Best Exchange Betting Sites

What is a Betting Exchange?

One of the first questions on a lot of customer’s minds would have been, “what is a betting exchange?”. The simple answer to this is that in a betting exchange, it is not you betting against the bookmaker, like the traditional form of betting, but instead, you are betting against other customers, who come to an agreement with you as to what odds you will get.

In order for a betting exchange market to be successful, you need a sufficient number of customers using this betting type. Of course, when it was first introduced, by Betfair, it was not popular. So, in the beginning, Betfair had to invest their own money into it, until enough customers started using the betting exchange. The more customers that are betting on a particular betting exchange market, the higher the odds, this is great for customers and is why you preferably want to be using a betting exchange with a sufficient customer base, to ensure yourself higher profits.

Promotions

The sportsbooks understand that sometimes, it may take a little bit of convincing for players to trust this way of betting and actually see themselves winning money from it. That is why they offer promotions, specifically for the betting exchange. Some of these promotions include:

Betfair is offering new customers who use their betting exchange, a £20 free exchange bet. This is a great way of starting off and getting some experience of what a betting exchange is like. Ladbrokes are willing to offer customers a £10 Lay Bet refund on their betting exchange, which means that if your £10 lay bet loses, you will get the stake back, meaning you are essentially placing a risk-free bet.

Back Betting on Exchange

For those that are unaware of what back betting is, in its simplest form, it is betting on an outcome to occur. For example, you might back England to win the next World Cup. This is traditional betting, as you will back a certain team or athlete to win. However, you can receive better odds in a betting exchange, depending on what other customers predict. If their opinion differs from yours, you can bet against each other and decide amongst yourselves what odds you are willing to give.

Lay Betting on Exchange

When you are laying a bet, in a betting exchange market, you are going against what the person backing a bet is predicting, therefore you are only able to win their stake. Using the example above, you may have an opinion that England will not win the World Cup, and therefore you decide to offer odds to the back bettor. You may offer other customers 6/1 odds for England to win the world cup, whereas traditional online betting sites are only offering 4/1 betting odds. So, if England does win the world cup, and the back bettor has placed a £10 stake, then the lay bettor will owe the back better £60. However, if England doesn’t win the world cup, the lay bettor receives the £10 betting stake.

Fees

As you may or may not be aware, bookmakers need to profit from bets being placed through a betting exchange one way or another. As in a betting exchange, you are playing against fellow customers, the bookmaker is not receiving cash from this. Therefore, they charge a commission fee on bets processed through their betting exchange platform. The bookmaker themselves can charge anything from 0% commission, up to 6%. This is nice and low and therefore doesn’t take too much effect on a customer’s winnings.

Do all betting platform sites offer exchange services?