I've played online casino games on and off for the best part of a decade. The question mates ask me most often, usually down the pub, is which are the best casino sites. My short answer is that no single list suits everybody. I do have a handful of checks I run on every site before a penny leaves my account, and that habit has saved me far more than any lucky spin ever won me.

This is just me talking it through. I don't work for an operator and nobody pays me to say nice things. I've had my share of rotten nights to go with the decent ones, and most of what I know came from getting things slightly wrong first.

When I mention rules, they come from the Gambling Commission. Most people call it the UKGC, though strictly speaking it regulates gambling in Great Britain rather than the wider UK market, and Great Britain is what I'm talking about here.

Checking the licence before anything else

The first thing I do is scroll to the bottom of the page. A licensed site has to show a statement that it's licensed and regulated by the Gambling Commission, and that line must appear on every screen where you can actually place a bet or spin a reel, not just on one forgotten page about legal stuff. Think of it as the licence above a pub door, and if I can't see one, I'm not ordering a drink.

Next to that statement there should be an account number. There should be a link to the operator's current status on the Gambling Commission website too, and I click that link every single time, since it takes about ten seconds to see whether the licence is live today rather than just a logo somebody pasted into the footer and forgot about.

It doesn't matter whether it's a site I've used for ages or one like sagaspins that a mate brought up over a pint at the weekend. The footer check is identical for everybody, and I'd rather look a bit paranoid than hand my card details to someone who isn't who they claim to be.

That little footer line is backed by a whole system. Businesses need an operating licence to offer gambling legally, and some people working in the industry need a personal licence of their own. The rulebook they follow is called the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice, which everyone shortens to LCCP, and it works under the Gambling Act, still the main law in Great Britain.

I learned to be fussy the slightly hard way. One wet Saturday a few winters back, with the football scores ticking over on the telly, I was flicking between sites with £20 I'd set aside for the afternoon. One of them looked brilliant, all bright colours and a huge welcome banner, and I'd actually typed my debit card number in before I noticed there was no regulator statement anywhere on the page. I shut that tab so fast I nearly knocked my tea over!

I never found out what would have happened to that £20. What stuck with me was how close I came to paying, purely on the strength of a nice-looking homepage and a banner with a big number on it.

Reading the numbers behind the market

I like knowing how big the thing I'm playing in really is. The Commission measures the industry with something called Gross Gambling Yield, or GGY, which sounds dry but is simple enough once you picture it.

Imagine the till at a chip shop at closing time, after every bit of change has been handed back to customers. Whatever's left in the drawer is roughly what GGY means for gambling: the money operators keep once winners have been paid out.

For the year to March last year, total industry GGY in Great Britain came to £16.8 billion. Online gambling made up £7.8 billion of that. Online was responsible for more than £900 million of the rise on the year before, which tells you exactly where people's attention has gone.

The latest figure on the Commission's statistics page covers April last year to March this year. It shows £17.5 billion, which is a frankly silly amount of chip-shop change!

The quarterly online data is where it gets properly interesting. I've pulled the main lines into one place to make the comparison easier to read.

Measure	July to September last year	October to December last year
Total online GGY	£1.42 billion	£1.5 billion
Online bets and spins	26.1 billion	27.4 billion
Slots GGY	£747 million	£788 million
Online real event betting GGY	£508 million	£530 million

Both of those bets and spins totals were records for that dataset. More than 27 billion bets and spins between October and December is a number I genuinely can't picture!

What I take from it is that the market is busy and still growing. Busy markets attract cowboys right alongside decent operators, and that's precisely why the footer check comes first for me, before I even glance at a game lobby.

I don't read these figures as a guide to which site will be kind to me on a given night. They're more like the attendance figures at a football ground: useful for knowing the sport is healthy, useless for predicting the score of your particular match.

Spinning under the new stake limits

Last spring the rules on online slots changed in a way I actually noticed. From 9 April, every adult was limited to a £5 stake per spin. Players aged 18 to 24 dropped to a £2 limit from 21 May, which I thought was sensible given how quickly younger mates of mine used to burn through a payday.

I'll admit I grumbled for about a day. Then I realised I almost never staked more than £2 anyway, and the people it really affects are the ones chasing losses at three in the morning with the stake slider pushed all the way to the top.

It works like a speed limit on a residential street. Most drivers barely notice it, and it's there for the handful who would otherwise do real damage to themselves or someone else.

If I ever landed on a slot that let me stake more than £5 a spin, I'd treat it the way I treat a missing licence statement. That would tell me I'm somewhere I shouldn't be, and I'd close the tab without a second thought.

For what it's worth, slots GGY still went up between the summer quarter and the autumn one, from £747 million to £788 million. The limits clearly haven't killed slots; they've just shaved off the scariest single spins, which suits me fine.

Paying in and cashing out without fuss

Payments are where a site shows its true colours. I've used plenty that were lovely right up until I tried to take money out, at which point everything slowed to a crawl and the friendly tone of the homepage vanished.

My order of preference is pretty boring. Debit card comes first, with PayPal close behind, Apple Pay gets used when I'm on the sofa, and Paysafecard comes out now and then when I want an evening to end at whatever's on the voucher.

Credit cards are off the table entirely. They're banned for gambling in the UK, and if a site ever offered me one I'd be gone!

When I land on a cashier page, these are the things I look for before anything else:

• My debit card goes through without a pile of extra steps.
• PayPal or Apple Pay works for withdrawals, not just for paying in.
• The site states a withdrawal time in plain words instead of a vague promise.
• Any fees are written in the terms where I can find them in under a minute.
• Paysafecard is accepted for the nights I want a fixed budget.

Affordability checks are standard now, and some people moan about them. I don't. If a site asks me a couple of questions about what I can afford before I go much further, that tells me somebody on their side is paying attention, which is more than I can say for the site I nearly paid on that rainy Saturday.

I treat the first withdrawal on any new site as a test run. I keep it small, I note how long it takes, and I only start using that site properly once the money has landed in my bank without drama.

Setting limits before you need them

The best time to set a limit is on a calm Tuesday evening. It is not halfway through a losing run on Grand National day!

I set a deposit limit on every new account straight away, usually lower than I think I'll need. It feels a bit like leaving your bank card at home on a night out and only taking cash: annoying for about ten minutes, and then you're grateful the next morning.

Horse racing and football are where I see mates come unstuck most. A big Saturday of matches or a festival at the races turns a fiver into a habit faster than anyone expects, and on a lot of sites the casino tab is one click from the bet slip, which makes drifting from one to the other very easy.

If it ever gets past limits, GamStop self-exclusion is the tool I'd point a friend towards first. Using it isn't a failure, more like the grown-up version of handing your car keys to a mate before the second pint.

I keep a simple note on my laptop of what I've put in and taken out across every site I use. It's nothing clever, just two columns, but seeing the real totals written down cures a lot of wishful thinking about how "roughly even" I am.

Picking a site that suits how you play

Once a site passes the licence and payment checks, the rest comes down to how I actually like to play. Some nights I want a quick few spins on slots. Other nights I'm more interested in a bet on the football with a bit of blackjack at half time.

Plenty of operators run sport and casino side by side. Online real event betting brought in £508 million GGY between July and September last year and £530 million from October to December, so it's clearly a big part of what these businesses do.

Combined licences are set to cost operators more too. Under government proposals intended to take effect from 1 October this year, a flat extra annual fee of £6,250 would apply where one licence combines two of remote casino, bingo and virtual event betting, rising to £12,500 where it combines all three.

That's not something I need to worry about as a player. It does remind me that a site offering everything under one login is a business paying for each slice of it, and somebody has to cover that bill in the end.

Welcome offers get the same treatment from me as free samples at the supermarket. I'll take a taste if it's genuinely free, but I won't fill my trolley just because someone handed me a cube of cheese on a cocktail stick, and I always read what I'd have to wager before I accept anything.

My own favourite setup is dull on purpose: one site for sport, one for casino, both with deposit limits, both checked against the Commission's register. Splitting them means a bad afternoon on the horses can't quietly leak into the slots, and I always know which account a loss came from.

Before trying anywhere new, I scroll down, find the Gambling Commission statement, click through to the licence status and set a deposit limit, and only after that do I look at a single game.