How We Choose The Best Betting Sites

There’s not a week that goes by without one of our readers asking us how we choose the best betting sites that we recommend on this site. We usually like to reply personally by email, but as our traffic is growing quickly (and the amount of questions is growing too) – we need to answer this question once and for all with this post.

Today we’re going to share with you some of the most important things we look for when searching for the best betting sites to make us comfortable recommending them to our readers.

Selection

The selection of different things to bet on at a betting site is one of the biggest boxes that need to be ticked for us to recommend them. 

You’ll almost always find all of the classic games like soccer, golf and American football. So if you’re a fan of the classics, you’ve not got much to worry about…

But we are a big site with a diverse user base, and we need to ensure we’re recommending sites that are suitable for all of our readers. 

Lately, it’s becoming more and more popular to bet at more random things. For example, on some sites you can bet on who’s going to win the next election. It’s simply getting a bit old school to just offer the same old sports, which is why we love the sites that are taking it to the next level!

What We Do: We check that all the best betting sites we recommend have an “acceptable” amount of games in all of their categories. If a site has not got enough on offer for us to be happy, we don’t recommend it.

Bonuses

Welcome bonuses are very important for us because they’re important to you. 

Let’s face it, when most of you are looking around trying to find the best new betting sites, you’re mainly looking at the welcome bonuses you’ll get for signing up. And we don’t blame you – they’re very attractive.

New sites offer bigger bonuses to new players than older more established sites (generally) because they are much more desperate for the players. It’s easy to find a 200% bonus on new sites, but it’s not so easy on an older one.

However, new sites also have less money to spend, and some of them add strict wagering requirements in their terms and conditions to try and save money. This means that you’ve got to wager several times what you’ve received as a bonus before you’re allowed to withdraw it. Most of the time wagering requirements are fair, but sometimes – they’re not.

What We Do: We compare all of the bonuses that the best betting sites offer and we check their terms and conditions for fair wagering requirements. If we find any nasty hidden surprises – we don’t recommend them.

Mobile Friendly

Mobile casinos are rapidly becoming more popular than traditional desktop-based casinos. In fact, the entire internet is becoming more mobile-centric by the day (more people already access the web on a mobile device instead of a desktop). 

As such, it’s super important for us to know that at a minimum the browser-based offerings of a casino display properly on mobile devices and tablets. Ideally, casinos will have a dedicated downloadable mobile app, which improves the gaming experience and adds a huge amount of stability.

What We Do: We test all of the casinos we recommend on mobile devices and tablets. If they don’t display properly, we don’t recommend them. If a casino has a dedicated mobile app, we award them more points.

Reputation

The final thing we look at before recommending a betting site is the reputation of the organization behind it. The biggest and most well-established casinos are obviously the safest for players, so if a casino has the backing of a company behind one of the big players – we rank it highly.

New casinos don’t have this luxury, and as such, they’re more of a risky recommendation for us. This doesn’t mean that we won’t recommend new casinos (because we do), it just means we need to do a little bit more research than normal and let our readers know about the potential additional risk. 

Conclusion

So there you have it, that’s just some of the main things we look out for when reviewing the best betting sites that we recommend to our readers.

The truth of the matter is that there are several other smaller (but important) factors we take into account, but they’re kind of a trade secret that we don’t want copied. We pride ourselves on being able to make some the best recommendations in the industry, and if other sites want our secret sauce…

They’re going to have to figure it out for themselves.