Free Bets

The best Girl Band ever? The spice girls announced that they are getting back together to do a world tour in December of this year and the following January of 2008 . This will liven up the music betting scene again with all sorts of bet options but the main one will undoubtedly be on them achieving another number 1.

There isn’t a mention of a forthcoming new single at the moment but you can bet that this will be on the cards. There was a hinted new album to be released followed by the concert tour when they will perform all the hits from their years together.

Little’uns in tow.
Life will be a little different this time around as the girls take their offspring with them and have even announced that a crèche will also be taken along to keep the mini-spices occupied.
What may also be a surprise is that all five spice Girls would be involved, having put there earlier differences behind them. This would be a real crowd puller and interest in the new look middle-aged girlie rockers will be very high. They’ll attract a new army of fans in their multi-millions as well as stirring their die-hard army from the first time around.

I look forward to seeing them, they’re a nice bunch of people.

Paul Collingwood was made captain of the England one-day cricket side this week and is an interesting and probably the most deserved selection. Bets wouldn’t perhaps have been on him being the number 1 choice but I feel that he is the best choice. He’s one of those brooding types of characters, particularly at the wicket when batting, that seems to be able to go inside himself and find that focus that’s needed at the highest level.

I do hope he can find that focus when he’s on the field. I want to be positive - so I will be, and stick my neck out - that Collingwood will be a hit as skipper. He comes across as a calm and easy going type of a guy but there’s no doubting that he has a steely determination for success. When (not if!) he proves himself in this position, he will be a hot contender for Michael Vaughans’ spot if Vaughan doesn’t hit a consistent vein of form.

To a nice bloke who has probably been one of the hardest working players in the game to get to where he is, we wish him well. Cricket betting is a growth area in online betting in the UK in particular and with Collingwood at the helm of the one-day national side, we can start placing bets on realistic England wins.

Well, from yesterdays, match against Moya, you would think I would be crazy to have a tennis bet on Tim Henman winning Wimbledon wouldn’t you? Well so would I, but in the betting world, if you’re looking to make a good return on a bet placed then you’ve got to look the other way a little bit.

So how often have you been disappointed in a player or team that you fancy for a competition performing poorly or even losing in the early stages? Happens a lot, but this is good for improving your odds. Let’s face it, do you bet to win or bet to win Money? You know the answer, so to win a good amount of money, you need good odds.

Here’s an example : Do you know that at the time of writing, you can get odds on Tim Henman winning Wimbledon outright at 300 / 1. Now if you placed a tenner on this outcome, you get £3000 back! Reasonable? I think so.

Yes, of course the likelyhood is that it won’t happen but in sport - it can! SO come on, if you want to get some real money from betting, don’t forget that you should be betting with money you can afford to lose - you need to look where the decent odds are.

The Wimbledon tennis tournament is always a popular event for online betting punters to look for tennis free bets. It’s another one of those “family” type events where we welcome new betters to the market who haven’t bet before at all. It’s a bit like the Eurovsion Song Contest in this sense.

This is where those smaller free bets offers come into their own. Look at the like of Coral, Paddy Power and Skybet. Their lower offers will actually attract the casual punter because noone new to betting wants to commit too much. Rightly so, they will fancy a flutter on Wimbledon and look for a low deposit required when they sign up with a new bookmaker. Some of the larger free bets might then scare them off, as there is a slight misconception that a £200 free bet means you have to commit the full £200. This is not actually so. This £200 would be the maximum value that you can get a free bet up to, you could still register and deposit £10 and get the £10 matched. The £200 is just a MAXIMIMUM.

It could therefore be termed that a £200 free bet offer is a “range of free bets” from £10 up to £200 maximum, hence covering all the popular range of free bets, £20, £25, £50, £100, £150.

Paddy Power have come up with their new latest free bet offer for Wimbledon which you can see by clicking here. Paddy Power are one of those innovative online betting bookmakers who like to update their offers frequently around their standard £10 free bet.

We really like the Paddy Power site, mainly because they nearly always have a humorous angle on things, not just in the way they display the current sporting events in their text boxes but over the years they’ve had some very clever graphical links with comical cartoons and flash images that bring a smile to your face. I guess it’s typical of the Irish sense of humour that they can keep presenting in this cheeky fashion and why customers just keep coming back.

We featured Paddy Power a few months ago as the Eurovision Song contest started to come into the frame but now Big Brother is one of their major events that they put a lot of effort into covering on their site. It’s very quick to go from their home page onto their pricing pages and you can navigate to anywhere on the site from just about any page you are on.

So check out Paddy Power and particlulary their latest Wimbledon Free Bet offer!

Cricket betting fans can get there cricket free bets ready today for the Twenty20 tournament which starts this afternoon and no doubt it will be as popular as ever an attraction for all the fans who actually go to the grounds.

This form of cricket has grown to be a stadium-filler and is guaranteed to give entertainment, excitement, runs, wickets and cause for some bowlers to re-think their career directions. If you’re a pie throwing bowler like me, you know that sinking feeling as the ball is rapidly elevated into the stratosphere. The first optimistic thought is “catch?” But no. It continues it’s journey over the crowd and into the neighbouring streets and if there could be an eight scored in cricket, that would have been one!

 Go and watch one of these games live! I know many people who were never big fans of cricket but have been to a Twenty20 match and never looked back. Because there’s so much action packed into a short time frame, newcomers to cricket see everything happen, i.e. runs, wickets, etc, rather than having to wait through a day of test cricket.

You’ve also got to hand it to the grounds themselves for firstly preparing wickets that suit the batsmen and then encouraging other attractions for the kids - bouncy castles, fairground stand, food stalls. You really get a sense of a community event when you go.

If you fancy a flutter in online cricket betting, visit our home page to see a list of bookmakers who will give you a matched free bet when you join them.

Today we welcome BGbet on board to further expand our free bets portfolio. With 40 years experience in the online betting world, punters will appreciate that they are dealing with an experienced and trusted outfit. Their professional website gives a clear “aerial view” of their sports betting layout, making it easy to navigate around and allowing quick and no-fuss registration.

This is a frustration with a lot of websites on the internet these days, particularly with e-commerce sites (not that BGbet is one!). What I mean here is that if you buy goods online, sometimes the checkout train is so long, you get really fed up by the time you have to enter your card details.

I think online betting actually leads in this field as most internet bookmakers seem to have got the message that punters want the process f signing up to be quick. BGbet have certainly enabled this to happen with the easy link at the top of their site “Open Account” after which you’re taken to their registration page and everything is laid out nicely and clearly for you.

You can see a real Horse Racing betting bias to the BGbet website with meetings laid out down the right hand column for an “At a glance” view of what’s on and odds offered. Don’t let that deter you if you’re not so much into the horses as the right hand column lists all the sports available, including Gaelic sports.

The BGbet site is just how we like things - nice and simple!

I certainly don’t want to suggest a bet on this sort of thing but as Royal Ascot Betting got underway yesterday and we saw an unbelievably close finish in the Queen Anne Stakes, Frankie Dettori did his usual celebratory leap from his mount on completing his victory.

Great to see, lots of fun for everyone with a few “Wah-heeeys” from the crowd but does anyone else think that if his foot doesn’t come out of his stirrup one day, he’s going to do himself some serious damage. If it happened - and honestly, I sincerely hope it doesn’t! - I don’t think his boss is going to be too thrilled with him. I do wonder if his wealthy employers have ever had a word about “the victory leap” as he did off Ramonti yesterday. When you think of the money that’s involved for these guys, you could forgive the top men for amending the contract of employment to get Frankie to refrain from such frivolity.

I hope he continues with it, it’s his trademark after all. I just had a thought about it and imagined that if I was in charge of Frankie, I would be more of a nervous wreck if he’d won a race than actually during one!

I must be getting old.

The explosive encounter on Saturday gets boxing betting in the frame again, a good time now to look at what free bets are available through us if you fancy a flutter. This is an intriguing fight between Ricky Hatton and the Mexican Jose Luis Castillo. Going on their past record, Hatton has to be favourite but Castillo is confident although he is no spring chicken at 33 years of age.

You can bet that this will be a classic. Why? I love fights with shear grit and determination and these two fighters are the type that, if they had to, would stand toe-to-toe in the centre of the ring and just keep on sluggin’. Sometimes of course, boxing bouts take many forms. Boxing is an art - no doubt. Ricky Hatton is one fighter who is the consumate professional. Extremely fit, strong and completely focused but if it comes down to a scrap - he’s there. Also, he is an intelligent, humble man which explains why he always strives to improve.

Castillo provides Ricky Hatton with a good little test. I think Hatton will win but he needs to be diligent because Castillo can be a similar scrapper as he proved with stamina against Diego Corrales.

Back to those free bets and we recommend Stan James as one of our favourite online boxing betting bookies. Get ready for this one - it might not be pretty!

Some punters have the misunderstanding that betting with free bets is only for sports betting. Not so at all - don’t forget that the free bet is the customer gathering tool of the online bookmaker. These free bets can then be used on basically any market that a bookie offers.

So, if you want to join a bookmaker with a £20 free bet offer, you sign up, make your £20 deposit which is then matched. You receive your £20 free bet to add to the deposit and so you’ve got £40 worth of free bets to play with.

Now you choose a market, for example the financial betting market. You can use this £40 budget as a one-off bet in this market, or you can split this pot to divide into other markets, i.e. £10 on financials betting, £10 on something in the music betting world and a final, larger flutter on the Big Brother BettingMarket.

This way, you use your free bet to give you a larger budget for your campaign to spread your bets into different markets to give variety and perhaps even “Hedge” your bets.

Don’t let the sports betting fans have all the fun and look around our list of online betting bookies that offer these great free money bonuses for new customers when they join - and use them wisely!