Our Top-3 Legitimate and Safe Online Sportsbooks with Great Odds.
Best Online Sportsbooks in 2023 – When rating sportsbooks, we consider safety the most important part of our reviews (because why bet on real-money games unless you can safely withdraw your potential winnings?).
Best Online Sportsbooks in 2023 – When rating sportsbooks, we consider safety the most important part of our reviews (because why bet on real-money games unless you can safely withdraw your potential winnings?).To get a recommendation from us, a sports gambling website must have a strong history of delivering payouts. And if a site has had some problems (nearly all long-running sites have), how were they solved?
If a sportsbook passes our safety requirements, the next most important factors are odds, bet selection, customer service and promotions. We believe the following sites achieve better ratings in all of these categories than any other site on the planet.
Our Top Recommended Betting Sites
It’s difficult to get a realistic idea of a site’s track record unless you’ve been around the online gambling industry for a while. That’s where our team comes in – we have the experience (personally, over a decade of experience in the online gambling industry) and we keep ourselves up-to-date on the latest developments.
A Positive Example
In 2008, Bovada got into trouble with the US government: $24 million were seized from bank accounts linked to Bodog, causing liquidity problems which lead to delayed payouts.
The key difference between Bovada and many others in the business was how fast Bovada solved the problem: payouts were delayed only by a matter of weeks and then, within a couple of months, returned to normal.
Every site will have problems once in a while; how they solve the problems is what matters.
To succeed at running any kind of an online gambling business is simple: be reliable, helpful and reasonable. In other words: deliver customer payouts on-time, do your best to help customers when they have problems, and offer customers reasonable chances of winning.
Everything else is just a bonus.
Even though it sounds simple, only few online betting sites can fulfill the criteria. This is especially true for US-friendly online sportsbooks, out of which I can only say good things about a few.
There are more sites to choose from outside of the US. Numerous stock-listed sportsbooks, for example, have to operate in a certain way under the eye of the public and the shareholders. Any significant problems would undoubtedly lead to bad results in the stock market.
Non-US sites often have licenses from more reputable gaming jurisdictions as well, although none of the licenses are 100% safe. Heck, even brick & mortar betting shops licensed within the US have scammed their customers and gotten away with it without a scratch.
What Makes a Sportsbook Good?
Once we’ve determined a gambling site to be safe and trustworthy, here are some of the details we’ve looked at to determine if the site is good for sports betting:
- How many betting markets are covered?
- How many propositions are available?
- How good are the betting lines for each market?
- How are skilled bettors treated?
- What kind of betting limits are in place?
- What kind of promotions does the sports gambling website offer?
- Is the sportsbook client easy to use?
- Are there any live video feeds available?
Markets
Logically, every US-friendly sportsbook covers the most popular sports in the US, but to what extent? For example, most sports gambling sites provide odds only for the biggest fights, leaving the less popular fights unnoticed (especially if the fight is not on the pay-per-view card).
I just checked BetOnline and Bovada to see which fights they offer for UFC 190 (taking place in four days from this moment). Incredibly, BetOnline only offers one fight to bet on (the main fight, obviously) while Bovada offers all of the event’s 13 fights. Both are involved in the MMA betting market, yes, but to a quite different extent.
Propositions
“Propositions,” as in, “different ways to bet on a game,” is a big part of the entertainment factor. It’s worth remembering that more uncommon bets are rarely good bets because the betting websites will likely use bigger safety margins than with regular bet propositions.
Betting Limits and Dual Lines
The biggest US online sportsbook, Bovada, is well-known for using dual lines, which means their betting lines change depending on the skills of the customer. Educated bettors get worse lines than recreational bettors.
Online sports gambling sites outside of the US rarely implement dual lines into their software (in fact, the only other US sportsbook doing that is BetUS, to my knowledge) but many will enforce betting limits on skilled bettors – for example, if you’re tagged as a skilled bettor at Bet365, you may only be able to place the maximum bet of $5.
Promotions
The more of everything a bookie has, the worse the lines in general. Why? Because they’re spending money on calculating odds for additional markets, extra propositions, providing live feeds, offer better promotions, etc. All of this costs money and someone has to pay for it. The online bookie would obviously prefer if that someone was you.
Promotions are a lot of fun, though. Getting to watch certain games on live video feeds, for example, should be valued for something in case you’d be unable to see the game otherwise. And when you combine that with an opportunity to bet on different types of outcomes during the game? Fun.
Approach
Before answering any of the questions, it’s important to consider your approach to sports wagering. Are you betting for entertainment or purely for profit (yes, everyone’s looking to make money, but there’s a difference).
The more fun you’re looking to get out of it, the better a site with lots of betting markets and propositions suits you. On the other hand, if your desire is to become a profitable bettor, you should primarily care about the quality of betting lines.
The sites consistently offering the best odds don’t necessarily offer the most markets, propositions or promotions (or the most “fun” in general). They give you the best run for your money, though.
How Online Betting Sites Make Money
An online sportsbook must turn profit just like any other business. It takes loads of personnel in departments such as customer support, betting analysts, marketing, etc. On top of paying everyone’s wages, they need to make money for the shareholders.
How do they do it?
It’s easily explained via the concept of coin-flipping. Let’s say you bet $100 on Tails – now, if you were to get “fair odds,” you would receive $100 in case it comes tails. However, a sportsbook wants $110 from getting Tails and is willing to give you only $100 for getting meaning the bookie wins in the long run.
Reduced Juice Bets
Certain online betting site like 5Dimes (US-friendly) and Pinnacle Sports (non-US) offer Reduced Juice bets on a selected group of games. Instead of giving you a proposition where you can win $100 by betting $110, you may get a chance to win $100 by betting $105.
Also see the Sports Betting Glossary.
The same logic applies to sports betting. For sportsbooks, they determine their point spread wagers to be 50/50 outcomes (just like coin-flips), however, you generally have to bet $110 to win $100. If you win, you get $100; if you lose, they get $110. Suggesting they’re right about the 50/50 proposition, you lose money in the long run.
In other words, sports betting sites determine what a 50/50 proposition is and then add a safety margin (it’s difficult to be exactly right) and a profit margin (they have to turn profit) on top of that, also known as “Vig” or “juice”. If they’re anywhere close to right about the outcome, they make money.
How to Win at Sports Betting
While there are plenty of more specific tips, tactics and strategies for beating sports gambling sites, it all comes down to this: there are mainly two ways to do it, both easy to understand and simple in principle but difficult to identify (otherwise sports bookies would be out of business):
- Know better than the sportsbook. If you’re knowledgeable enough (requires lots of research and experience), you may find betting lines where the sportsbook is far off with their analysis of the game. Remember though: the sportsbooks still have a safety+profit margin included in the bet so they have to be quite a bit off to make it a profitable bet for you.
- Find arbitrage opportunities. The other way is to find situations where two online bookmakers have big enough disperencies between their lines that you can turn profit by betting on the other outcome at Sportsbook A and the other outcome at Sportsbook B.
Book Recommendations
Sharp Sports Betting
Stanford Wong’s Sharp Sports Betting is perhaps the best introduction to the basics of winning at sports wagering.
Weighing the Odds
King Yao’s Weighing the Odds in Sports Betting is a must-read after you’re done with Wong’s Sharp Sports Betting.
Fooled by Randomness
Talem Kalib’s Fooled by Randomness helps you understand risk, luck and randomness on a different level.
Winning in the long run is difficult. Some people have done it in a big way, such as Billy Walters (ESPN article), but the amount of expertise and research required is too much for most of us.
To make matters worse, many online sportsbooks have the habit of enforcing betting limits on the customers they consider more educated than average, or even using dual lines (offering different betting lines depending on the skill level of the customer).
It’s up to how much you’re willing to work at it. Consistently winning at sports betting is possible as proven by others, so it’s up to you and how dedicated you’re willing to be.
Why to Trust Our Rankings
I would never try to convince you to blindly trust any informational website’s recommendations. Easily over 90% of sites are completely influenced by advertising income and even the ones that only recommend legitimate sites can make mistakes.
With that said, I’m proud of our list of recommended sportsbooks, which is based on decades of experience and tons of research.
We consider these sites as good as they get.