PokiePop Casino

PokiePop Casino Review

Us Aussie gamblers rarely get any casino sites just for us – typically, the casinos we review here are much bigger, international ones that also happen to accept players from Australia. PokiePop, however, is all ours, as its name suggests. It’s a site for pokies, and its artstyle is inspired by pop art (like the kind found in comic books from the 40s and 50s). One glance at its main page proves that its presentation is on point… but is the rest of it up to Aussie standards?

To find out, we decided to dive deep into PokiePop’s stylish nethers to discover whether its games, bonuses, and other features are good enough for the average player! Not only that, but we did our homework and investigated things like the casino’s owner, license, support team quality, and more, all so we can provide you with the most comprehensive picture possible. Truly, we’re the true pop stars of the casino world!

Bonuses

Welcome Bonus – 100% Match up to AU$1,000 + 100 Free Spins

Just like most online casinos out there, PokiePop offers not just a single welcome bonus, but an entire welcome package that will reward you for your first 3 deposits. For now though, let’s focus on just the first deposit bonus, which, while nothing outstanding, should still be more than satisfactory for most players.

The very first time you put money down, you’ll receive a 100% match up to AU$1,000, as well as 100 free spins. Both the welcome offer and the free spins fall well within the standard for online casinos, even if they don’t exceed it. Keep in mind that the spins will be given to you in batches of 20 every 24 hours, and you need to use up each batch within 24 hours of receiving it. You also need to log in to get it, it won’t be automatically deposited to your account daily.

Speaking of wagering requirements, this is where things get a little messy: both the bonus cash and free spins winnings must be played through x50 times before they can be withdrawn. This is extremely high, and far above casino standards – to put it in perspective, if you deposited the minimum of AU$20 and won an extra AU$5 from the free spins, you’d need to wager a total of AU$1,250 on pokies alone (way more on table games) before you can withdraw whatever’s left. It’s completely unreasonable.

Additional Welcome Bonuses

Like we said a moment ago, PokiePop will reward you for your first three deposits, not just your first one. Don’t get too excited, though: the second and third deposit bonuses aren’t anywhere as good as the first. For starters, booth the match percentage and bonus cash have been reduced to 75% and AU$750 respectively, and on top of that, you won’t get any free spins! This applies to both bonuses, they’re identical.

Just like before though, the worst part isn’t the actual bonus, but the wagering requirements tied to it. You’ll still have to contend with x50 on pokies, and 5 times more on table games. Granted, you’ll have 30 days to complete these requirements, which is pretty generous, but that doesn’t make the overall task feel any less like an unnecessary chore. We’d rather reduce the time to 10 days and the wagering requirements to x30.

Reload Promotions at PokiePop Casino

Although the welcome bonus wasn’t particularly great, we have some good news for you: you’ll still be able to enjoy a lot more offers after it. In fact, PokiePop’s promotions section is positively brimming with deals, it’s one of the best things about the site! Some of them will be limited-time offers added for special occasions (like holidays) and will expire; as such, it’s pretty pointless to discuss them here.

Some of the offers, however, are what’s known as a “reload bonus” – or a promotion that will recharge each time it’s used, allowing you to claim it periodically. PokiePop has a ton of those, typically tied to particular days of the week: for example, every Saturday a deposit of AU$20 or more will grant you one of five random offers, and on Sunday, the same deposit will let you pick one of three offers. Add to this the aforementioned limited-time offers, as well as a healthy dose of Drops & Wins tournaments (which we’ll discuss in their own section below), and you’ve got a pretty healthy set of bonus offerings!

Games

Although the bonuses as a whole were a bit of a mixed bag, ultimately they don’t matter as much as casinos want you to think they do. No, what truly matters most are the games: that’s what you’re here for, right? And here, PokiePop holds its own well enough. The offerings won’t blow any minds: in fact, the amount of games and providers alike is fairly modest compared to other, bigger casinos operating in Australia. Not only that, but the site is also missing any form of sports betting, which many would argue is one of the main draws of online gambling.

When you sign up, what you’ll get is pokies, live casino (and table games, of course), and instant win games – known as “Other Games” in the casino’s modest categorization. The former two are obvious and we’ll discuss in more detail down below, but the latter is perhaps the most interesting, since PokiePop hasn’t skimped out on those niche games at all. You’ll find over 100 titles here, including Keno, Plinko, Aviator, scratch cards, and even virtual sports, which are all extremely welcome.

Pokies

The first thing we noticed about PokiePop’s pokies section is that… there kind of isn’t one. When you open up the front page, you’ll instantly be drowned in a sea of icons, each representing a game. You won’t need to go to a subpage to get started, but on the flipside, the available categorizations are also very lacking. It’s clear that the site’s designers didn’t want you to waste time searching ro the right game, and instead wanted you to get started immediately with as few obstacles as possible. Which is commendable, but has its drawbacks.

With that said, the selection of pokies here is very decent. It’s easy to argue that PokiePop has chosen a “quality over quantity” approach, since nearly every provider whose games it secured is pretty popular and known for quality: Betsoft, BGaming, Pragmatic, Tom Horn, Mascot, Spinomenal, etc. They’re undeniably great, and anyone familiar with them will know that they’re exploring a top tier selection. The problem is that, as mentioned earlier, not everyone DOES know them – and PokiePop has remarkably little patience for those people.

Live casino

One thing’s certain here: PokiePop stayed true to its name and emphasized pokies over live casino in a pretty significant way. Although the live dealer section isn’t terrible, it’s nowhere near as full and interesting as either the pokie or the instant win ones. In total, you’ll find only about 70 rooms, the vast majority of which for the popular titles like blackjack and roulette. If you want something more obscure, like andar bahar or craps, your options become very few to non-existent.

What’s interesting is that, as far as we can tell, the casino’s main live provider is Evolution Gaming, one of the biggest live casino companies on the market. They have way, way more rooms than that, so why are only a fraction of their offerings available here? What especially hurts is the absence of their live game shows (such as Monopoly Live or Deal or No Deal) which, while not entirely without representation, are still mostly absent from the site. How come?

Deposits & Withdrawals

Although we were fairly happy with PokiePop’s games, the same can’t be said for their payment options, which are by far the worst thing about the entire site. Most online casinos pride themselves on the myriad of different payment methods they offer players – e-wallets, pre-paid vouchers, cryptocurrencies, you name it. After all, the more ways you can deposit, the more players can actually pay to play, right?

And yet, PokiePop still only offers 4 different payment options, and 3 of them are banking solutions: Visa, MasterCard, and bank transfer. Sure, these are commonly used payment methods, but not everyone wants to use them – plus they’re available at every casino for those that do want them. That’s why many players want to use e-wallets like Revolut or crypto like Bitcoin, none of which is present here. You can only use Neosurf, a pre-paid option that you obviously can’t withdraw with. It’s such an inexplicably poor choice all around.

Withdrawal time

But the low amount of payment options isn’t the only poor choice the creators of PokiePop have made. Although you obviously can’t withdraw with Neosurf, for whatever reason you can’t withdraw with your credit card, either. Why not? Most other casinos allow it. Instead, your only option for receiving a cashout is bank transfer, which is slow as hell. According to PokiePop itself, it’ll take 3-5 days for your payment to be processed. However, based on our experience with Australian banks, this timeframe will likely be even longer. And that’s without counting the 1-3 days it’ll take for the casino to dispatch the money in the first place! Why wait when Litecoin or Neteller could’ve transferred that money instantly?

VIP Program

As discussed in our Bonuses section, PokiePop does have a ton of different bonus offers you can take advantage of – both as part of the welcome package and after it. Sadly, one thing it doesn’t have is a VIP program or some kind of loyalty initiative that will consistently give the most persistent players prizes. This shouldn’t be a deal breaker to most, especially considering just how many reload promotions the casino already offers. But it’s still something that would’ve been nice to see, yet is completely absent.

Tournaments

While a VIP program isn’t in the cards, PokiePop does at least offer a decent amount of tournaments – even if most of them are from the “Drops & Wins” variety. This means that they’re organized not by the casino itself, but by the pokie companies (like Pragmatic Play for instance), and as such can be found at many different casino sites running those same games. As far as we can tell, there aren’t any tourneys unique to PokiePop.

Still, if you’re not someone who tends to cycle between several different sites, this shouldn’t bother you. And besides, “Drops & Wins” tournaments have gigantic prizes: for example, BGaming’s tournament, which is currently ongoing as of the time of writing, has a prize pool of nearly AU$300,000. Not a bad haul if you can win it, even if doing so will be significantly harder to the increased competition by players from other sites!

Verification

If you already have experience with the world of online casinos, or even just with websites that can give payments instead of only receive them (like, for example, e-wallets or crypto exchange marketplaces), then you’re already familiar with the process of verification. And if you don’t, well, due to international money laundering laws, every site that gives money to users must require said users to verify who they are in real life by presenting the appropriate identification documents.

PokiePop works the same way, so if you want to withdraw those hard-earned winnings, you’ll have to tie your real identity to your casino account! Thankfully, this process isn’t nearly as invasive as it sounds, as it’ll just require the basic documents you’re already using to identify yourself: a form of ID (like a driver’s license) and, if needed, a proof of address (even a utility bill or delivery receipt will work). If you deposited via credit card, you’ll need to send photos of it (with some of the numbers censored for security purposes), but it really shouldn’t be much more involved than that.

Is PokiePop Casino Legit & safe?

Here at CasinoAustraliaOnline, we not only tell our players whether an online casino is legit and safe, but also teach them how to verify that information for themselves! And if you’ve been reading our reviews, you certainly know to look for any site’s owner and license before you make a commitment. And if you did that at PokiePop, you’d have certainly come away with the conclusion that the site is illegitimate. After all, this vital information seems to be nowhere. You should step away, right?

Well, not quite. After checking the site through various license registries, we discovered that it actually is licensed by Anjouan. Tied to said license is also the site’s owner, Astral Holdings Ltd, which is responsible for owning and managing multiple different casino sites. You can verify this information yourself by looking up PokiePop’s domain in the license register on Anjouan’s website. So yes, this site does seem to be legit and trustworthy! As for why they aren’t showing this essential information on the main page itself, or in the About Us section… we have no clue. But it’s undeniably a red flag, and we wouldn’t blame you for distrusting the casino anyway because of it.

Customer support

The customer support section of PokiePop was undeniably one of the biggest surprises of the entire casino! Like, yeah, we expected it to have live chat – so does nearly every other casino on the market. But the ways in which you can contact support go so much deeper than that. For example, it offers not one, but two distinct email addresses if you’d rather go that route: one for general help, and one specifically for accounts and banking (aka, the more serious stuff). Which is a fantastic idea that ensures player requests are treated with the urgency they deserve.

And if you’re feeling a bit nostalgic over the early 2000s, why not give PokiePop’s support team a call? Yeah, you can do that too: this is one of the very few casino sites that still operates a valid phone number for support. Granted, that number is American (1-800), which is odd for a casino so clearly intended for the Australian market, but hey. If you don’t mind making an international call, it’s still a fantastic option!

Mobile casino

As you may have noticed, PokiePop’s interface can be a bit… loud. Lots of big buttons surrounded by even bigger banners, loads of interactive elements even in the simplest menus, the works. With all that in mind, it wouldn’t be wrong to presume that the site would be a mess on mobile that overloads any phone with anything less than 16GB of RAM… but actually, you’d be wrong. If anything, PokiePop’s strange interface feels a lot more at home on mobile than it ever does on desktop, both in terms of usability and technical performance. So if you’re worried about how PokiePop will perform in your mobile browser, don’t be, chances are that unless you have a particularly old phone, you’ll be just fine!