My Honest Punt Review (Tested With A Real Deposit)

Punt is a controversial gambling platform that looks exactly like another popular online casino – Stake.com. Not only the design, navigation, and interface are copied from the Stake website, but the T&Cs, privacy notice, and other pages were also copy-pasted. The representatives of Punt casino said that the owner of Stake.com helped a lot by giving advice during the development phase, although this was never officially confirmed.

Copying a successful product is not a bad idea and I have nothing against that. We live in a world where it is nearly impossible to impress the market with a unique idea. Even big companies are copying and adopting services developed by competitors. But it is a problem when you pretend to be mentored by someone when it is actually not the case.

Today, I will make an honest Punt review after depositing real money, having multiple chats with the support team, and requesting a withdrawal. I am not using any sponsored balance to run the test, so the review will be unbiased and truthful.

✔️ Is Punt legit? (3/5)

License-wise, Punt.com is legal and is operating under the laws of Curacao. This is the most popular license authority for cryptocurrency gambling brands.

Punt casino is still pretty new, and I have no idea how it is going to develop its operations in the future. The fact that a big portion of the content presented on the site is ‘borrowed’ from another popular casino is definitely a red flag.

I give this section of the review three points out of five. Right now, it looks like Punt is faithfully paying the cashouts, but the copycat nature of this casino does not allow me to trust them 100%.

🎲 Games and providers (4/5)

The collection of games at Punt casino is pretty similar to Stake.com’s arsenal. All the games are divided into several categories: Punt Original small games, slots, and live casino. The original games include all the popular titles, such as Dice, Crash, and Mines, among others. Surprisingly there is no Plinko game on the list, which is really popular on Stake.

When it comes to slots, you will find the games from 20 different gambling software development companies. Some major providers are also missing in this section, such as NetEnt, or Play’n Go.

For Live dealer casino lovers, there are only two studios on offer: Evolution and Pragmatic Play Live. This would be enough for regular players but might become a problem for countries where Evolution is blocked. In this case, the selection of live casino games will be extremely limited.

I give this section of Punt’s review four points. The list of games is fine but is not full for comfortable long-time playing. It should become better with the addition of all major slot providers, some popular original games, and several live casino studios.

🎰 Slots RTP (5/5)

You can see the house edge information for every game published on Punt. Now it is very easy to calculate the RTP of the game simply by excluding the house edge from 100%.

This section of the review deserves the maximum rating. The availability of the RTP or house edge numbers adds more credibility to any gambling platform. We all know that casinos will always have an edge over the players, so knowing the exact number helps to build trusting relationships.

💰 Payment methods (2/5)

Punt casino accepts all major crypto assets for deposits and withdrawals: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash, XRP, Tron, BNB, and Tether.

The minimum deposit amount for Bitcoin is 0.0001 BTC.

This is around 2 dollars at the current exchange rate.

The minimum withdrawal amount is twice the deposited amount: 0.0002 BTC, which is around 4 USD at the time of writing. You will also have to pay a withdrawal fee of 0.00007 BTC.

And this is around 1.5 USD at the current exchange rate.

Your deposit will be visible on the balance and will become available for you to play with it once the Bitcoin transaction receives one confirmation from the network.  

I made my first deposit using Bitcoin. The transaction fee that I had to pay to send out the coins was only 0.14 USD.

Pretty soon the transaction was confirmed, and I was able to see the money on the casino platform.

The deposit process was quite smooth and the only thing that I can complain about is related to the huge withdrawal commission. Nowadays, there are lots of crypto casinos that allow making free-of-charge withdrawals. It would be somehow acceptable if the withdrawal commission would be on the level of the current actual transaction fees. But Punt requires a cashout commission that is ten times larger than what is actually needed.

I cannot give this section of the review more than two points out of five. Such a giant fee should not be deducted to process a payment. I would say that, in this way, casinos not only cover their payment fees, but they also put a larger amount of money in their pocket, which is unacceptable.

🚀 Welcome bonuses (0/5)

I was not able to find any welcome bonuses listed on the website, that’s why I decided to ask a live chat support agent about this matter.

According to the support team, the only bonuses that Punt casino has on offer could be found on their official Telegram channel. I could find some expired codes there, but nothing special.

It looks like those bonus drops are immediately grabbed by users, so you should be constantly monitoring the channel to use one of the codes. It is also obvious that a 2$ bonus is out of the interest of a serious player.

This section of Punt’s review does not get any points from me. The bonuses shared on the Telegram channel could not be considered real welcome bonuses. They might be useful for freebie hunters, but not for players who have their own money to gamble with.

📢 Promotions (2/5)

When I asked a customer agent about regular promotions, I was advised to check for the Telegram codes once again.

We discussed these codes in the previous section, so let’s check what else could be found on Punt’s website.

Every player has a progress tab, which shows the status of the current level and a progress bar for the level up.

You start the journey as a Newcomer and play your way to the first Bronze level. The Bronze level enables special level-up rewards, Rakeback, and weekly and monthly bonuses.

This is how the rakeback promotions works: you gain your rakeback in the currency in which you actually play and then you have an option to claim your rakeback.

Unfortunately, the rakeback becomes available starting from the Bronze level, and you need to wager $10k in order to get there.

After playing for a while, I wagered around 0.015 BTC and decided to stop the experiment. It is nearly impossible to wager $10k with a $200 deposit that I made for testing this platform. As there are no other bonuses or things that I could check and get, there was no sense for me to continue playing.

By the way, the rakeback tab shows that I started to collect some money.

But it is impossible to claim the rakeback amount without reaching the Bronze level.

I give this section of Punt’s review only two points out of five. It looks like you will be able to get some good rewards on the higher levels, but you need to wager $10k in order to get there, which is a lot.

As a newcomer, you will not receive any bonuses at all. If you play slots with an average RTP of 96%, then after wagering 10,000 USD, mathematically, you will lose around 400$. You can try to farm levels by playing low-margin games, such as Dice, which have only around 1% of the house edge. But even with these games, you are expected to lose around 100$ before getting to the Bronze level.

🔎 KYC and anonymity (3/5)

Below you can see the list of restricted countries that are not allowed on the Punt platform. Make sure to check the up-to-date list in the casino’s T&C before making a registration.

As every other Curacao-licensed casino, Punt reserves the right to ask for a KYC verification at any given time. This is a general KYC policy that all licensed casinos try to follow.

This section of the review gets three points out of five. If you are planning to play at Punt for some significant amount of time with multiple deposits and withdrawals, then be prepared that sooner or later you will be asked to pass a KYC verification.

👨‍💻 Customer support (2/5)

It is written on the live support chat window that the usual reply time of the support team is under 10 minutes.

In my case, it often was much more than 10 minutes to receive an answer for even a simple question.

One of my questions was ignored for 25 minutes. After that, the support agent just went offline without any notice.

I do understand that people have their working shifts, and it would be totally fine to drop me a message that some other agent would check my issue. But leaving the chat without any explanation is a bit confusing.

I deduct three points in this section of Punt’s review. The quality of the live support is not there yet. The casino is still pretty new, so these problems will likely be fixed in the future, but for now, I give only two points out of five.

⚡ Speed of withdrawals (4/5)

The withdrawal process is a bit complicated because of the cashout fee that you have to take into account when requesting the payout.

The first time I entered the amount to withdraw, the website showed me information on how much money was available on my balance.

Then, I tried to copy/paste the proposed amount, but the same error was there.

After that, I manually deducted the withdrawal fee and requested the cashout with a smaller amount. This time it was accepted and appeared in the history.

Six minutes later the cashout was processed and became visible in my Bitcoin wallet.

Taking into account the amount of time I spent trying to understand what was the issue with the balance, the total experience was not pleasant at all. I deduct one point in this section of the review.

🌐 Is VPN allowed? (5/5)

According to the Terms and Conditions, you cannot use VPN to hide your real location.

After chatting with the customer support team, I received a confirmation that using a VPN is safe for security purposes.

🏁 Final verdict (3/5)

The main question we all need to answer here is the following: what might be the reason to play at a copycat Punt casino when there is a better original: Stake.com? I must even say that Stake.com is not the best crypto casino that I played at. You can check the Reviews page to know which casinos outperform Stake, providing free withdrawals and newbie-friendly loyalty programs.

It is pretty obvious that Punt has fewer chances to become your day-to-day gambling platform as it brings nothing new to the table. While copying something successful is not a new thing in any business, there are not that many examples of a copied service becoming more successful than the original.