Room: South America(loris2)

Café Casino is a newer US-facing online casino, launched in April of 2016. Café Casino accepts Bitcoin for deposits and withdrawals. That seems to be the site’s gimmick; that, and the simple fact that they accept real money bets from US customers.

500% Super Play Welcome Bonus

New depositors can take their pick from two different options for the casino’s Super Play Welcome Bonus. This is the first option – a match bonus worth up to $5,000 at a match rate of 500%. This bonus requires a playthrough of 35x.

100% No-Max Welcome Bonus

This is the second welcome bonus option – a match bonus worth up to $1,000 at a match rate of 100%. This bonus requires a playthrough of 25x.

$10 Free Chip

All new depositors earn $10 in free play in the form of a $10 Free Chip. Any winnings you accrue while playing with the $10 in free play is subject to a 60x playthrough requirement, and a max withdrawal amount of $125. If you win more than that, you forfeit any amount above $125.

$100 Referrals

For every customer you refer that makes a deposit of at least $25, you’ll earn $100 in free betting cash. Your winnings are subject to a 60x playthrough requirement, and winnings are capped at $1,000. Any winnings you earn beyond $1,000 while playing with referral money is forfeited.

Perks

Perks is the name of Café Casino’s rewards program. All players start out with certain rewards by virtue of joining the Perks program. Entry-level members enjoy 10% Daily Cashback offers, weekly bonus offers, a chance to win a weekly $4,000 prize pool drawing, and the standard spate of bonuses and promotions offered above. As you accumulate more rewards points, those numbers start going up. For instance, at the next level (in exchange for 50,000 points) you have access to $150 referral fees, more entries in the prize pool, and even better bonus offers.

Café Casino only accepts deposits and pays withdrawals using American currency.

Below covers the basics of all deposit methods available at Café Casino:

Deposit

 

Below covers the basics of all withdrawal methods available at Café Casino:

Withdrawal

 

Let’s start with the pros – three things about Café Casino that we like:

A total of 207 games are available at Café Casino, about half that number also available at their mobile-capable website. We were most excited to see the long list of available blackjack variants. Most US-facing casino sites are so heavy with slot machines, they’re basically useless to those of us that like table games and other contests besides just machine-style gaming.

This requires a caveat – for a site that’s just launched in the past few weeks, Café Casino has a decent bonus lineup, and several of those bonuses have decent playthrough requirements and other terms and conditions.

We have to make another caveat – they have really fast posted payout times. That means that we can’t verify whether or not the times they post are accurate. We haven’t had a chance to make a withdrawal ourselves, and we can’t find any reviews or notes from actual customers who have. Still, getting a payment within ten business days is good timing for US customers, most of whom are used to times much longer than that.

Now for the cons – three things about the site that we don’t like:

You can deposit using a credit card or Bitcoin, and that’s it. Your withdrawal options aren’t much more varied, with the addition of a paper check delivered via courier. We get that it’s tough to offer a varied lineup of payment options to US customers, considering the restrictions of the UIGEA bill. Still, it needs to be said. You don’t have a lot of ways to send money to and from your Café Casino account.

This isn’t a big deal if you live in the US. But millions of casino fans around the world won’t be able to access Café Casino, and for them, that’s a bummer. There’s something else to consider when you’re dealing with a US-facing gambling site – why would a site want to do business in such a difficult market? It’s easy to imagine nefarious reasons for doing so, but the truth is probably very simple. The US market is relatively untapped, thanks to the very UIGEA restrictions that made us a little suspicious of Café Casino to begin with.

The Kahnawake Gaming Commission is not one of the most respected names in online gaming licensure. Our suspicions about the Kahnawake Gaming Commission have a lot to do with Kahnawake itself – an invented territory that’s just large enough to accommodate facilities for the licensing of gaming operations. Kahnawake licenses a huge list of online gambling interests, not all of which are above-board businesses. When you see headlines like the Quebec Supreme Court protecting Kahnawake from prosecution by federal authorities, you get nervous. It’s not that Kahnawake’s licenses are known to be fraudulent. It’s just that they’re not anywhere near as reputable as names like Alderney, Gibraltar, or the UK.

Below, you’ll find more detailed coverage of each of Café Casino’s five game categories:

The largest category of games at Café Casino is slots – they know their audience, don’t they? US players love slots. They’re by far the most popular way to gamble in US casinos. To that end, Café has a list of 102 slot games broken up into seven categories:

• Rival SlotsAll of the slot games produced by Rival are hosted in this category. You can play classic Rival titles like Milk the Cash Cow, So 80’s, and Arabian tales. All told, this is the largest sub-section of slot games at the site, as Rival is the primary provider of software to Café Casino.
• i-SlotsSome of Café Casino’s Rival slots are also available in this category, consisting exclusively of Rival’s famous multi-reel and multi-payline video slots in the i-Slots series.
• ProgressivesCafé Casino hosts every single active Rival progressive slot:

• Real SeriesA set of RTG five reel slots from that company’s popular Real Series. Includes games like Cleopatra’s Gold, Ronin, Football Frenzy, and Goldbeard.
• Five ReelAll of the site’s five reel slots are gathered in one easy to find place.
• Three ReelAll of the site’s three reel slots are gathered in one easy to find place.
• Video SlotsAll of the sites slots with video features are gathered in one easy to find place.

An impressive list of six blackjack variants starts your journey with table games at Café Casino:

• BlackjackThis is a 6-deck game that accepts wagers between $1 and $500.
• Double Deck BlackjackThis is a 2-deck game that accepts wagers between $10 and $250.
• European BlackjackThis is a 6-deck game that accepts wagers between $1 and $500.
• Perfect PairsThis is a 6-deck game that accepts wagers between $1 and $500.
• Single Deck BlackjackThis is a 1-deck game that accepts wagers between $25 and $300.
• Zappit BlackjackThis is an 8-deck game that accepts wagers between $1 and $500.

Café Casino hosts nine games in its Table Games category. They are:

• BaccaratThis is a traditional version of baccarat, played with six decks and a 5% commission, paying 9:1 for a tie bet, and the player is forced to hit on totals of five or less. Your wagers are limited to these denominations – 1, 5, 10, 25, 50, or 100. This isn’t a particularly attractive version of the game, with garish colors and old-looking graphics. We were also surprised to find no mini-baccarat game, as you’ll often find at Rival-powered casinos.
• Caribbean Hold’emCaribbean Hold’em is casino-style poker. Technically, this is a version of Casino Hold’em in which the ante bet pays even money only if the dealer’s hand doesn’t qualify. Don’t forget the progressive side bet, just $1 at a time for a shot at a huge progressive payday.
• Caribbean Stud PokerThink of this game as five-card stud played against the house instead of against other poker players. This is Rival’s version of the original “house-banked game,” the first game designed to attract both poker players and slot fans back to the casino’s table game section.
• CrapsRival’s version of the classic dice game. There’s nothing unique about this variant – it looks a bit dated, like all of Rival’s table games.
• European RouletteAnother Rival table game that follows all the traditional rules. European Roulette has one fewer space on the spinning wheel than its American counterpart, and that makes all the difference in odds. Roulette players who know their way around a house edge calculator only play Euro Roulette. So it’s nice that Café Casino included a version of the game in their main library.
• Let ‘Em RideAnother casino poker game, Let ‘Em Ride introduces the concept of community cards to the “poker against the house” game.
• American RouletteAmerican Roulette is the game as it is usually played in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. This game has one additional space, compared to European Roulette, so its odds are way worse. You should only play this game if you have a particular fondness for the American version of the game, or if you like playing with longer odds, for some reason.
• Tri Card PokerThis is Rival’s version of the classic casino poker game called Three Card Poker. This is a fast-paced and simplified version of poker played against the house, and includes a mandatory side wager on a separate game called PairsPlus.
• Vegas Three Card RummyWe were surprised to see both Three Card Poker and Vegas Three Card Rummy on the same library at Café Casino. The games are very similar. The only difference between this game and the one we just described is that in the Vegas edition, your goal is to form a lower point total than the dealer.

The selection of just three video poker games is our biggest disappointment with Café Casino. While most other US-facing casinos host a dozen or more video poker variants, Café Casino is currently only offering the three most common games. That doesn’t allow for much replay value, and the video poker fans on our review staff grew pretty bored with their lineup in well under an hour.

All three of Café Casino’s video poker games accept wagers of between $0.05 and $25 per hand:

• Deuces WildAs the name implies, this is a variant of video poker in which cards with a 2 rank act as wild cards. This version of Deuces Wild (with a 250-coin payout for a natural royal flush) is not all that popular, and we struggled to find house edge information about it. We know that Deuces Wild games tend to range from a house edge of 91% to just about 101% at the upper end. It looks to us like the pay table weights the game far too much in favor of the top end of the board, which means fewer wins, though generally larger payouts when you do manage to put together a top-board hand. Rival’s video poker games are just as ugly as their table games. The software could really use an update – I felt a bit like I was playing a slot machine handheld game from the 1990s.
• Jacks or BetterJacks or Better is sort of the godfather of all video poker variants. Rival’s version, as presented here at Café Casino, is as standard issue as they come. Yes, this game has a 9/6 pay table, but it’s not considered a “full-pay” 9/6 game, since the value of the game’s top prize has been reduced big-time. Even so, this game’s pay table indicates an overall house edge of just above 0.7%. That’s not bad, though it’s easy enough to find better Jacks or Better games online, with edges somewhere close to half that, or even better. Gone are the days of +EV Jacks or Better, but surely the designers could do a bit better than 0.7%?
• Joker PokerJoker Poker is another legacy variant, a game you’ll find in any casino worth your interest. Once again, when we looked into this variant’s pay table, we weren’t all that impressed. The top end of the pay table is once again limited, compared to other popular versions of Joker Poker available online. The Rival designers wanted to push the house edge a bit in favor of the house (surprise, surprise), and the easiest way to do that is to chop the value of the game’s top prize basically in half. Overall, the house edge of this version of Joker Poker, with this particular decapitated pay table, is 1%. You can find Joker Poker games with odds that don’t favor the casino nearly that much at just about every other US-facing casino gambling site.

Café Casino’s customer support services are currently available in English only.

You can contact Café Casino’s customer service team 24 hours a day at:

• 1-888-364-1850

You can also try pointing your browser to their contact form.

If you’re having issues with the website, point your browser to Café Casino’s handy Browser Info page. It checks your browser and some aspects of your computer to test for compatibility with their services, and can offer help in upgrading your browser to optimize your player experience.

Here are some questions I get frequently about the services provided by this site:

Café Casino didn’t produce a mobile app – instead, they made a version of their traditional online site that translates well to smartphones and tablets. The mobile version of the site is designed for display on the smaller screen of a mobile gadget, and the games are often tailored to that smaller display size as well. The mobile version of the site offers a limited game library, and limited account access.

The only country that Café Casino does business with is the United States. If you live in any other country, you won’t be allowed to place a bet or even open an account.

Until a casino has been around a few months and builds up a collection of customer reviews and forum posts either defending it or attacking it as a rogue site, it’s hard for us to say definitively that the site is not a rogue operation. Our advice is to do your own research. Call the site and talk to their customer service department. Ask a bunch of questions. Poke around the website for a while. Send lots of emails to customer service through the site’s contact form. And then keep an eye on your account. We’re not saying that the site is a scam or even that it’s suspected of being one – it just doesn’t have a very long history of customer service. It’s tough to find a decent review of the site, much less any indication of whether or not they’re a legitimate gambling website.

Again, we don’t have a lot of hard data on this question. The site promises that your withdrawal will take between 1 and 10 days, so until we have any evidence to the contrary, we’re going to assume that’s how long you’ll have to wait.