hi all

those of you that bet with online bookies and exchanges.

hows your experience being getting bets on etc.

managing of accounts.

money access

fees etc.

would appreciate your input.

how do we compare with what we have here compared to say betfair or others overseas.

any reccomendations

regards
ubetido

ubetido,

I currently have accounts with Betfair, Sportingbet and William Hill for sports betting (mainly Tennis), also use the Sportingbet account for horse racing now. I also have accounts with NSW, Qld, ACT & WA tabs (although not using most of these at the moment) and IAS.

Sportingbet:
Deposits and Withdrawals are easy - deposits from credit cards and withdrawals to bank account. They are the only bookie I use that dont require withdrawals to go back to your credit card first - means you can earn frequent flyer points by depositing off the card, placing bets, withdrawing then repeating! Also not only do they not charge a fee for credit-card deposits but they give a 5% deposit bonus on Thursdays. New racing service seems very good. They have recently improved their site which has speeded up the bet placing process (previously this was a bit of an issue). Biggest problem (for me) is their limited coverage of Tennis events. Others have complained about bets going "missing" but I have not had this problem myself and I suspect the site upgrade may have fixed it anyway. I contacted their support line a couple of times (once I placed bet on the wrong player in a tennis match and the other time they had not credited me for a winning bet) - both issues were fixed promptly.

William Hill:
English based site but offering betting in Aussie dollars - I only use it for Tennis. Deposits and withdrawals quick and easy via credit card - they will allow you to withdraw more than your initial deposit back to the card which is unusual (so if you deposit $100, win some bets and want to withdraw $200 they will credit the full amount back to your credit card). So far I have not had any issues at all with them (and have taken a fair bit of money off them!).

IAS:
I have been using their service for the DiviPlus option on Saturday racing but now that Sportingbet is offering the same thing on more races I will probably close my IAS account and use Sportingbet instead. I am not a big fan of the IAS site as I have some issues with it continually prompting for username/password (I think this is a compatibility issue with either my ISP or my firewall but it doesn't affect any other betting sites).

TABS:
I really don't use any of my TAB accounts any more - their odds on sporting events are usually not great and since almost all my race betting is Win-only I do this through Sportingbet/IAS/Betfair to get the better odds. When I was using these accounts I would say that NSW was best for deposits/withdrawals (quick and straight to the account), WA had the best betting interface (ability to cancel bets rather than the double-confirm made it much quicker), ACTTABs revised site is better than last years version but not as quick as some of the others and Qld was a bit of a pain overall (but I wanted it for when the Qld odds were noticably better than the other tabs). Fees on credit card deposits are inexcusable given how much they are raking off each bet you place, you can use BPay of course but there is a next-day delay.

Betfair:
Probably no need for any great commentry here - I am a fan of the exchange concept and Betfair is certainly the best of the exchanges I have seen. Deposits and Withdrawals are OK although the small fee on deposits is a bit of a drawback - I tend to keep a higher balance than I otherwise would as I don't want to have to top up the account.

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