Marta Kowalski

About Marta

Marta joined 8day.gg as Editor-in-Chief in 2024 after nine years of writing about the casino industry from the perspective of a working player rather than a marketing partner. She believes that the difference between an analysis a reader can act on and a paid-for endorsement is whether the person writing has actually made the deposit, played through the bonus, called the support line at 2 AM, and waited for the money to hit their account. Everything she publishes at 8day.gg follows that principle.

Before joining our team, Marta wrote for several iGaming trade publications and consumer sites, primarily focused on the European market. She speaks Polish and English natively, reads Swedish, Portuguese, and French well enough to sanity-check translations, and has spent the last two years working with our regional teams to bring the same standards to Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, French, Swedish, and Thai coverage. She writes the English-language pages herself and edits the localised versions in close collaboration with native-language contributors.

She lives in Kraków and travels regularly to industry events in Malta, London, and Amsterdam. When she is not testing casinos, she is either reading Central European history or trying to convince the rest of the editorial team that Zbigniew Herbert should be more widely read.

Editorial approach

The 8day.gg methodology that Marta oversees rests on a single conviction: a casino is only recommendable if we have completed a full test cycle without any pillar failing. That means the licence must be verifiable in the regulator's own register, deposits must complete via at least two methods, the welcome bonus must be worked to completion or documented abandonment, support must be timed on three separate interactions, and a real withdrawal must be chronometered from click to arrival on the destination account.

Casinos that pass five out of five pillars appear in our rankings. Casinos that pass four out of five do not, regardless of how strong the passing four are, because the failing pillar is the one that will hurt a reader when they are most vulnerable. This is the standard Marta enforces across every market on the site, and it is why the rankings are shorter than most competing publications: only operators that pass the whole cycle earn placement.

She insists on native-language coverage for every non-English market. Portuguese pages are written in European Portuguese, not translated from English. Danish pages are written in Danish. Thai pages are written by contributors who work in Thai. Machine translation is never used for published copy, only for internal reference. The result is slower publication cadence but substantially higher trust from readers in each market.

Areas of expertise

Marta's specialist areas cover the operational side of casino analysis: how bonuses are structured mathematically, how licences differ in practical enforcement, how withdrawal delays correlate with operator ownership structures, and how support teams reveal whether a brand is run by people who understand player experience or by people who see support as a cost centre. She has documented the transition of the Curaçao regulatory framework post-2024 in detail and maintains our internal reference on which operators sit under which master licence.

She works closely with Raymond Delacroix on payments-heavy content and with Aisha Halima on trust and compliance topics. Her byline appears as author on the majority of hub pages across the site, and as fact-checker on pages primarily authored by Raymond or Aisha in their respective specialisms.

Background

Marta has been writing about the online casino industry since 2015. She started in Polish-language consumer casino media, moved to English-language trade coverage in 2018, and joined 8day.gg as Editor-in-Chief in 2024. Her degree is in comparative literature from Jagiellonian University in Kraków, which she credits with teaching her the reading habit that survives industry press-release fatigue. She has attended ICE London every year since 2016 except during pandemic-related cancellations.

She does not accept commissions or payments from operators for editorial coverage. All 8day.gg rankings are compiled independently and published affiliate relationships are disclosed in the site's disclosure statement. Marta considers the separation of editorial and commercial functions the single most important characteristic distinguishing our work from the majority of casino affiliate publications.

Recent work

A selection of pages Marta has authored or overseen this quarter. The full list of pages under her byline includes almost every hub page on the site.

Contact and editorial policy

Corrections, factual disputes, and story tips can be sent to Marta directly via the contact form. She reads all messages personally and responds to substantive editorial questions within three business days. For pitches from operators seeking review or bonus updates, please use the affiliate contact route, which is handled separately by the commercial team and does not affect editorial coverage.