Betfair Review

Betfair Review – Introduction:

Betfair originally launched in 2000 as an online betting exchange – a platform where users bet against each other as opposed to betting with a bookmaker. Since then, Betfair has become the largest exchange in the world, over competitors such as Ladbrokes Exchange and Matchbook.

In May 2012, Betfair diversified away from its exchange model and launched a Sportsbook, the same as traditional bookmakers, as it discovered its customers were doing 30% of their betting elsewhere and they wanted to reduce their loss of market share to their competitors. This allows Betfair to offer the best of both worlds, an exchange, which is favoured by professional punters, and a stand alone sportsbook. Betfair have experimented sporadically with Esports betting on their exchange, but they don’t yet offer CSGO and their other Esports markets suffer from low liquidity, so we’ll be focusing on their sportsbook offering which is more comprehensive.

Reputation and Reliability:

Betfair as an entity holds a really strong name. The Betfair Exchange has become the backbone of the gambling industry since it came to market, as wherever it is available, it drives the pricing of all the markets that traditional bookmakers offer. It also else a platform used by bookmakers for hedging large bets from their customers, particularly on-course at horse racing or greyhound racing meetings. If you see them using a computer, it’s linked up to Betfair or Betdaq, one of their competitors.

Betfair Sportsbook piggybacks onto the well established Betfair brand as it’s integrated into Betfair.com and is now their main focus. Betfair is a huge company with huge sums of money in the bank, and they’re soon undertaking a merger with Paddy Power worth over £1bn, so it’s hard to find somewhere more secure to bet.

Betfair has a Gibraltar gambling license for their UK based customers, and a Maltese license covering those based elsewhere in Europe. Both jurisdictions are held in high esteem. They also have local licenses in Bulgaria, Italy and Spain, as they have moved towards a more above-board strategy in terms of where they will accept bets from. In Australia, the Betfair brand operates but is actually now owned by Crown Reports, Betfair’s previous joint venture partner. This pools liquidity with customers around the world, but is licensed in Tasmania.

Betfair Sportsbook – CSGO Betting:

Betfair Sportsbook are a bit hit and miss when it comes to CounterStrike: Global Offensive. Sometimes they price up a large range of matches including pistol round winners and correct scores and handicap betting, providing a good all-round range of betting options, but sometimes they seem to fail to price up any matches at all. Once they become more stable in terms of always offering the same matches as other companies, then they’ll be a better place for betting on CSGO.

Betfair Sportsbook – eSports history:

Betfair’s activities in Esports date all the way back to 2010 when they sponsored the German ESL Pro Series which took place in CS1.6, CS: Source and Warcraft 3. They offered the league’s matches that took place at Intel Friday Night Games on their exchange, ran competitions on the ESL website giving away free bets as well as having experts preview each week’s matches.

In the UK, they started offering markets in October 2015, including in-play betting for LoL and Dota, but have made no moves to do any marketing towards Esports’ communities just yet.

Payment Options:

Betfair offers a good range of deposit and withdrawal methods. You can deposit instantly but upon withdrawing your funds will sit in holding for 24 hours, where, if you choose, you can reverse the withdrawal in order to release the funds to bet with rather than having the withdrawal process to your bank account. If you don’t touch it for 24 hours it’ll then be processed as a withdrawal. This adds an extra day onto the withdrawal time, but we have found that they are quick to process withdrawals to your card so you’ll have it back within a couple of days anyway.

Customer Support:

As you’d imagine with such a big operation, Betfair has a full suite of customer support options. These include live chat and telephone support. You can also email your queries to info@betfair.com for a response within 24 hours for non urgent enquires. We always recommend using live chat so you can get any issues resolved quickly and easily.

Website & Betting Options:

The website is nice and easy to use. By default, their website will load the Sportsbook, and you can check this by looking at the main navigation bar and ensuring that Sportsbook is selected and not Exchange. Within that, click All Sports, and then select E-Sports. As a warning, if there are no matches currently available, E-Sports will disappear from the navigation bar.

If you want to switch the odds from fractional to decimal, all you have to do is scroll to the bottom of the page, and change the option selected in the “View odds as” drop-down.

Like many of their rivals, you can do multiple bets across other sports, so you could back TSM to win Dreamhack in a double with Manchester City to win the Premier League.

Sports Markets:

You can bet on other major Esports titles such as League of Legends, Dota2 and StarCraft II. On top of this you can bet on all the sports that you’d expect a major bookmaker to offer. One of Betfair’s unique features is “price rush”. This is where if you place a bet, for example a correct score football bet, and there are higher odds available on the Betfair Exchange, your bet is eligible for a price rush, that is a boost in odds. You’re automatically opted in, so there’s a chance that you might get a better price than you were expecting.

They also offer “cash out” – so if you’re placing a football accumulator, you can lock in a profit early if the results are looking promising.

Other Products:

The backbone of Betfair is their exchange. You can find that by clicking on “Exchange”. This will divert you to the peer to peer betting part of their website. Here, you aren’t taking on Betfair like you are with a traditional bookmaker, instead you take on other people. Betfair take a standard 5% rake from your cumulative profit on your bets on each market – though this commission does reduce if you are betting at higher stakes. Betfair Exchange is generally seen as an advanced betting tool as it does have a learning curve for amateur bettors. We recommend reading some tutorials about the Betfair Exchange if this is a route you want to explore, and start things off on their Sportsbook.

Aside from the exchange, you can enjoy all the other products that you’d expect such as casino, live casino and vegas. There are two other products here that require some explanation: exchange games and pools betting. Exchange games consists of popular casino games but these take place on the exchange and you bet against other people. If you’re playing blackjack, you can back a hand before a card is dealt, after the first card, or second card is dealt or you can “lay” it to lose. This provides a different way to enjoy those traditional casino favourites.

Pools betting allows you to enter massive jackpot games for predicting the outcome of football matches. If you want to win you’ll need to predict five or six correct scores to bag the £10m jackpot. It’s £10m because the chances are incredibly slim, but he who dares wins. They also do win-draw-win pool bets where you just need to pick the result of up to six matches. Pools betting revolves around football and at the time of writing there are jackpots available totalling over £16m. You could win a hell of a lot of money for a tiny investment if you get lucky!

Verdict:

Betfair are a solid operator with a good range of options for betting on CSGO. The only consideration is that Betfair’s appetite for risk is quite low, so if you’re a high stakes bettor, you might be better at Mr Green, as Betfair aren’t particularly keen to lay large bets. You should get on fine for a while, but eventually they may limit the stakes that you are able to wager. It’s definitely worth opening an account though.