New betting sites
A new sportsbook has no payout record yet, and a payout record is the one thing I'd want to see before I sent a book money. That doesn't make every new book a bad one. It means you do the checking the years haven't done for you.
What a new book can't show you
An old book has paid players through bad weekends, or it hasn't, and either way there's a trail. A new one has a website, a bonus and a promise. A new name tells you nothing about how much money is behind it or how long it plans to stay. The checks below are the ones I'd run on any book. On a new one I'd run all of them before the first deposit, not after.
Who runs it
Find the company. The terms and conditions should name the business that takes your bets and the licence it holds, with a number. If nobody is named anywhere, I'd stop there. If a company is named, look at what the licence is worth to you: a small offshore regulator gives a player very little to lean on when a payout goes wrong, which the offshore sportsbooks page covers. And check that the book takes players from where you live. Some of the books we've reviewed list the United States among the countries they don't accept, in their own terms, so read that list before anything else.
The terms and the payout limits
Read the withdrawal rules before the bonus rules. You want the minimum and maximum per request, the weekly cap, the fee on each method and how long each one takes. A low weekly cap matters more than any headline offer, because it decides how long a big win takes to reach you. The payouts section and the withdrawals guide say what to look for, and the ID checks page explains the documents the book will ask for.
A small withdrawal first
Then test it. Deposit a modest amount, place a bet or two, and ask for a small withdrawal inside the first week. Note the day you asked, the day it arrived and anything they asked for in between. If a book is slow with $100, I wouldn't find out what it does with $5,000.
The welcome offer is a sum
New books lead with big offers because they have nothing else to lead with yet.
Say a book matches a $500 deposit with a $500 bonus, and the rollover is 10 times the deposit plus the bonus. That's $10,000 of betting before you can withdraw. At -110, a bettor who wins exactly half his bets gives up about 4.5 percent of everything he bets: lay $110 to win $100 twice, win one and lose one, and he's $10 down on $220 bet. On $10,000 that's about $455. So the $500 bonus is worth roughly $45 to an average bettor, and less if it's free play rather than cash.
| Rollover on deposit plus bonus | Betting required | Average cost at -110 | What the $500 is worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5x | $5,000 | $227 | $273 |
| 10x | $10,000 | $455 | $45 |
| 15x | $15,000 | $682 | nothing |
The bonuses page lists the other lines to read in the terms, and what a 20x rollover is shows how fast it gets worse. I'd take a small offer with a short rollover over a big one with a long rollover every time.
The books we've reviewed, newest first
These are the sportsbooks we've reviewed that state when they started, in the order of the year each review gives. None of them is new. The newest says 2014, so for now this page is a list of how long each book says it has been taking bets, and I'd rather show you that than call a book new on a guess. When we review a book that started recently, it goes at the top.
| Book | Says it started |
|---|---|
| MyBookie | 2014 |
| Bovada | December 2011 |
| BetMania | 2006 |
| BetPhoenix | 2006 |
| Bookie.ag | 2005, by its footer; its parent RDG Corp dates to 2003 |
| betDSI | 1998 |
| BetPop | 1998, as part of the First Fidelity group |
| YouWager | 1998, as First Fidelity |
| Skybook | 1997 |
| BookMaker | 1996 |
| Everygame | 1996 |
| BetUS | 1994 |
| WagerWeb | 1994 |
These are the books' own claims, and a start year is not a payout record. Each review says what we could and couldn't confirm, and the review methodology says how we look. If it's casinos you're after, the new online casinos page does the same job for them.
Whatever book you try, new or old, set your bankroll before the first deposit and keep each bet a small part of it. A welcome offer is built to make the first month bigger than you planned, and responsible gambling has the limits I'd set first.