Top Discover Card Casinos

The Discover Card was launched in 1985 by Sears. It was a pretty inauspicious beginning for the card but it quickly grew into one of America’s biggest cards and is still growing today.

In Europe, we generally consider Visa and Mastercard to be the two biggest names, followed by American Express. It’s easy to imagine that the United States is the same and that Discover Card is some obscure card that few people use—the credit equivalent of Maestro.

In actual fact, Discover Card is more common than American Express in the United States and it’s also more common in Europe than you might expect.

In this guide, we’ll look at the best Discover Card casinos and show you the pros and cons of gambling with this safe and popular payment method.

Where are Discover Cards Used?

Discover Card is accepted in over 190 countries and territories. However, it’s not always as common as you might think.

Take the United Kingdom as an example. The Discover website has listed the UK as an accepted region for a number of years, but while this was true in theory, it wasn’t always true in practice. Ten years ago, if you walked into a UK retailer and flashed a Discover card, they would have stared blankly and asked if you had a Visa or Mastercard.

Today, things are not as bad as they used to be. In 2019, Barclays signed a deal that ensured all Discover cards would be accepted through the Barclaycard network.

Does that mean you can use Discover Cards to gamble in the United Kingdom? No, and therein lies another issue.

Why You Can’t Gamble with Discover in the UK

There is such a thing as a Discover debit card. Typically, however, when you hear “Discover Card” you think about credit cards.

In April 2020, the UK authorities banned the use of credit cards for gambling. The country’s gambling regulator determined that over 800,000 of the UK’s 10.5 million gamblers were using credit cards to gamble.

Of those, a large number were defined as “problem gamblers”. They were gambling money they didn’t have and getting themselves deeper and deeper in debt.

Credit cards have their benefits where gambling is concerned, and we will discuss those shortly, but the negatives are obvious.

Put yourselves in the shoes of a gambling addict for a moment. You have just gambled away all of your paycheque at the local casino or betting shop. You’re depressed, frustrated, angry, and desperate to win your money back.

You don’t have any funds in your bank account and are devoid of cash, but you have a credit card with a large limit. In such situations, it’s easy to talk yourself into using that card and letting your future-self deal with the fallout.

Problem gamblers in the grip of addiction don’t think about what will happen weeks or months in the future. And even if they have that thought process, they may convince themselves that they are due a big win and can use that win to cover their debt.

The UK regulators have made a lot of strange decisions in recent years and many of these have harmed the gambling industry. But if you approach the situation from a neutral perspective and consider the dangers of problem gambling, it’s easy to see where they are coming from.

The result is that you can’t use credit cards to make direct deposits or withdrawals on online casinos. This is true even for credit cards that are connected to PayPal accounts and other e-wallets. In fact, if you use a credit card to fund an e-wallet, you may encounter issues even if you’re not trying to use this card directly.

Can You Get Rewards for Gambling?

Discover Cards are considered some of the best reward cards around. They have fantastic cashback schemes and you’ll find them at the top of countless “best credit card” lists. The problem is, where online gambling is concerned, none of this really matters.

An online gambling transaction is logged as a “cash transaction”. In other words, it’s the same as using your credit card to withdraw cash and purchase money orders.

You won’t collect any rewards and you will be tasked with paying additional fees. In an ideal world, you could use your Discover Card to gamble and collect rewards. Combining this with a Welcome Bonus and Loyalty Scheme, you could have the perfect set-up for a professional gambler.

But, alas, none of that is relevant because none of it applies. In fact, due to the increased fees, professional gamblers generally abstain from using credit cards.

Pros and Cons of Using Discover Cards to Gamble

Why should you consider using a Discover Card over another payment method like Skrill? What does it offer that you can and can’t get with other options? Take a look at these pros and cons.

Pros: Security

Credit cards provide a certain level of security that you can’t get from debit cards, bank transfers, and a few other popular payment methods.

If you use a debit card, it’s connected to your bank account and potentially to everything that you own. If anything happens to that card, you could lose every penny. Banks are less forgiving of fraud and if you give your card details to an unsecured site and lose every penny, there’s a chance they won’t cover you.

It’s a scary thought, but message boards and social media is littered with stories of fraud victims who were blamed by the bank and not compensated for their losses.

This doesn’t happen with credit cards. If you are a victim of fraud, you will get your money back. This is true even if you use those details on an unsecured website or willingly give them to someone who then commits fraud.

All credit cards provide this benefit but Discover is particularly good when it comes to security.

If you’re gambling on new online casinos or questionable casinos, it adds an extra layer of security. It’s not just about theft, either. If the casino takes your money and refuses to give you your winnings without a valid reason, you can contact your credit card provider and make a claim.

You won’t get your winnings, but there’s a chance you will get your deposit back.

In this sense, Discover Cards are some of the safest payment methods online.

Pros: Support

We have a lot of respect for Neteller as a casino payment option. We have been using online casinos since the early 2000s, a time when PayPal was a no-go and Neteller/Skrill were two of the only e-wallet options. They filled a gap, served a purpose, and gained a lot of respect as a result.

A lot of players love these payment options, but if they were being honest, they’d agree that they have terrible support.

Traditionally, the same is true for all e-wallets, and while they have all upped their game in recent years, everyone but PayPal is behind the times.

The last time we contacted PayPal, we just needed to click the “Help” section in our account and were given a unique code and a phone number. We called the number, input the code, and straight away we were connected to someone who had access to our account.

The last time we contacted Skrill, we had to send them an email and were told to expect a reply within 2 weeks. Two weeks later, they emailed us with a confused copy-paste reply and we had to contact them again to clarify. Another two weeks passed, and the ball finally started rolling.

It took another 4 emails and nearly 2 months before the issue was resolved.

Even PayPal can be frustrating at times, as you can attest if you have ever had an issue with verifications or claims. Sure, their first-line customer support is great, but the same isn’t true for the verification department and the other internal aspects of the company. Trying to get through to them is nearly impossible.

None of this applies to Discover. It has top-notch customer support and it is available around the clock. You don’t feel like you’re constantly arguing common sense with a mindless automaton and you are not forced to abide by archaic processes.

If you have an issue making a Skrill deposit, your first response is to sigh deeply, consider emailing support, and then promptly change your mind when you anticipate the weeks of struggle that lie ahead. With Discover, you just whip out your phone, make a quick call, and it will be remedied quickly.

Pros: Limits

Many online casinos place limits on e-wallets and other common payment methods.

Do you use Skrill or Neteller? You can say goodbye to most Welcome Bonuses, as 90% of the casino bonuses we cover disqualify all users of these methods. If you use certain mobile-only methods and pre-paid cards, you may find that you can’t deposit more than a few hundred at a time.

Wire transfers insist on a high minimum withdrawal; e-wallets restrict you based on limits set by the site and payment provider.

But you won’t face the same issues with Discover Cards.

In fact, all major credit cards and debit cards have very high limits.

Cons: Card Fees and Interest

As noted above, you will be charged every time you use your Discover Card to gamble. If we take a typical US Discover Card as an example, users are charged the greater of $10 or 5% for every transaction.

In addition, they will be charged a higher rate of interest. Many Discover Cards charge 24.99% APR for these transactions.

For example, if you deposit $20, you will be charged a total of $30 in the first instance and will then need to cover the interest.

In such cases, it makes more sense to increase your deposit amount, but even then, you will need to increase it substantially to reduce that fee to 5% and once you do, you’ll be hit with a much higher interest rate.

Generally, if you want to avoid these fees, you need to stay clear of Discover Cards and credit cards in general.

Cons: Site Fees

Not only will your card provider charge you for making transactions, but the site could charge you as well. Every time you use a credit card online, the retailer pays a small merchant fee. With reward cards, this fee is higher, as the extra cash is used to offset the cost of those rewards.

This isn’t always passed onto the consumer, but it’s certainly not uncommon for this to happen. Many sites charge up to 3% for each transaction that you make, which means you’ll lose $15 from a $500 deposit, along with whatever the provider charges you.

Cons: Speed

An e-wallet or cryptocurrency withdrawal may reach your account in just a few minutes. There can be delays, but these are the result of the casino’s processing time, and not the method itself.

If you use a credit card such as Discover, the actual processing time can take anywhere from 3 to 5 days. Add a casino pending time of 3 days to the mix, along with a Bank Holiday and a weekend, and it could take over 10 days to get your winnings.

And that’s assuming that you can actually withdraw, as therein lies another problem with Discover Cards.

Cons: Problematic Withdrawals

Many casinos will let you deposit using a credit card but won’t let you withdraw to the same method. This can be incredibly frustrating, and for more reasons than you might think.

The first time we experienced this issue ourselves was a couple of years ago, when gambling at a major UK casino and sports book (before the ban).

We deposited using a credit card and a week later, we withdrew some winnings to the same card.

After 10 days, the money had not been processed and so we contacted them. Only then were we informed that the casino couldn’t withdraw to credit cards and we needed to choose another method.

The money was returned to our wallet and we tried to withdraw it somewhere else, only for the software to inform us that we needed to use the same method we used to deposit.

Again, we phoned them; again, we tried, and eventually, after another week of waiting, we gave up and gambled the money.

It’s worth noting that this was one of the biggest sites in the UK, one that has been around since the dawn of the iGaming age, and yet it still had these problems. Some casinos will just refuse to withdraw outright and not even offer it as an option, others will let you do it. And for the ones that do, the money is returned as credit and not cash.

Needless to say, it’s a problematic process.