Coral Review

With an annual turnover of over £1.1 billion, this giant of the bookmaking world offers a free £20 bet with just a £5 initial bet and punters are truly spoilt for choice with more than 25 markets to choose from across a website that you should find easy to navigate. Coral are a highly-respected bookmaker that should be commended for putting the needs of their customers first each and every time.

Deposit & Withdrawals

With a huge, well-established company such as Coral, the latest and most secure encryption technology is to be expected, to keep your money and personal details safe. Making a deposit if quick and simple and debit card, credit card, Paypal, E-wallet and voucher payments are credited instantly. If you are withdrawing via a credit or debit card then it takes between two and five working days, while E-wallet withdrawals are instant and for bank transfers the money will be in your account within three to five working days. Furthermore, Coral offers a new ‘Bet and Collect’ service with two account types. Full Coral Connect lets customers enjoy the full benefits of Coral Connect, allowing betting in shop, online, via mobile, tablet and via the telephone using a card that acts as one account. With the card you can withdraw your winnings in cash from any Coral shop or directly to your registered online bank card. In-Shop only Connect allows you to bet in shop only with your Coral Connect account, permitting cashless transactions and quicker more efficient bet placements. If you get a winner you can keep the funds on your Connect card or withdraw the winnings in cash from any Coral shop.

Customer Service

As one of the largest online bookmakers, Coral have built up quite a reputation for offering great customer support and offer the usual contact methods of live chat, email, telephone and by letter. Live chat is usually answered within seconds, but the site explains detailed waiting times or ‘average response times’ before you contact them as you can choose to wait or to try at a later time.

License Information

Customers in the United Kingdom: Coral is licensed and regulated by the Gambling Commission.

Coral offers its odds in easy to read UK and European formats, while their overall betting margin hovers around 5.8%. Notably this rises to 6.5% for tennis bets and an impressive 7.3% on their ice hockey book, which are two markets to certainly exploit and the minimum stake allowed is £1. However, while the maximum fluctuates somewhat based on both the sport book chosen and the type of bet placed, there are surprisingly high maximum winnings limits, set at £1,000,000 per bet with no exceptions.

Betting limits

Corals have various maximum payouts on a single day’s betting. This is £1 million for horse racing and football, £500,000 on greyhound racing and £250,000 on sub sports like golf, tennis and cricket

Types of bets

Being one of the oldest high street chains and now with a strong online presence, Coral a large range of bet types from traditional bets like singles, multiples and combination bets (including Yankees, Lucky 15’s, LuckY 31’s, Canadians and Goliath’s) as well as a whole host of football bets and of course a full range of tote bets such as Jackpots, Placepots, Quadpots, Tri-fectas and Exactas. If we look at their online bets you have live in-play and a whole range of handicap bets.

Sport coverage

Coral currently have a strong coverage of sports betting with 28 different sports to choose from.

In-play experience

Bet in-play multi-view is a great and novel idea from Coral, allowing you to drag and drop selections to make your own channel which means you will not miss any of the action. It is very well done and easy to use.

Live streaming

To watch a Live Horse race or sports stream, you need to have placed a bet on that event. You need to have placed a real money bet of at least £1 on the race/event you want to view.

The main sports betting page will be confusing to most if you are not an experienced punter. Firstly the blue and green colour scheme is quite bright and you cannot pick out exactly where you want to go straight of the bat. It does take a bit of getting used to.

You have two menus on the front page with the top main menu showing all the products and then below this you have a second menu which is where you will see all of the different content options. One big plus for Coral is that they have some excellent experts that post on their sports blog which include Alan Shearer on football and Joe Tizzard and Tom Scudamore on horse racing.

Add to this a really top notch statistics section from Betradar, as well as Coral Radio, a live streaming interface and also live scores and results sections.

The main betting area is in the middle of the screen and when you open up you will probably find this is pointing to horse racing or football which of course are the two main betting sports.

The left menu has some good functionality including the “My Coral” section where you can buld your own mini menu to show only your favorite sports.

This way you can get to your favorite sport, event and market very quickly.

Page load times on the Coral site are very good.

The average betting margin across the Coral site is 5.8% which is not overly competitive and in one of the main sports, football, it is exactly the same at 5.8%. For Tennis punters this then increases to over 6% with American sports being a little lower.

In terms of odds, this where Coral are one of the weaker bookmakers

Where odds are not so good, we go to the other extreme in terms of the market coverage, particularly in football and horse racing. If we take a game from the premier league on a Saturday afternoon you will easily find more than 200 markets on a single game with some very unique pre match and In-play betting opportunities including: Team Goals, Score Markets, Corner and Cards Markets, Goalscorer Markets and a new option called My Markets which allows you to build your own market scenarios and list.

The In-play interface is really very good and a nice layout with markets and odds clearly laid ot with white text on a green background. For punters who like to be on multiple sports and specifically In-play, you will love the new feature on the Coral site which is called Multi View.

Multi View allows you to have a set of windows on your screen like tiles on a wall. You can then just click from a list and add any event/market that you wish to track. You could have a football match, a tennis match, a golf tournamant and even the next horse race, all in one screen with all odds and data.

For bettors and punters who like to play with minimal risk then the In-play handicap markets offer some very short price options with teams being given up to a 4 goal lead or giving up to a 4 goal lead. It generates some very short prices which can be combined in low risk accumulators.

Coral are one of the longest running bookmakers and until a few years ago their online offers were not much to write home about. That has changed a lot in the last couple of years.

When we checked the website bonus page they had sixteen different bonus offers including a simple Bet £5 get £20 offer which has limited T&Cs.

One of the excellent offers is their “Build Your Bet” tool. This is not like other bookmakers who offer a request a bet where you have to wait to get a price from a trader. Here you just add various selections and scenarios and it prices the bet for you automatically.

Coral provide a wide range of deposit and withdrawal options for their customers. Along with the standard options like VISA, Mastercard and the main e-wallets, you can also use Skrill 1 tap, Ecopay, prepaid card and paysafe card.

You also have the option of using your Coral Connect card in the shops

Really good level of knowledge from the customer service agents but it can be slow in getting a response, this was tested on a normal Saturday and took more than a minute which is quite long for a company like this. We also saw longer times during major sports events.

Coral have been in the bookmaking and betting shop industry for many years. They still run many retail outlets in conjunction with Ladbrokes with whom they joined forces with just over a year ago.

Coral.co.uk is operated by Coral Interactive (Gibraltar) Limited (company number 106323). Coral Interactive (Gibraltar) Limited’s address is Suite 711, 1st Floor, Europort, Europort Road, Gibraltar GX11 1AA. LC International Limited is licensed by the Government of Gibraltar & regulated by the Gibraltar Gambling Commissioner.