888 Review

The 888 Group is headquartered in Gibraltar. Cassava Enterprises Limited ("Cassava") exists within the 888 Group as an operating subsidiary and is the owner and operator of the 888sport.com Internet site. Cassava also operates www.888.com, an online venue for casino, poker and bingo games.

Cassava offers sports betting services and the casino, poker and bingo games under licenses issued by the Government of Gibraltar. 888.com has other offices around the world and employs over 880 full time members of staff. The other operations that are associated with the 888 Group are:

·        888.com: Cassava's flagship website. Here you will find the bulk of gambling options at your disposal.
·        Pacific Poker: Online poker arm of Cassava.
·        888ladies.com: Cassava's online Bingo room.
·        888sport.com: Cassava's sports gambling arm.

Since September 2005, 888 Holdings Public Limited Company, which is the group's holding company, has completed a successful initial public offering of its shares. They were admitted to trading on the London Stock Exchange. Since that time, the 888 Group has continued to grow and embrace new fields in the online gaming industry, especially sports betting. 888 Group is also the sponsor of several high-profile football clubs, such as Sevilla FC.

Sadly, US players are not allowed to play on 888sport.com as a direct result of the passing of the UIGEA laws.

All this means that your money is very safe with the site. The site is big, has deeply seated roots, and a good reputation for honoring bets. How does 888sport.com compare with the other big boys in the online sports gambling industry? Read on to find out.

888 Website/Software

The website of 888sport.com is a bit of hit and miss. Let us start by recapping what it does well first.

The website is available in a fair amount of languages. To change the language, all you have to do is choose a new location in the drop down box to the upper right of the screen. Available languages are English, Spanish, German, Danish, Swedish, French.

One major downside is that even though 888sports.com and 888.com are owned by the same company and featured on the same website, you cannot use one account for both. You have to make separate account names for both, even if you use the same info on both accounts. Make sure keep this in mind if you plan on expanding past 888sports.com.

There is quite a large selection of available sports to bet on, including but not limited to American football, Australian rules football, baseball, basketball, boxing, cycling, darts, football matches, greyhounds, politics, rugby league, and tennis. While the amount of sports to bet on is nothing to sneeze at, the actual bets you can make leave a lot to be desired.

Deposit options are plentiful on 888.com. You can use VISA/Master Card credit cards or debit cards, Moneybookers, Neteller, Entropay, ACTeCASH, Wire Transfer or Deposit by Phone.

The “my account,” deposit, and log in buttons are all prominently featured, and will never pose a problem to be found. The color combination employed is not too eye-catching, but not too distracting either. To place a bet, all you do is choose whatever sport you want to bet on in the left hand pane of gray color, and then a submenu reveals itself allowing you to specify. Say, for instance, you choose "Basketball." Upon clicking on it in the left hand pane, you will get five different types of basketball "categories of bets." In the specific case of basketball, you get Spanish ACB, Basketball long term, Euro basketball match list, euro basketball handicap list, euro basketball Points list, NBA basketball match list, NBA basketball handicap list, and NBA basketball points list. "Match list" pertains to winning straight up, and "handicap list" pertains to point-spread betting. Points is about the totals. Upon clicking one of these categories, you will get a variety of matches to bet on. Upon clicking "more" in the top right hand of each bet, you will activate more betting feats. There is an average amount of feats to bet on. There is also a betting slip, much like the one on SportingBet, available on the site.

There are a few catches to using the betting slip though. 888sport.com's propensity to use popup windows for every non-standard thing, such as the cashier and betting slip, does get in your way when you are trying to place a multitude of bets using the betting slip. First of all, when you click on a single feat, the betting slip automatically pops up. When you click on something different in the background, the betting slip automatically refresh itself in the window. This is not intuitive since you need to have the window constantly open to view what you have it in it. It's not offered in a “at a glance” fashion like their competitors. Other sites leave betting slip on the main page, which constantly updates itself.

Something else of note is the amount of leagues covered by 888sport.com's football. It’s simply a huge list. Every single soccer league around the world is covered if you want to bet on them.

There is a live scores tab and there a statistics tab, which gives you a heaping dosage of whatever stats may have been relevant in order to help you make a bet. It’s not as thorough as a dedicated site, but it is very helpful and a welcomed addition.

888 Sports Offered

There are literally tons of available stuff for you to get your betting fix on. Available sports are: American football, Australian Rules football, awards, baseball, basketball, boxing, cricket, cycling, darts, football-long term, football matches, Gaelic games, golf, greyhounds, motorsport, Olympic Games, politics, rugby league, snooker, TV specials, tennis, Ultimate Fighting Championship and also UK Racing. Pretty much all the bases are covered.

888 Variety of Wagers

You can bet on straight up, totals, point-spread, and a multitude of parlays, including types where you pick X amount of different outcomes, for these to get wagered in as many combinations as possible. The displayed odds can be changed on the fly between Fractional (5/2), American (+105), and Decimal (3.50) for your convenience.

What is lacking is the actual number of possible betting feats, such as 1st qt pts, 2nd qtr pts, 3rd qtr pts, and 4th qtr pts. For example, on 888sport you might only get 1st qtr pts.

888 Juice Details

Juice is inconsistent over all the available bets. All possible wagers have very wildly varying amounts of juice, making for very unpredictable odds. You will have to review the odds you are getting on a case by case basis. -110, -110 seems to be the standard, but it’s very common to find betting feats at -105, -118 and much more wilder ones on basketball games. Check it out on a game by game (and sport by sport) basis, and remember to always adjust wagers accordingly.

888 Bonus and Promotions

888sport offers what is known as the £50 bet basket offer to their new customers. It entails a series of free bets, two £15 and one £20, based on the number and amount of the bets made by the new person. One £15 bet at odds of 2.00 or above earns a free £15 bet. Nine more bets, at £15 each, at 2.00 odds or above earns another £15 free bet. Five more £15 bets at 2.00 or above will then net the new person a free £20 bet.

888 Customer Service

There is a multitude of ways to get in touch with 888.com's support. You can send them email using their online form, you can call them up, and you can chat with them live.

By using the email option, I sent two emails and the average response time I got was about 24 hours per email. The answers seemed friendly and knowledgeable.

I have also tried chatting with them, and I was connected to an operator within 15 minutes. Again, the chat operator was able to answer all of my queries, and seemed very patient while doing it. They helped me clear out the accounts issue I had while starting this review.

I have not contacted them by phone, but they have numerous available phone numbers. They seem to have a free phone number for every major country. I have had good experiences contacting them and getting appropriate responses using the email and the live chat option, so I have no reason to believe that their live telephone support would fall short. Bear in mind that telephone support is only available between 9AM and 10PM GMT though, not 24 hours per day.