SportingBet Review

SportingBet was founded in 1997 by Mark Blandford. Headquartered in London, they are now part of the GVC Holdings group, after a 2012 takeover that also involved William Hill and saw Hills buy out Sportingbet’s Australian and Spanish operations. Sportingbet has more than 2.5million registered customers across 200 countries, and claims over 1m bets are placed with them every day. They have also regularly been shirt sponsors of a number of football clubs, the most famous of which is perhaps Wolverhampton Wanderers, though Sportingbet’s name has also been carried in Bulgaria, Romania and Greece.

Deposit & Withdrawals

As expected, they offer the standard payment methods available to bookmakers online these days. Visa/Credit cards being the main port of call, though the ever-popular PayPal is also included, alongside Neteller and Skrill. There are no fees with any of the deposit methods, though there is a minimum deposit, as well as withdrawal. Sometimes transactions may take a little while, but not beyond the expected time frame of three to five days.

Customer Service

The experience for customers is usually high rated at SportingBet, with ease of contact the main draw-in. The ‘Help & Contact Us’ button is combined in the website’s header next to the search bar. Upon clicking, a pop-up window is displayed, so do be aware to have this enabled. Although the live chat link is covered by the search bar in the pop-up, simply extending the browser gives the correct formatting. As well as live chat, telephone and email is also an option, with the former available in five other countries including Canada, Finland and Singapore, though only from 10am to 8.30pm.

License Information

Customers in the United Kingdom: Sportingbet is licensed and regulated by the Gambling Commission. License number is 1772.

Sporting Bet offer fractional, decimal and american odds formats

Betting limits

The maximum amount that you may win via the Sports betting Facilities within any 24-hour period is, depending on your selected currency, EUR 250,000. If your net win exceeds the Sporting Bet limit on winnings (above) it is your responsibility to be aware that you will not be paid out if your net win exceeds this limit.

The maximum amount that you may withdraw is twenty thousand US Dollars ($20,000) (or the equivalent amount in EUR or GBP currency) every 30 business days.

Types of bets

A little above their competitors, SportingBet usually offers better value on British sports such as football, though be prepared for less kind odds in other sports across the globe. Their basketball odds, as an example, are ones you could probably find much better with other websites. This is also the case with American Football. On the other hand, with some of their other markets, their odds are some of the best around, so do scan the entirety of the website to find what suits you as a better. Their social media also updates odds throughout the day so keep an eye on that as well. 

Sport coverage

Sporting Bet cover 34 different sports within their online sports betting portal. The main betting offers are within horse racing, football, tennis, cricket and basketball.

In-play experience

This is where SportingBet shines – in particular areas at least. Their live streaming may not be as polished as some of the pioneers of the feature but they have caught up with their competitors in hindsight. Football and tennis seem to be the go-to options in this regard, covering the usual events in these sports but also a little outside the box with the latter when WTA and ATP competitions come to town. The live options are probably Sportingbets’ best selling points.

Live streaming

Live streaming is offered on the site

The bright blue background with white text is not very easy on the eye and makes some elements difficult to pick out. The overall colour scheme of a turquoise blue, darker blue, grey and white text makes the sections of the website look quite dis-jointed so from a navigation perspective it takes some getting used to.

The navigation menus are a bit over the top. You have the products menu at the top part of the page but then you have the sports menu which is then replicated three times on the home page. It is placed under the main products menu, under this again in the middle section which shows all odds and then once again in the left sidebar.

It just makes you wonder which “football” link you should pick. Weak navigation in our opinion.

Loading of all pages is super quick which is great and in terms of content they do have some nice tools which can found at the bottom of the left side column and include a livescores and statistics tool.

So where SportingBet lose out on the look and feel and navigation, they make up for with this statistics tool. We would recommend any sports bettor to go and take a look at this tool.

It is beautifully laid out, easy to navigate and contains data across a wide range of sports with excellent graphics.

This is something to look closely at if you are a football punter. In terms of overall betting margin then SportingBet are not very competitive with an average ofv 5.8% across all sports, and it gets worse when we come to football with a whoppping 7.7% margin. This is one of the highest and worst margins we have seen offered on football.

However there is something to take into account. SportingBet offer football betting in 75 regions across the world, and, in many countries there are betting opportunities you will not find with any other online sportsbook. These lesser leagues will of course have higher margins as they contain risk for the bookmaker which drives the average margin high. For main leagues they are more competitive at under 5%.

At any time on the SportingBet site you will find between 30,000 – 50,000 markets/bets to choose from. As we mentioned in terms of odds margins they are not the best, but when it comes to markets, they have one of the strongest offers of all online sportsbooks.

Football is the main market with offers in more than 75 countries, including some obscure leagues like El Salvador, Honduras and Jamaica to name just a few.

There are also a wide range of bets on offer including handicap bets, combination bets and a full range of minute and fast market bets.

The In-play section of the site is actually easier to use with a simple navigation. The colour scheme is also easier on the eye.

In the In-play interface you have a series of tabs. You have the “Event View” where you can see all markets for a single event. You have the “Multi View” where you can select a range of events to view in one screen. Finally you have the “Calendar” view where you can view by individual sport and it gives you the option to tick a box which lets you filter only the sports that are of interest to you.

At the time of writing SportingBet were not offering any bonuses on their site.

SportingBet offer a wide range of payment methods both for deposit and withdrawal. These include VISA and Mastercard credit and debit cards. You can also use Maestro as a payment method and there is also the option to use your favorite e-wallet including Paypal, Skrill and Neteller.

As well as these you have other e-payment options like Trustly and paysafecard as well as a new method which is “Fast Bank Transfer”

This is one area of the site that is better than other online sportsbooks.

Well we could not tell how fast they are as we could not get a response by phone or live chat within a 5 minute period. Some of our site users had the same issues…….Richard actually contacted us and told us about his experience.

He was trying to find information on “Promotions” but the link in the main menu led to a blank page. He used the Live Chat to try and get some information, and twice there was no response within 7 minutes (this is a long time when using Live Chat)

He then said that he contacted them by phone and was immediately put on hold and nobody answered within 4 minutes, so he got frustrated and hung up.

BookmakerAdvisor are very adamant that they give totally impartial reviews, so it is important for us to show all elements of an online sports betting and bookmaking site.

We will check this in further follow ups but for now this looks a weak area of the SportingBet site.

You can view the official licensing information below:

ElectraWorks Limited, the provider of this website, is licensed by the Government of Gibraltar and regulated by the Gibraltar Gambling Commissioner under the Gambling Act 2005. ElectraWorks Limited has been granted a fixed-odds licence (RGL No. 051) and casino licence (RGL N0. 50) for the operation of remote gambling.

Furthermore, ElectraWorks Limited is licensed by the UK Gambling Commission under the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014. ElectraWorks Limited has been granted License No. 000-039011-R-319371-004 for the operation of remote gambling in Britain.

In terms of payments security they use 128 bit Secure Socket Layout (SSL) encryption software. This means that any information you enter into their online forms, such as payment details, are automatically protected. We secure your private information using an SSL Certificate from VeriSign.