Betting 101: Opening a betting account

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The previous article concerned ‘Choosing Your Bookmaker’.

So you have done your research and eliminated all F rated and scam bookmakers from the options available and are now ready to take the plunge and open your first bookmaker account.

What are they going to ask you and is there anything you need to be careful about?

Basic Information

All bookmakers will require, as a minimum, your name, physical address, email address and phone number. Don’t worry, this is standard and if you are tempted to provide a false phone number then I would advise against. Bookmakers will rarely spam call their users, it simply isn’t in their interest to irritate given the breadth of betting options available and as verification of accounts become ever tighter, there are a number of bookmakers who will only allow an account to be opened upon verification of said number.

There is a secondary reason, however, especially for those opening accounts with US facing offshore bookmakers such as 5Dimes or BetCris. The arrival of cryptocurrencies has precipitated somewhat of a revolution in the betting world. Payments are quick, cheap and anonymous but payouts often require an extra layer of security, simply because verifying ownership of addresses is by their very nature incredibly difficult. It has become standard for a number of bookmakers offering cryptocurrencies as a deposit/withdrawal method to verify payouts either via a code sent to a registered phone number, or even a phone call.

Whatever you do however, do not invent an address! See why in the section on KYC (to come!).

Username and Password

Username is an easy one, just choose something memorable and not too stupid (if you are given the option of choosing) as you don’t want to be on the phone to customer service who when asking for you username, you reply ‘Iama****’!

Password is by far the most important part of any sign up process and the one that is the most overlooked. I have been using a password manager for many years, and this is why:

Once upon a time I had a lot of money in a betting account. My payment method for that betting account was Skrill, an internet wallet which allows you to send/receive money to/from other sources as well as to bookmakers and back to your bank. It is very useful.

My email account was maliciously accessed presumably due to the fact that I had an easily guessable password, and all historical conversations between bookmakers and I were open viewing. Access to my betting accounts from that point was straightforward, simply requiring a ‘lost password’ link to be clicked on at the bookmakers, whereupon the link arrived in my inbox and was changed by the hackers.

They were then able to, via a mix of clever talk and lax bookmaker action, change the email address associated with my bookmaker account and send the ENTIRE BALANCE to their Skrill account whereupon it was siphoned off to a Russian bank account and never seen of again.

It was an incredibly expensive lesson and from that day forward I have used the password manager Roboform. Each time I open a new account a random password consisting of number, letters and symbols is generated and saved, I don’t even know what that password is. The same happens for my email address so unless somebody was to somehow access my Roboform account (and they can’t), I am safe. This is a relatively inexpensive way to ensure peace of mind and password security.

Whilst this is the advice given for all of your passwords, it becomes particularly important with bookmakers as your money is involved and, should your money disappear overnight, you can be sure that you won’t be getting a refund from the bookmaker.

Currency

This may seem an obvious one. Choose the currency relevant to your home country right? Well almost.

I’m jumping ahead a little with this but at TheRundown we want to show you the benefits of odds comparison. The more bookmaker accounts in your basket, the more access you have to better odds...and the better the odds the better your chance of making a profit from gambling.

I mention this because not all bookmakers offer the same currencies. Some, especially the US facing bookmakers only offer accounts in USD. It is good to look around at bookmakers that you may potentially want to have an account with to take a note of their currencies as ideally you will want to keep all bookmaker accounts and payment methods with the same currency.

I have seen this a number of times where somebody deposits from their bank account with currency A into their payment method which has currency B and finally into their bookmaker which has currency C. 2 exchange rates and potentially 2 sets of fees that could easily be avoided.

Odds Format

I’ll cover odds in a future article which will provide an understanding as to what odds mean as well as the different formats that are available to you. Many bookmakers provide you with the option of choosing which format you prefer when you are signing up but this generally isn’t a huge consideration as you will be able to amend at a later date, either in your ‘settings’ or from the bookmaker page itself.

That should be enough for you to open an account securely!

We are passionate about improving all punters’ chances of being profitable in sports gambling and are open to answering any questions that you may have. Please send us a message if anything is unclear or if you would like information on a certain aspect of sports gambling, after all, if you are writing the question it is likely that many others are thinking it.