How To Find The Right Sports Betting Site

Sports betting can be great fun, but you’ve got to find the right place to do it. Some betting sites are unscrupulous and set up only to steal your money or data, so you’ve got to be able to discern which sites are above board and which ones you should avoid. It’s not easy to do so; even illegitimate sites often have the veneer of more attractive and well-developed pages, all the better to trick the ingenuous into handing over their credit card details. Here’s how you can spot the right sports betting site and have some fun when you’re betting on your next game.

Check out some site aggregators or reviews

Other sports betting enthusiasts have assembled reviews and aggregates of good sports betting platforms that you can check out. Take a look at these best sports betting sites if you don’t believe us; there are plenty of places out there you can drop a wager if you’re so inclined, and there are lots of websites that gather together the ones that are actually worth your time. Don’t worry about doing the research yourself if you don’t feel up to it; let someone who’s an expert handle that part while you let off some steam at the virtual betting shop.

Look for security assurances

First and foremost, you should be looking at sports betting sites to make sure their security is completely legitimate. A good sports betting site will foreground all of the ways in which they’re keeping your data and your financial credentials safe. If they don’t, you have to ask yourself why; what are they hiding that they don’t want you to know? The site should tell you what kind of encryption it uses, how it’s making sure that your data is safe from hackers and scammers, and why you should trust it with what is essentially incredibly sensitive information.

Make sure the site has a range of sports

Even if you’re specialising in a single sport to bet on, you should still make sure the site you’re betting with has alternatives. After all, the lustre may fade from the sport you’ve chosen, and if it does – and you like the site you’re betting on – then you might want to keep betting, but be unable to. A good sports betting site covers all the major favourites; football, basketball, tennis, American football, rugby, and any other sport you care to name. Truly great sites also have a range of more obscure sports you can check out if you want to go further afield.

Choose a site that makes things simple

Sports betting is a pastime with a huge amount of jargon to wade through. You’d be forgiven for not knowing or being able to comprehend any of it if you’re new to sports betting, which is why you should choose a site that doesn’t expect you to keep up. A good sports betting site will explain itself and help you to understand what all of its labyrinthine terminology actually means. The site should make it easy for you to place a bet, explain what you’re betting on, and tell you what’s going to happen if you win or lose the bet.

Read reviews

Any decent sports betting site will let you read its reviews. If the site doesn’t own its Trustpilot profile, again, it’s worth asking yourself why that might be. A good sports betting website will be proud of its reputation; it’ll show you real testimonials and reviews from people who have genuinely betted with the site. If it can’t do that, then it might mean that the site is hiding a bad reputation from you. Reading reviews will equip you with the knowledge you need to tell whether or not the site is lying to you, even if its offers seem enticing.

Look for good customer service

Sports betting is one of the most sensitive industries around; you’re trusting these websites with a lot of your data. With that in mind, good online sports betting customer service is of paramount importance. A website should have customer service representatives on hand to answer any questions you might have; the site should be transparent with how long it’s going to take for you to receive a reply, and it shouldn’t obfuscate its contact methods behind arcane processes. If a site makes it hard to contact the customer service reps, ask yourself what that might mean.

Find good beginner offers

When you’re choosing a sports betting website – especially if it’s the first one you’ve ever betted with – you need to make sure that the offers are strong. It’s doubly important to read the terms and conditions in this case; a site might look like it’s offering something too good to be true, but when you read the T&Cs, that is indeed what it turns out to be. Again, a great sports betting website won’t hide its offers behind asterisks and qualifiers. If the offer is good and the site is proud of it, then you’ll know, and there won’t be any attempt to add caveats and conditions to the offer.

Look for responsive design

You might not have come across the phrase “responsive design” before, and if you haven’t, here’s a primer. Have you ever visited a website on your desktop PC, then visited the same site on your smartphone or tablet and noticed it’s changed to accommodate your new platform? That’s responsive design, and all great sports betting websites have it. If a site looks ugly and badly optimised on your phone or tablet, it probably means the people behind the site don’t care about looking professional or attracting customers, which is definitely a red flag.