Sports on offer pre match
The outrights are the most impressive thing here as they have gone above and beyond the call of duty to price up Gaelic Games, Aussie Rules and obscure(ish) Rugby Union leagues. Obscure for outright betting anyway. The amount of football matches priced up is large but, as is the case with a few firms, they are all mouth and no trouser as they offer only one market for many matches.
Sports on offer in play
888 are roughly 888 miles behind the top boys in the industry in terms of live betting. A Saturday afternoon is a time to log on to a site and be blown away by how much football they are trading in play but 888 have only 20 matches for the whole day. The big boys would be doing more than 20 3pm kick offs alone. Tennis is pretty average but other sports seem up to scratch but they may only be because other firms don’t trade other sports very much.
Offers
Everybody’s favourite balding, leg spinning legend who has somehow managed to bag a 40 year old scorcher Shane Warne is on board and will happily offer us a £50 matched bet to start us off on our 888 sporting adventure. As if getting Warney wasn’t enough, they reward current customers in all sorts of ways using all sorts of platforms. Like them on facebook to win football tickets, bet a fiver for 20 free spins in the casino, playing on the 8 theme there is an offer to protect your bet against goals scored in or after the 88th minute. Continuing the theme, the 888th bet placed on the site each day wins £888 which is gr-eight.
Pricing
From this coming Saturday’s Premier League matches, the only best prices that 888 have are for Wolves away at Everton, Newcastle away at City and for three draws. This translates that they don’t offer the best bets around for what people want to bet on.
Site Design
As a bookie, it’s hard to find a colour to use for your website which isn’t already synonymous with another bookie. Red, Labdrokes. Green, Bet365. Blue, a few. Orange, no-one springs to mind but maybe 888 in a few years. The orange works well and adds to the snazzy nature of the site. It seems that they can’t give you enough information, there’s a stats section, live results section, an area to which tells you when the next events are off and a scrolling highlights photo informing you of what to look forward to.
Customer service
There seems to be no way of contacting 888 and instead rely on an extensive FAQ section which doesn’t cover such questions as ‘why have you voided my bet?’, ‘why are you staking me; late betting is your fault’ and ‘why have you changed my 10-1 to 1-10; it’s your fault you offered the wrong price’. They may have a few unhappy punters on their hands, but I suppose they’ll never know about it.