My name is Robert K. Buxton, and for the last twelve years I've been the guy who keeps the lights on at https://casinoswelt.com/, the German-language casino comparison portal that's quietly become the go-to resource for players across the DACH region.
I never set out to run a gambling site. I was born in Leeds, raised on a diet of BBC Radio 4 and my dad's endless pub quizzes. At university I studied computer science because I liked puzzles, not because I wanted to grow up and police bonus terms. But in 2012, fresh out of a soul-crushing IT support job in London, I answered a freelance ad to "clean up some messy WordPress code" for a startup review site. The pay was rubbish, the office was a converted bedroom in Hamburg, and the coffee was instant. I stayed for six years.
Casinoswelt.com hired me in 2018 as their first full-time admin. My brief was simple: make sure the site never goes down, the reviews stay honest, and the servers don't melt when a new Play'n GO slot drops. I've built up the backend from scratch: custom plugins for license verification, automated payout-speed testing, a database cross-referencing every MGA and GGL regulation update. Players don't see any of it, but when they land on our comparison table and every RTP is accurate to two decimal places, that's me.
A typical Tuesday: I'm up at 6 a.m. CET, scanning the overnight logs for 404s or suspicious traffic spikes. By 8 I'm on Slack with the editors, arguing why we can't list a Curacao-licensed white-label that's hiding its ownership behind three shell companies. At 10 I push a micro-update that fixes a mobile filtering bug reported by a user in Vienna. Lunch is a sandwich over a spreadsheet that tracks affiliate disclosure compliance across 14 jurisdictions. Afternoons are for deep dives: I'll spin 1,000 autoplay rounds on a new Pragmatic slot, screenshot every bonus trigger, and write a 50-line script to verify the math. Evenings I moderate the forum, banning the bots and answering the same three questions about German tax rules until I can recite them in my sleep.
I still code in PHP like it's 2015, but I've learned to speak fluent legalese. I can tell you what the exact difference is between a "bonus" and a "non-sticky bonus" under the new Glücksspielstaatsvertrag, and I've got a direct line to three separate compliance officers at the GGL. My proudest moment was the day we caught a rogue operator faking eCOGRA seals—our takedown post got 40,000 views and forced them to pull the plug overnight.
Outside the server room, I am a boring dad of two who coaches under-9s football on Saturdays and brews terrible IPAs in the garage. I don’t gamble-admin’s privilege is knowing exactly how rigged the odds are-but I’ll never lose the buzz of watching a player use our filters to find a €5-min-deposit site with PayPal and 96.8 % RTP, then come back to the forum to say they actually cashed out.