Best Live Betting Sites

Live betting is one of the most exciting ways to wager on sports and has the potential to ramp up your returns too. We’ve compiled a list of the best in-play betting sites around today, so you can compare them and sign up today!

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What is live betting?

While you engage in live betting, the outcome is the same: you’ll be able to put cash down on various outcomes of a sporting event while it’s still actually happening. You might be inclined to place a bet 20 minutes into the initial half of a football match, say, or during the fourth round of a boxing contest. Whenever you feel like doing it, you can. Importantly, you should keep in mind this isn’t a rare service provided by only a select few bookmakers. Interestingly, these days, the UK presents a huge range of in-play betting websites and in-play wagering apps which bring the convenience of this kind of gambling to your fingertips.

Why is live betting so much fun? Well, it greatly increases the excitement, for instance. From football to rugby to cricket, observing any sport live becomes an even more thrilling experience when you know you can have a personal stake in every unexpected twist and turn as it happens. You know, when you bet in-play, the event takes on a new, nearly interactive dimension that you don’t possess when merely watching as a passive viewer. Another main benefit with in-play betting is you can benefit from fresh odds as the event progresses.

How to bet in-play

Keen to have a go at in-play betting and see what all the fuss is about? The good news is that it’s every bit as user-friendly as any other kind of online betting. You don’t have to go to any special section of the betting site or download any additional software. Just click or tap your way to the page for the sport of your choice, and you’ll immediately be able to see which games or matches are currently underway. You can then check out the various betting markets and their live odds as they currently stand. At this point, it’s just a matter of placing bets exactly as you would before the event began.

You’ll notice the odds will shift in real-time, as the event progresses, and this is important as it’s the reason why in-play betting sites and in-play betting apps can put you at an advantage. Let’s say, for example, that a certain football team is hotly tipped to win a particular match. The pre-match odds on that team will be short and pretty uninviting. But let’s then imagine the team falters in the first half – perhaps one of their strikers gets sent off, or they’re 1-0 down by half-time. At this point, the odds will very probably get much longer than they were before kick-off. If you bet on them now, and they proceed to meet initial expectations and win, you’d get a bigger profit thanks to these new longer odds.

Cash out

You should also look out for the cash out option. This is a big plus point with live betting, as it means you can actually draw potential winnings on a wager even before the outcome is known. If, say, you’ve bet on a scoreline that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. By hitting the cash out option, you can bail out of this losing bet and take whatever money you can, calculated according to the live odds at the moment you cash out. 

Best live betting sites

With the sheer variety of in-play betting sites out there, punters are faced not just with the question of how to bet in-play, but where to bet in-play. Fortunately, at TopRatedBetting, our experts have you covered, vetting and recommending the best UK betting sites. Among our popular picks is 888, a very well-established operator which offers in-play betting markets for half of the sports covered on the site. Grosvenor Sports is another big-name brand, offering a big range of markets on everything from American football to WWE. One of the newer kids on the block, meanwhile, is Novibet, which has a particularly strong cash out market. That means you’ll have plenty of opportunities to cut your losses and collect money on bets that look like they might be doomed to lose. 

Best live betting apps

You aren’t restricted to making live bets on your desktop or laptop. Thanks to in-play betting apps, you can wager wherever you are, with a few taps on your smartphone or tablet. You can do this via the bookmaker’s website on your mobile browser, or by downloading native apps onto your device. Coral has a slick and easy-to-use native app which also lets you watch live streamed coverage of many sporting events as you bet. Among the other big names offering in-play betting apps are the likes of Ladbrokes and PaddyPower. With all these options on offer, you’ll never have to fear missing out on prime live betting opportunities.

Football live betting

It’s one of the most popular sports for bettors around the world, so it won’t come as a surprise to know there are lots of ways to bet in-play on football. Reckon you can predict the full-time result at half time, or which player will score the next goal, or whether the match will go into extra time? With live betting, you can put your money where your mouth is.

Golf live betting

There are more live betting markets on golf than you can shake a seven iron at. Picking the outright winner is always a favourite market, but in-play betting also lets you wager on who you think the first-round leader might be, and where a particular player might place, among other things. 

Cricket live betting

What will be the method of dismissal for the current batsman – LBW perhaps, or stumped? How many runs will be amassed in the current over? Will a century be scored at any point? These are among the outcomes you can put live bets on when watching the cricket – howzat for a way to gamble?

Tennis live betting

Tennis is such a fast-moving game that you’ll need to keep your wits about you as when you place live bets. You can bet on plenty of possibilities, from the match outcome (of course) through to who’ll win the current game or set, whether a player will have their service broken, and what the set scores will turn out to be.

Rugby live betting

Thanks to its intensely physical, combative nature, rugby is always thrilling to watch – and doubly so when you place wagers as the players charge at each other on the field. The in-play betting markets include everything from classic over/under bets where you predict how many points a team will score, through to whether a specific player will score a try in the first half.

Darts live betting

You may not be in the room to see those darts fly, but live betting is a way to get a taste of the energy and exhilaration as the players do battle. Of course, the match-winner bet is always going to attract droves of punters, but you can also explore other markets such as correct leg scores, how many 180s there’ll be (both in total and per player), and even where the first dart will land. Will the player hit the spot with a treble 20?

Frequently Asked Questions

• Are in-play betting sites safe?

  Yes, they are – as long as you don’t go off-piste and place bets at unregulated betting sites. At TopRatedBetting, our industry experts will only ever recommend bookies that are licensed and regulated by the UK Gambling Commission. This ensures you’ll be betting through operators that have strict safety and security protocols, and play by the rules.

• Are the advertised bet in-play odds accurate?

  Yes, but bear in mind that, by its very nature, in-play betting means dealing with odds that are constantly shifting. Depending on what’s going on in the sporting event, odds can shorten and lengthen within seconds, so you may have to think fast, and make abrupt judgement calls when you bet in-play.

• Do bookies offer enhanced in-play odds?

  Yes, they do. It’s such a competitive field that many bookies will really pull out the stops by enhancing odds in your favour. Some enhanced odds may be exclusive to in-play betting. For example, you may be awarded an odds boost token, which you can choose to activate on a specific in-play bet, enhancing the odds and potentially delivering a far bigger return if you get lucky.