This is an independent bookie hailing from Lithuania, and they bring an eclectic sports list with them that will appeal to anyone tired of betting on the same old categories.
High rollers in particular can get more bang for their buck here thanks to smaller margins on key sports, and anyone that regularly bets live will find plenty to love about Tonybet’s in-play area.
With more markets per event than you have probably ever seen before you will never get bored with the betting lines on offer, and market depth is not going to be an issue either as this bookie delves down several tiers in most sports.
A few big omissions include horses racing, greyhound racing, and regular customer promotions, but with so many other areas of excellence it would take an impressive bookmaker indeed to turn your head from Tonybet.
- Markets – I challenge you to find more betting lines for top events anywhere else, or more diversity in a sports list.
- No Limits – Big bets will benefit from competitive odds coupled with no payout cap.
- Loving it Live – A seriously impressive in-play betting interface with great range.
An Interview with the Interface
What I love about this website is the fact that the betting interface fills the whole screen, giving acres of space to the various navigation and betting options and allowing the user to easily scan the page and pick out what they are looking for. It genuinely feels like your laptop screen is a size bigger.
It would be fair to say that this isn’t the most attractive interface in the betting industry, being basically grey throughout, but in terms of design and functionality it’s one of the best.
It somehow manages to respond very quickly but still feel laid back, transitioning between one market to another with ease so as not to stall your workflow, and page loads don’t hang around either.
Colour is used sparingly to indicate things like cash out availability and to make the odds themselves pop, and this works well by drawing the eye to the important information first.
Navigation
The sports list is in the usual place below a few quick links to popular leagues and sports, and it also works as a drop down filtering system so you can narrow your search from here by selecting a sport, country, then a league or competition.
This will then display all fixtures in that league/competition that are available to bet on in the centre of the page. It’s a good system that saves space and gets you to your bet in a matter of seconds.
Anything currently in-play will be front and centre on the home page and if you use the search bar to look for a specific event then you can be looking at the betting lines for that event even faster.
When looking at a particular event the betting options are split into a good number of different categories and any market you aren’t interested in can be minimised too.
It extremely convenient and saves a lot of pointless scrolling.
The Book Itself
The sports that are available at Tonybet will obviously fluctuate in accordance with what is going on in the world – you can’t bet on something that isn’t happening, right? However, at full capacity the list shows great range and is approaching 40 different sports categories.
I have never seen a sportsbook with such an obsession for the various types of skiing, and in fact any competitive sport played on ice or snow seems to be covered here; bobsleds, skeleton, ski jumping, Alpine skiing, winter sports, luge, etc. This should also tell you that Tonybet are a decent bookie for some of the more unlikely sports markets.
They would be mad not to include the old favourites as well, and they aren’t mad at Tonybet, so you can also expect plenty of basketball from all over the world, lots of tennis and rugby, and of course masses and masses of football. If there is a ball being kicked in the jungles of Papua New Guinea the chances are Tonybet will let you wager on it.
They don’t offer any horse or greyhound racing – they have a more continental feel to them – but as long as that isn’t important for your usual habits then you will be spoilt for choice.
Finally, saving the best until last; market depth. There are frequently 700+ markets to be found on top football matches. That isn’t a mistake. 700+. Top tennis can expect 70+ and some basketball fixtures climb higher than 420+. Not all sports enjoy this sort of attention but it’s a staggering amount of options.
Casino
It makes good sense to have a casino running alongside a sportsbook, and this one offers plenty to do between matches or when you have a few pounds left burning a hole in your account.
The stock of 500+ games consists of slots for the most part, but that doesn’t include the live casino which is absolutely stacked with blackjack variations as well as roulette.
The live games are an interesting and fairly unique addition allowing you to bet on card games, lottery style games, dice, and a wheel of fortune.
Lastly, the separate poker product has a life of its own, and is given plenty of attention since the bookie’s founder is a well known poker player.
Profit Potential
You can bet on this website using fractional, decimal, or American odds, and the good news is that those odds do tend to be slightly more competitive than some of Tonybet’s biggest rivals.
Their margins on football are smaller which means more money in winners’ pockets at the end of the day, but if you tend to bet less seriously then you probably won’t notice those few extra pence in your payout. Anyone that stakes larger amounts, however, will see enough of a difference to make it worth switching.
Some sports are more in line with the average but you shouldn’t ever find odds that you would turn your nose up at.
There isn’t much to say in the way of promotions unfortunately, it isn’t an area that Tonybet seem particularly invested in. They could do with one or two regular customer offers in order to encourage bettors to stick with them, but at the moment they all seem to be geared towards new players.
They don’t even seem to offer any kinds of odds boosts or enhancements.
Overall, anyone with a lot of spare cash can find extra value here from the odds alone, but for everyone else they are just middle of the road.
Mobile
The first thing you will notice when you use Tonybet’s app or mobile website, is how responsive it is to the touch. You can whizz from the top to the bottom of a list of odds in no time with a flick of the finger. Yet, in the same way as the desktop site it manages to keep things laid back with colour fades when odds are selected, for example, rather than an instant swap which can feel a bit manic.
The design and layout has clearly been thought through because the closer an even is to starting, the easier it is to access from the homepage. You can see events that are about to start as a first priority, then toggle to events in the next hour, 2 hours, etc. Perfect.
The A-Z is housed under the menu button, and there are no quick links to popular categories on the home screen, but this actually makes things easier because your focus is not split; to browse markets ahead of time use the menu, to get a bet on something upcoming soon, use the homepage.
The menu works in the same way as the desktop by filtering your search and while this is a perfectly adequate way of doing things it does lead to a bit of back and forth if you are league/sport hopping. This may be an unfair criticism on a smaller screen, but it’s a slight issue nonetheless.
Even so, this app is a classy piece of kit that does a lot of the leg work for you and doesn’t slow the process down with any unnecessary gubbins. You can log onto the app and get a bit on in seconds if you need to, and that is often a punters key consideration.
Meet Tony G
If you were from Lithuania, then you would certainly know the name Antanas Guoga, but you would know him better as Tony G.
He is a man of many talents and as well as being a politician, a businessman, and a world famous professional poker player, he is also the man who founded Tonybet in 2009. Hence the name.
He had already been running an online poker network since 2003 and this is still available from Tonybet today.
It didn’t take long for Tonybet to catch the eye of a much bigger fish in the way of Betsson, who paid €6 million for the Lithuanian side of the business, and have been running it ever since.
However, Tonybet kept going independently under its own brand and now operates on a UK and an Estonian licence so is able to serve the whole European market, with Tony G still at the helm.
Sponsorship hasn’t really factored into the business plan so far, at least not over in the UK, but they have sponsored basketball and racing in the past, even causing some controversy in their native Lithuania where gambling advertising is banned.
The company also holds the record for the biggest live Open Face Chinese poker tournament in history, attracting 132 players.
The Perfect Punter For TonyBet
Who would feel most at home betting with Tonybet?
The fact that their margins are a little smaller than some of their competitors is good news for those who stake larger amounts, as is the apparently non-existent winning cap, but those betting smaller figures probably won’t notice much of a difference in returns.
The live betting interface is one of the better options in the industry for my money, and the range of live betting markets is vast and interesting. Plus, anyone that wants depth of betting markets need look no further, the gargantuan amount of choice here is ridiculous.
If horse or greyhound racing makes up much of your betting portfolio you will definitely notice their absence, but on the other hand, anyone that likes trying new things and exploring new markets will find plenty of them to investigate.
Money: The Ins and Outs
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For clarity, the above time limits include a 48 hour maximum processing time, and if you do ever encounter any fees it will either be because you have been withdrawing silly amounts and wasting their time, or they will be charges from the payment provider and not Tonybet.
There is no information to be found in the betting rules on site regarding the maximum payout limits for each sport, and when asking about maximum and minimum stake levels I was politely told to stop being nosey. Some bookies are more cagey than others when it comes to this sort of thing but it seems unnecessarily secretive not to open up about the minimum stake…
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Nevertheless, a little bit of undercover work revealed that the minimum stake here is £1 and the maximum payout is £200k. Not the biggest but not inconsequential either – just keep that in mind when staking on things like accas.
So while the payment options, limits, and timeframes all seem well and good, the fact that Tonybet are less than upfront about some of their terms might put some bettors off.
Live Action Betting
The in-play interface is very usefully designed with great big icons and buttons that you can’t miss or mistake. Browsing the available sports categories is a breeze and the interface will always show you a live graphic interpretation of one of the games as standard.
It also differs from other in-play interfaces because it allows the punter to choose which fixture is shown as a live graphic as well as which team/player is in possession for each individual match – alongside the usual things like scoreline and time on the clock etc.
This means you can actually do a lot more from this point without having to open event view for any particular match. Of course, if you want to bet on anything other than the top 3 markets then you will have to open the event proper, and when you do the betting lines are split into lots of useful categories.
This is good news because there are often a lot of them!
One other little touch that is especially well considered, is the fact that the betslip appears underneath the match graphic and not above it. This means that it does not push the match tracker down the page as your betslip expands as tends to happen on most other sites. A simple solution to a common irritation.
Cash out doesn’t appear to be indicated but it is available on plenty of betting lines. Clearing this up would further help the bettor when trying to quickly decide their next move during live events.
How Can They Help?
If Tonybet wanted to make improvements then this would be an area they could have a look at, not that they score poorly for customer support, but there is certainly room for some work.
It’s not a 24/7 service but they are available from 9am until 5am, so it’s pretty close. What’s more, the live chat is easy to access and as well as listing an email address there is also an online contact form. Having said that, live chat isn’t always available when it says it should be, so it can be a bit pot luck as to whether anyone will actually be on the other end. Some of the staff are bordering on rude too, and they don’t waste any time in closing the chat if you go quiet for a few seconds.
Since Tonybet operates all over Europe they have customers that speak many different languages, which might be why they haven’t included phone support, but it will nevertheless be a slight drawback for some folk.
Social media is available but it seems to be a bit of an afterthought. This would seemingly be fairly easy to remedy and serve as a welcome addition to the contact options.
The FAQ is ok, although it feels like it has been built to help them more than us.
Getting Hold of Tony
- Name: Tonybet
- Registered Company: Tonybet OU
- URL: https://tonybet.com/sport
- UK Licence Number: 39126
- Live Chat: Chat icon available on each page
- Email: [email protected]
- Phone: Not available
- Twitter: @Tonybet
- Address: Tonybet OU, Upes st. 23, Vilinius, LT-08106