What changed

• 2026-11-13: page created with the worked example; overlap measures not yet computed.

Before you bet

19+ in Ontario and British Columbia; 18+ in Alberta, Manitoba and Québec. Gambling involves risk. Play responsibly. Need help? See help lines by province.