Make Gambling Fun logo
Contact us

Sports Betting - Tips

By not just blindly grabbing the first sportsbook you saw on Google, you’re already showing that you have what it takes to be a successful sports bettor. In an industry where success and failure run on tight margins, you know that getting every little edge you can goes a long way. This doesn’t stop with what sportsbook or sportsbooks (smart line shoppers) you choose to use.

If you’ve got a hot tip or the lock of the century, and you’re ready to get into the action, don’t let us slow you down. Below, you’ll find our list of the top sports betting sites offering the best action on your favorite sports. These sites are the most trusted and will offer the best overall experience in the business.

Top Sports Betting Sites

If you’ve got a minute, though, grab a chair and stay a while. In the sections below, we’ve put together a whole lot more options and a whole lot more information for your benefit. We have sportsbook recommendations based on what sport you want to bet, where you’re located at in the world, or what type of site you’re looking for.

On top of that, we’re going to take a look at the differences between betting online versus betting at a brick-and-mortar location (and where you can make more money), why our reviews and recommendations are different than the rest of the internet, and what criteria we use to pick out which sites we choose to recommend.

Spoiler, we don’t let anyone pay for better reviews, recommendations, or to be put on any of our lists. Our recommendation lists (including the one above) are strictly merit-based. We’re not here to run ads for people that pay us; we’re here to offer you the best recommendations so that you can get the most bang for your betting buck.

Best Sports Betting Sites | By Sport

The Big Three Sports

Known commonly in the sports betting industry as the big three, professional baseball, basketball, and football are some of the biggest bet sports in the entire world. Whether you live in the US or abroad, you’ve probably placed at least one bet on one of these sports, or you’re here looking to do so. When you’re betting on a sport that has so much action on it, it’s important to be somewhere that understands what you’re looking for and offers a top-notch product.

NFL Football

MLB Baseball

NBA basketball

Additional Sports/Leagues/Events

We don’t want to make it sound like these sports are any less important by putting them in the additional sports category. That’s a category usually reserved for the runts and run-off, but not here. You can make just as much of a killing off of any of these “additional sports” as you can with one of the big three. It all comes down to finding value and picking winners. But that all begins with finding the right online sportsbook offering the action that you need.

If you’re ready to get started, click below on the sport or sports you’re interested in to see our recommended picks for the top online betting sites catering specifically to that sport. It’s strange how certain sites will play favorites with certain sports. While we aren’t positive why some of them do it, we just embrace it and take it as a win when they cover our favorite sport more effectively.

Football Horse Racking NHL
NCAA Football NCAA Basketball UFC
GOLF Soccer Formula 1
NASCAR Tennis Boxing
Entertainment AAF XFL
Super Bowl March Madness Table Tennis
WWE Snooker Cycling
Handball Volleyball Rugby
Dog Racing    

Best Sports Betting Sites | By Where You Live

Sometimes, finding an online sportsbook that caters to where you live is much more important than finding one that offers a little better action on one sport or a certain type of action. If that’s the case, we completely get it. This happens a lot, especially if you live or reside in a market where things are a little heavier-regulated than they are in other parts of your country or the world.

Find your region of the world below and check out our top-rated online sports betting sites for your particular area. Keep in mind that we do keep these sections updated very regularly, as things can change. These changes can be new legislation opening up the doors to new sites, or it can be new sites moving into a new market. Whatever the case, we make it our mission to make sure you have knowledge of the best options for betting on sports in your area.

US Sports Betting Sites

‘Merica. If this is where you call home or at least where you’re currently residing, there are plenty of great sportsbook options out there for you to choose from. Because legislation is stricter in some areas of the country, though, you have to be a little more selective with which options you choose to place your bets with. For this reason, we highly recommend checking out our list of the best US sports betting sites below.

Out of all of the lists on this page, this is the one we find ourselves updating the most, so feel free to bookmark it if you like to jump around between books frequently. As legislation changes, more and more companies are moving into the market space, which means a lot more great options for you to choose from.

International Sports Betting Sites

For those of you in the rest of the world, we certainly have not forgotten about you. We know that certain regions like Asia, Europe, Canada, the UK, and Australia have some of the biggest gambling markets in the whole world. And we know that you have needs and wants that are typically different from those of bettors in the United States.

You have different sports that you follow heavily, different laws and legislation, different types of bets you prefer, and even different ways that you like to see those bets presented to you. To help you out, our international staff has put together the best online sportsbooks available to you in your country or region. Click on your country, continent, or region below and get into the action on the right site for your location now.

The Criteria That Makes These Sites the Best

This sportsbook is the best because it has the prettiest pictures and the coolest-sounding name! Yeah, that’s not something you’re going to hear from us. You see, our experts know exactly what they need to look for to find out which online sportsbooks really are the best. How do they know this? Well, they are a combination of professional bettors and industry professionals. They know what bettors want, what they need, and what they don’t need.

They also know when sites are trying to “pull a fast one” or do something that isn’t right or fair to their customers. We can’t be fooled by pretty graphics, fancy animations, or aggressive promotions. While that stuff sadly works on a lot of unknowing customers, it’s not going to work on us, and we won’t let it work on you.

The list below will lay out what we feel are the most important criteria that make an online sportsbook great. While this is not the complete list of criteria that we take into account, it is what we find to be most important. If we were giving you the complete list, we’d have to ask you to grab more than a chair – you’d probably need a bed since we’d be here all day and night.

We feel it’s important to share this information with you because we want you to know why the betting sites we’ve recommended made our lists. Without any further ado, let’s talk about the different criteria we find to be the most important.

The Amount of Betting Flexibility

If you’re a serious sports bettor, you know that there is a lot more that you can (and should) be able to bet on in a game than just who the winner is going to be. When we bet online, we expect to get a lot more action and bet options than we do betting at a brick-and-mortar location. If an online sportsbook isn’t delivering what we expect, we’re not all about it.

We want to see a lot of different sports you can bet on, a lot of different leagues and organizations within that sport, and then a lot of different types of bets on each game. In addition, we look for the type of coverage they have for preseason games vs. regular-season games vs. postseason/championship games. If they’re only offering great action on popular games or postseason games, that’s not really that impressive. This is one category where we know from our experience in the industry that we can be picky.

A Seamless User Interface

Who doesn’t love a website that’s so painful to use it makes you want to throw your computer into oncoming traffic? Okay, we think we made our point. It’s extremely important to us that an online betting website gives us a user interface that works well. We want to be able to research lines, choose bets, make those bets, and see if we won or lost without losing our minds. Is that really too much to ask for?

Apparently, according to what we’ve seen on a lot of sites, it is way too much to ask for. The problem probably stems from sites building their platform without accommodating for the end user (you) or without making arrangements to allow for expansion. As more and more sports become popular, sites need to add them into the mix to stay competitive.

If their site isn’t built to handle that expansion, they’ll usually try and cram way too much into a space that’s not fit to handle it. This makes for a messy platform that’s tough to navigate and, well, would have you chasing your computer or phone into oncoming traffic to retrieve it.

Superior Online Banking Options

It’s not the early 2000s anymore, and online sports betting is no longer in its infancy. That’s a public service announcement for a lot of the online sports betting sites out there who still haven’t updated their deposit and withdrawal options and procedures to get with the new times. Those are things that used to be a challenge, but they shouldn’t be a hassle at all anymore.

You need to be able to load your money online and get your winnings off in a timely manner. You shouldn’t need to fret about when you’re going to be able to start betting or when you’re going to get paid. To help you understand a lot of the banking options available and how they should work, we’ve put together a completely separate online sportsbook banking guide for you linked below.

Attentive and Available Customer Support Services

We’d like to hope that you’d never have any need for customer service and that everything would go smoothly and according to plan. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, and sometimes we need a little bit of help getting what we want to be accomplished done. Because of this, we put a lot into analyzing an online sportsbook’s customer service options and the quality of those options.

What contact methods do they have? Do they have 24/7 options? Are you able to talk to a live person? Does that person speak the same language as you? Does that person have the ability to help you, or is it clear they paid for the cheapest customer service out there? How long does it take to get someone to help you?

These are some of the questions we like to ask when we’re analyzing the effectiveness of an online sportsbook’s customer service team or lack thereof. While we hope you never need to use it, we want to know it’s there for you if you do have to.

Website Security

The internet is full of threats. Hackers spend their days scouring the web trying to find places to exploit people and get their hands on their money and their personal information. Places, where there is a lot of money on the web, tend to attract these types for obvious reasons. Sadly, online betting websites fall into this category due to the billions of dollars that are bet every year on internet sportsbooks.

When we analyze an online sportsbook, we spend a lot of time looking into their security. While we might not talk about this much in our reviews, know that it’s something we weigh heavily.

  Typically, if we run into a site with security issues, we won’t even include its review on our site, or we’ll put it on our blacklist so that you know to avoid it.

A Trusted Company

The most important factor we look for with any online betting site we review or recommend is trust. Trust encompasses all of the above factors (which is why we conveniently put it last). We need to be able to trust that an online sportsbook is going to deliver the experience they promise us. This certainly includes having the bets we want, a great interface, easy-to-use banking options, top-notch customer service, and overall website security. If they’re going to promise that they are going to deliver these things to us, we need to know we can trust them to deliver.

Additionally, we need to be able to trust them with the safety and protection of our money and our private personal information. This includes policing their staff and third-party vendors and providing the proper security from outside threats. Your relationship with your online sportsbook should be one of mutual trust.