I was always sceptical about spread betfa – the risk seemed too high in terms of making the ‘wrong call’ in terms of predicting the number of yellow cards during a game or how many corners there would be. However I have always been keen to take advantage of free football bets whenever possible.
I then came across Sporting Index, who advertise themselves as one of the world’s leading spread betting companies. I was firstly attracted by their offer of £100 back after 5 bets of £20 each have been placed.
In terms of service, I couldn’t fault this at all. When I applied to join the site I was called up by one of the Sporting Index customer service team who firstly wanted to verify who I was, but also ask me if I needed any further information or had any questions about how spread betting of the company operated. At that point I did indeed have a couple of queries about the activation of the free bets, so being able to chat that through with someone was very helpful.
After that point the site provide a customer service number that can be called at any time for account queries or just to run any questions past. If the company see anything that can be seen as ‘suspicious’ on your account they may give you a call, but this is to protect the customer and they seem to have no problem at all with customers going straight for the free bet offer. Lets face it too, with a great free bet offer like that they are probably checking that people aren’t opening multiple accounts!
So this free bet – how does it work? Well, Sporting Index ask that you firstly open the account and, when this is activated, they ask the customer to put 5 separate bets on different markets with a ‘risk’ of up to £20 – in other words the customer has to be able to ‘lose’ at least £20 as part of the bet.
eh? Lose money? Well yes, that’s how spread betting works. You must deposit enough money in your new account to cover potential losses, but lets face it, if you are sensible and put a bet on that could lose as a maximum £20 each time then by the time you have put the five bets on you will have lost a maximum of £100. And then of course Sporting Index will put £100 in your account, meaning that if you have won 3 of 5 of your bets then you’ll have a healthy profit to take away with you (which you can cash out immediately).
For example, if a market for ‘bookings’ in a football match has a ‘buy’ price of 5 yellow cards and you think there will be at least that many, then this would be a good bet to choose. When asked how much you want to put on each ‘point’ (or booking) you would choose £5.
If there were then 0 bookings you would lose £20 (by not being 1,2,3 or 4 bookings and each of these being worth £5). If there was 1 booking, you would lose £15 (it was more than 0, but less than 2,3 and 4) and so on.
If there are 5 bookings exactly then you would not win or lose any money, and for every booking above this you would win £5. So if this was Barcelona v Real Madrid in recent months you would probably win quite a lot of money!