I spent six years working the cashier's cage at a bricks-and-mortar casino on the Gulf Coast before I moved to Savannah and started testing online cages full time in 2018. Standing at a redemption window rewires how you see this business. You stop listening to what the floor promises and start watching what happens when a real ticket lands in front of you and someone wants their money counted back to them.
So I test these sites the way I paid tickets: I deposit my own money at every operator I write about, I request a withdrawal and time it on a stopwatch, I read the whole rulebook before I form an opinion, and I fail a cage the moment it invents a new requirement at the window. I take no operator payment for placement, and when a site on this list changes its terms for the worse, it drops down the order or comes off it entirely.
The part I care about most is the walk from the table to the cage, because that is where players actually get hurt. Almost nobody I paid out lost money because a game was rigged. They lost it to a bonus that capped their cashout, a reversal window that let them gamble back money they had already decided to take, or a verification desk that sat on a request until they gave up. My whole job is to time that walk so you know what it really costs before you make it.