SkyBet Review

Skybet Review – Introduction:

The roots of Skybet have goes back to 1998, when they were known as Surrey Sports, a telebetting company, until they were acquired in 2002 by Sky plc. At this point, Sky rebranded in order to benefit from the world renowned Sky brand. In 2015, Sky plc sold 80% of the business to an investment firm, CVC Capital Partners, at a £1bn valuation, but they retain the strong Sky brand on a long-term agreement. Due to the relationship with Sky, you automatically associate Skybet as part of the group that bring you Sky Television and Sky broadband in the UK, by far the most popular pay TV service in the UK.

Skybet are licensed in the United Kingdom and are one of the only bookmakers not to jump ship to Gibraltar or the Isle of Man, and retain their head office in Leeds.

Skybet are well known for their customer retention offers, such as the Skybet Free Bet Club.

Reputation and Reliability:

Skybet’s reputation is in line with what you would expect from a company carrying the brand of one of the largest corporations in the world, who also provide the largest range of live sporting events to UK television through Sky Sports. They hold a UK license and we have rarely seen any complaints about them, so you can be certain your money is safe and that you’ll be treated fairly.

Skybet – CSGO Betting:

Skybet offer one of the widest ranges of CSGO matches and unlike most other sites, they also offer betting in-play for high profile matches. This means that you can bet on who will win the map, match, or even the next round whilst the game is ongoing and you are watching on Twitch, or watching the HLTV scorebot. For almost all matches they offer both the outright match or map winner, handicap betting (where one team starts with an advantage in terms of number of rounds, e.g. +5.5, so they would need to win or lose 16-11 or better and they would win, as 11+5.5=16.5, which is higher than 16), and even who will win the first pistol round. They do not try to compete on price, offering a pretty standard overround, but their wide product range, selection of matches and other promotions makes up for it.

They haven’t offered any outright tournament winner markets for CSGO yet, but we expect they will soon in order to maintain their position of having the best product range.

Skybet – eSports history:

Skybet started offering Esports markets in October 2015, when they announced a partnership with data and odds supplier Betgenius, under the terms of which Betgenius would supply the odds, including in-play. Since then, they’ve quickly expanded their product range to include in-running betting on CSGO, League of Legends and Dota2, as well as pre-match prices for StarCraft II and Smite.

Payment Options:

Unlike other major bookmakers Skybet is limited to major payment methods such as debit/credit cards, and the only e-wallet that they accept is Paypal. If you prefer to use Neteller or Skrill, unfortunately you’ll not be able to use their website, which is a shame. On the plus side, withdrawals are processed quickly, within 4 hours via Paypal and usually within two days back to your card.

Customer Support:

Skybet has an excellent help and support service with Live Chat available 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. They also offer a very fast response to email enquiries and if you would rather talk to customer services by telephone their lines are open from 8am to midnight.

Website & Betting Options:

The first thing you’ll notice with Skybet is that when you click on their “ESports” section, the main matches section does not differentiate between the different Esports titles, so you’ll find a mismatch of CSGO, LoL and Dota2 matches, amongst others. This could be slightly confusing if your favourite CSGO team’s organization also has teams in other games. There’s an easy workaround for this though: select “CSGO Match Up Winner” and you will then guarantee you only see CounterStrike matches.

One great thing about Skybet is that you can use all the standard betting options that are synonymous with these top tier bookmakers: doubles, trebles, accumulators, trixies, patents, yankees – you name it, you can place it on Esports. You can also put in other sports selections with your CSGO bets. Fancy Fnatic and Barcelona to both win? Do them together!

Sports Markets:

Nearly every sport imaginable is available on Skybet even including things such as WWE wrestling. They have almost every market type available, and have gone to great lengths to cater for everyone from the novice punter through to the pro punter. You can expect to find fun markets for football such as anytime goal scorers, first goal scorers and player to score a hat trick markets. A range of Asian handicap betting opportunities will tempt the pro punters.

You can do multiple bets with Esports and any other sports should you wish to which is an attractive feature for everybody.

Other Products:

Similar to its rivals, Skybet has a casino, poker room and bingo site. They also have a second casino that goes under the name SkyVegas.

Their casino is run by Playtech’s software, which is the industry leading platform. Built into it is a live dealer section which allows you to play against a real life representative of the house. Live blackjack, roulette, baccarat and casino hold’em are the games available within their live casino.

Sky houses some of the biggest progressive jackpot slots around with all of the big games available. Jackpot Giant has jackpots of over £3m available and Beach Life has a £750k jackpot at the time of writing. Considering how someone won over £13m from a £0.25 bet over at Betway, we’ll be heading over there to spend our loose change on trying to grab one of these jackpots.

Sky rewards loyalty. If you hit a certain amount of casino points each week you’ll be rewarded with a bonus. There is no max bonus, so you can earn an infinite amount of bonuses based on your turnover on the casino. Check out the Sky Players club for more information.

Verdict:

Skybet might be new to Esports, but they’re certainly not new to betting and offer the service that you’d expect from a top-tier bookmaker. If you’re based in the UK (or Finland) then it’s worth opening an account with Skybet to avail yourself of a wide range of betting opportunities on CSGO, as they offer more matches than any of the other traditional bookmakers. With a generous free bet it’s worth giving them a try, but if you’d prefer something with more of an eSports focus, consider checking out Unikrn, or for a bigger free bet, consider bet365.