Best Betting Exchange Sites in Ireland
Up-to-date information on services and bonuses for all four Irish betting exchanges here at Match.Center. We provide a full rundown of what they offer and how to utilise them.
List of Bet Exchanges in Ireland
What are Betting Exchanges?
Sports exchange sites are not the same as traditional bookmakers, they are in fact a marketplace, and they act in the same way any other free market does. At a platform of such type, the product that you are buying and selling is a bet, and it operates the same way a fruit market operates selling apples or pears. In the same way that a fruit market can have more demand for a certain apple which will force the price of those apples up. And if someone suddenly wants to sell an abundance of bananas the price of bananas will fall in order to clear them, the odds fluctuate with the same mechanics. They will move up and down with the ebb and flow of supply and demand.
It is different from a traditional bookmaker because you are wagering with all the other customers. After the wager between two users is settled, a platform simply holds all the money and adjudicates which bets have won and pays the winners accordingly. In general, the lower the commission, the better.
Exchanges all make their money by charging the winner a small commission. They do not care if you win or if you lose because no matter what on every market they make their commission rate from someone. So if you struggle to get stakeson at other bookmakers then try another type of wagering.
How Do Betting Exchanges Work?
This model works by following the same flow of actions no matter what your chosen site is:
- The platform selects an event it wishes to open a market on. It can be any available sport or a non-sport option (politics, TV-shows, etc.).
- They then open the markets they want to offer, here they just have to say what it is people are betting on, and set the market rules explaining the details: how to place a back bet and what is laying bets. They do not have to price the market up or provide any odds.
- Initially, there will be no quotes and nobody can wager on it! This happens when a market first goes up and you may see it if the game is far away or if the market is an unpopular one that not many people want to bet on. As time goes on more and more people will say “I will bet on that” and put in back and lay orders. As they do so, whilst the market is forming anyone can enter the stake amount and prices that they want.
- As people seed the market it is unlikely to be matched straight away but will sit on the order book waiting for someone else to call. When someone wants to accept a back bet, they click on the lay button and enter the stake amount they want to take at those odds. They are the ones who will payout the winnings if it wins but keep the stake if it loses.
- When you submit your stake, exchanges will ringfence the total amount of money each person (the backer and the layer) can lose and hold it waiting for the game to take place. Once there is a result, losing and winning wagers are settled. Either the backer or the layer gets his winnings, and funds are unfrozen.
The process will be almost exactly the same for any site. This example happens to be at a Betfair account denominated in £s but the mechanics are all identical for Euros. What is really important to get your head around is that each wager has two sides to it between two different customers, one backing the bet and the other laying it. For every back bet there’s a lay bet and vice versa. We will show how this works at Betfair below:
In the example above we have selected a match taking place two weeks in the future between Leeds and Arsenal. Markets have been open a short time: you can see that only £163 of bets has been matched so far and the market has an over round of 103%, which is about what a bookmaker will be. An exchange will be a lot closer to 100% when the game begins, there is still room for the prices to improve at the moment.
The back quotes are 1.67 on Arsenal winning. Now you may think that Arsenal will win but you wanted better odds than 1.67. Unlike a usual betting site you are not forced to accept or leave offers, instead you can submit your back bet requesting the prices that you want.
You can see this in the example above where the stake amount is 10 and the odds have been set to 1.7 which will mean a £7 profit. This bet can be submitted but we know from the earlier screen that it will not be matched at these odds.
Instead what happens is the stake is entered and now it’s in the lay column, you can see a pink 1.7 with £10 underneath it. That is the back bet that was just submitted. It is signalling to every other customer that you want to wager £10 at quotes of 1.70 on Arsenal to win and anyone who wants to play against you can take it.
So we will do that, the screen above shows how to lay a bet, you click on the relevant selection and the current lay odds and a new bet slip will appear.
Entering the backer’s stake will be how much of the bet you can win if the event does not happen. This is counterintuitive and not what people who have only placed back bets at regular betting sites are used to. They are used to typing in the amount that they will lose, but with a lay wager you type in the amount that you will win. The amount you will lose is shown as your liability, and in this example it is £7.
Once your stake is matched then it will be removed as you can see above, because there is no money there to be matched for anyone else now that £10 has a backer and a layer. The net position for the market is shown above: layer loses £7 if Arsenal wins but wins £10 if it is Leeds or a Draw.
This is the exact opposite of the display for the person who backed your offer, you can see they win £7 on Arsenal but lose £10 if it is Leeds or a Draw.
What to look out for when selecting an Exchange Betting Site?
When selecting a sports trading platform to use there are several important factors to take into account, we will look at them all in detail below.
Commission rates
The most important thing to consider is the commission rate that is charged. This is because the odds you get will be at or around a 100% over round, and if you want better you can just request them and either get the better prices when someone else matches the bet or the bet is just not placed. Essentially the commission on winnings and margin are the same, so the only thing that matters is the value.
Exchange Site | Commission Rates |
Betfair | 2-5% |
Matchbook | 2-4% |
Smarkets | 2% |
BETDAQ | 2% |
The grand like Betfair charges 5% on winnings by default, but provides a discount programme, though you need to accumulate it first. At the same time, almost all of their competitors offer more favourable terms nominally. We would rank Matchbook as one of the best in this category since they were the first to offer and advertise a 2% commission. The company reshaped the entire market as a result.
Liquidity
Liquidity means the amount of money that you get matched at the odds you ask for.
It is all well and good an exchange having low commission but you need to be able to get your bet matched first. For a long time Betfair as the inventor and a market leader was the only place you could be certain of getting large bets matched, but this is no longer the case. All the sites in Ireland have ample liquidity, certainly just before the event begins.
We have looked at the Champions League game between FC Copenhagen and Manchester United. Looking at the available betting exchanges we found the following data:
Exchange Site | Back Odds | Lay Odds | Back Liquidity | Lay Liquidity |
Betfair | 1.85 | 1.86 | £352 | £2564 |
Matchbook | 1.85 | 1.86 | £147 | £1906 |
Smarkets | 1.84 | 1.86 | £418 | £1927 |
BETDAQ | 1.85 | 1.86 | £146 | £875 |
Data was correct as of 10:30am on the 8th November 2023, 9 and a half hours before kick off.
A site without liquidity is like eBay if there were no sellers. And with no sellers, there will be no buyers (there is nothing to buy), and with no buyers no sellers will waste time and money listing things if they do not sell anything, and it is a very difficult cycle to break. This is why there are so few platforms compared to the number of bookmakers, it is very hard to get a critical mass of customers to survive.
Range of Sports and Markets covered
Some of the sites will add a sport event if it is something you are interested in though (both Smarkets and Betfair have definitely done this in the past) and you can also request individual bets to be added to an event, for example the name of some coach to a “next manager” market. All the exchanges cover the core sports and have a depth of leagues and tournaments listed. They also have many options per event.
Payment and Withdrawal methods
Funding your account should be easy. All four exchanges accept debit cards which are the main form of payment with no fees and high limits. There is not a lot of need for other methods if you have a debit card but some people like to use e-wallets or other options.
Reputation
Some people look at a reputation and there is some logic to that but we would not actually worry about this too much. That is because it is retrospective (looking at the past), whereas it is the future that matters. For a long time in the gambling industry Betfair exchange had a terrible reputation and had, amongst many things, offered promotional bonuses and then later seized the player’s winnings and cash balances (sometimes worth thousands of pounds), and just confiscated it all for no justifiable reason. It was only after lengthy legal battles that Betfair had to pay the players involved.
Another major issue with Betfiar was the introduction of the Premium charge which overnight discriminated against some users and charged them a higher (and different tier) of commission. If they can change the goalposts (so to speak) just like that then there is a lot of reason not to invest the time and money into learning how to use the Betfair exchange. However, that was all in the past, and having a bad reputation is not always relevant to the present.
Today Betfair is highly unlikely to steal balances as it did perhaps ten years ago or change its commission structure overnight as it did maybe 5 years ago. Today Betfair is pretty good. So whether or not to judge them by actions of the past is up to each individual to consider.
Mobile Betting
All of the best betting sites these days have a dedicated mobile app and this applies to exchanges as well. Interestingly, not all of them do have applications that allows all the functions but the better ones will and if wagering on the go is something that you want to do then this is something to consider.
Customer Support
Ideally, you will never have to ask them, but in case you do have a problem, being able to contact a knowledgeable customer support agent quickly and easily is a big plus. There is nothing worse than spending hours (literally, hours) waiting to get through to someone only to eventually get through and find you are playing message ping pong with an AI bot.
What is Backing and Laying at Betting Exchanges?
You can choose to back something which is staking that it will happen. This is exactly the same as placing a wager at any bookmaker.
The difference is that you can bet at the current prices available or you can request higher odds and wait to see if it is matched, in this way an exchange is more flexible.
It is laying stakes which is the real difference. Here you have something that no bookmaker allows and that is because in effect YOU are being a bookmaker for your lay bets. It involves betting that something will NOT happen. You are taking somebody else’s bet that it will, and so if it happens you lose. Wagering that things won’t happen opens up a whole load more options and when you can both back and lay on the same market it becomes possible to trade, which is a whole article in itself!
List of Betting Exchanges in Ireland
Smarkets
To say which is the “best” is subjective and one man’s best will be different from the next, but for us Smarkets just about pips it to the best exchange site number one position.
They are the newest of the four exchanges, founded in London in 2008 as a startup by two Americans, they are instrumental to the standard commission rate being just 2% rather than 5%.
What seals the top spot is the functionality of the Smarkets website, and taking the ability to trade to the next level with real-time charts, much like a financial stock market display looks. They couple this with large amounts of liquidity on markets earlier than it appears at rivals.
It has more flexibility than other exchanges with odds available up to 9999 to 1 instead of just 999/1 and they frequently have more markets available for each event. At the same time as having a superior exchange betting platform, they also have a sportsbook known as “SBK”. Now it is ONLY available as an App and you use your same account for both the SBK sportsbook and the Smarkets exchange. Unlike rivals who have a sportsbook and lower the odds in that area, the Smarkets SBK App gives the simplicity of a bookmaker but the same great exchange quotes.
Betfair
Was not the first to launch but they were close and they are the earliest that still exists today. They followed a marketing strategy reminiscent of Microsoft where they grew to a monopoly position in the market by buying any of their rivals who were better than them and merging them into Betfair. They did this with an exchange called “Flutter” which is notable because:
A) Flutter was actually a much better than Betfair and also
B) Flutter is now the name of Betfair’s parent company, but confusingly there is no relation between the two!
With their monopoly position and more liquidity than anyone else for many years, success breeds success, and their dominant position meant 5% basic commission (potentially lower for active users, but also higher on some special markets), and people could take it or leave it.
They began with the marketing slogan “Smart minds Betfair” which focused on the skill element of exchange betting and that when compared to gambling at a bookmaker where you are pretty much certain to lose money in the long run. At an exchange where you set your own odds you have a fighting chance of winning. As time went on the Betfair management realised that to make more money they should add a Casino site so that slogan was quietly dropped, because Smart minds definitely do not bet in a Casino.
They, in fact, instead added a whole host of gambling options including Poker, Bingo, Games, and the Casino. Losing a focus perhaps explains why the competition was able to catch up with, and eventually overtake them.
Today Betfair are still the largest among 4 sites in terms of users but they have been forced to offer lower commission rates and frequently have exchange offers that they never used to have. This is great news for their customers. Because of the better promotions and Free bets they offer they may have had a shout at still being rated our “best” choice IF they gave these promotions to everyone. Unfortunately, they sometimes advertise these existing user offers on their homepage but then bonus ban customers from taking part in them which makes it appear a lot better than the reality!
BETDAQ
BETDAQ has had a potted history since it was founded by Irish businessman Dermot Desmond in 2000 (they started trading one year later). For a long, long time they were the second largest betting exchange but could never truly dent Betfair’s market position. In the end they were sold to Ladbrokes in 2013 and became the ill-fated and short lived “Ladbrokes Betting Exchange”. Ladbrokes soon realised they had no idea what they were doing with an exchange and made a complete mess of things, forcing them to eventually offload it back to Dermot Desmond eight years later, meaning BETDAQ is once again an independent company.
They have also added a Casino site and Sportsbook which are all accessed by the same account. BETDAQ have some existing user promotions and has added live streaming to their website which shows endeavour and the intention to compete and they do continue to improve. It is however a fact that at the moment they do nothing better than what is available elsewhere, and they are very much an “also ran” right now.
Matchbook
Matchbook operates in the UK and Ireland and has had numerous owners since it began in 2004. They have had different commission structures during that time but currently charge Irish customers a flat 2% on winning bets which is the industry standard. They actually had their licence suspended in 2018 and were fined £740,000 for a number of regulatory breaches but they appear to have put all that behind them now.
They have considerably less sports coverage than their rivals, just 14 compared to around 30 at the others. Despite this they have a decent amount of markets compared to their rivals and the only drawback is that there are usually gaps in the odds and low liquidity until hours before an event starts which can be frustrating.
Betting Exchange Offers – What are they?
At the time of writing all four Irish betting exchanges have a Welcome bonus but obviously different companies will have different offers with different terms and conditions attached. Some of them have existing user offers as well but they are not a regular feature of the website but are instead either sent to eligible customers by Email or they are for a specific game or match and appear on the website in the days before the start and then disappear again.
We will look at the welcome offers the sites currently offer below. It is common for there to be several options for the new user to choose, so we will look at each one in turn. All Welcome bonuses are available to Irish customers as Euros even though the graphics may say £s. If you see T&C, £20 it is also €20:
Smarkets Welcome offers
Trade with 0% commission for 60 days
If you deposit with code “COMMFREE” then you will have to pay 0% commission for the first 60 days of your account activity. This can be worth a great deal, or very little, it depends on how much you intend to use the betting opportunities in your first two months. We would suggest that if you are experienced in online wagering then this could be the best option for you.
Betfair Welcome offers
Bet €20 on the exchange and if it loses get a Free bet refund
New customers can register with the promo code ‘ZBHC01’ and stake €20 on the Betfair exchange (it must be all on the same market as one bet). If the bet wins, then keep the winnings but if it loses get credited with a €20 Free bet. Only bets placed and settled within 7 days of account opening count as a qualifying wager for this offer. You must deposit with either a debit card or Apple pay. There are no min odds or anything else to worry about.
BETDAQ Welcome offers
Zero Commission for 100 days
BETDAQ is offering a ‘best in class’ deal – 0% commission for the first 100 days. This offer excludes deposits made through Skrill, PayPal, Neteller, and Skrill, so it’s advisable to make your deposit with a debit card. And don’t forget to use the promo code: Enter “0COMM100” upon registration to avail of this offer.
Matchbook Welcome offers
At the time of writing Matchbook have a choice of 2 different sign up offers!
Matchbook Money Back Promo Code Offer
Sign-Up Offer – Money Back If Your First Bet Loses
- Sign-up to Matchbook today with bonus code: “MB20“
- Place your first stake of 1.80 or more in 7 days.
- If it loses, they will refund your stake as a single Free bet.
- Refunds will be applied to your account within 72 hours of the qualifying bet being settled.
0% commission for 90 days
Sign-Up Offer – 0% Commission For 90 Days
- Sign-up to Matchbook today with bonus code: “COMMFREE90“
- Deposit funds using a credit or debit card. E-wallets are excluded from this promotion.
- You will get 0% Commission on All Sports for your first 90 days.
Betting Exchange Websites Compared
We compare and contrast the key features of the four exchange options in the table below:
Exchange Site | Commission Rates | Sports | Cash Out |
Betfair | 2-5% | 24 | Yes |
Matchbook | 2-4% | 10 | Yes |
Smarkets | 2% | 21 | Yes |
BETDAQ | 2% | 16 | Yes |
Pros & Cons of Sports Betting Exchanges Compared to Sportsbooks
Positives:
- Anonymity. Nobody else knows what you or how much wager on, so you can be someone who makes a long run profit and still get decent sized bets on because it is not possible to limit your account just for sports wagering profitably which a regular fixed odds site will do. *Interestingly this was not always the case, and before Betfair merged with Flutter at Flutter you could see who had matched your bets and who you were winning money from, or losing it to!
- The odds are better. It is no great secret that you will get higher prices at betting exchange sites than at traditional bookmakers. There are several reasons for this but the main one is probably that the exchange will naturally trend towards a 100% book (perfect market with no margin) and you will just have to pay commission if you win. This leads to much, much, better odds on outsider events where traditional sportsbooks may offer considerably less value because they assume that anyone betting on it will do so.
- Should be more secure. In theory an exchange should be a more secure place for your funds to be because exchanges act as a middleman and never lose money. They do not care if someone wins or loses because they take a cut of commission regardless. If you win money from fellow punters – you pay. The expenses they have are known in advance, which are the staff wages and office rent, hosting the website, etc, etc. But they can not be caught out by a punter suddenly winning a huge ten leg Acca for €1,000,000! Exchange should never go bust and it is true that far, far more bookmakers go bust every year than betting exchanges. Although, exchanges have folded before (SportingOptions) and punters only got their money back up to a £1000 limit!
- Much more flexibility when you lay. Being able to place lay bets (against) something happening) gives you a huge amount more flexibility. It is a more efficient way and opens up extra options. When you “cash out” bets at traditional bookmakers what you are doing is laying the stake that you have previously backed, paying the bookmaker up to 20% extra. Using an exchange allows the exact same thing only with much better payouts.
- Much more In-Play options. When an event goes “In-Play”, at an exchange there are much more competitive quotes than the same thing at a bookmaker and you can bet on a larger range of markets. If it is horse racing, the market won’t suspend until the horses have crossed the line unlike at a traditional sportsbook that will end betting much earlier. In fact, if the finish was close the live market will reopen which enables punters to wager on the result of the photograph!
Negatives:
- Fewer existing user promotions. As a rule such sites have far fewer concessions and Free bet promotions than sportsbooks. The most notable one of these is “Best Odds Guaranteed”. This offer is pretty much the only reason why a traditional sportsbook can be considered a value bet when compared to trading at the exchange but only if you are wagering a few hours before a race while the market is forming.
- They are not always the best odds. You must factor in commission which can make the prices not as good as they appear. 2% is still probably better but regular betting sites will be competitive on the favourites for both horse racing and football as these feature quotes are used to draw in customers.
- You can not place multis (accas). If you are someone who likes combos, you won’t be able to do it. You can place multis one after the other and roll up the winnings each time but you can not place an acca. For a short period of time exchanges tried to introduce the functionality but it never took off and you can not do it anymore.
- You have no protection from a “Palpable Error”. A palpable error is when a sports contract between a customer and the bookmaker can be cancelled because there has been an obvious mistake. This can work both ways, sometimes to the benefit of a customer and sometimes for the bookmaker, it is usually when for example the odds at all other betting sites are 1/8 on the heavy favourite to win but one bookmaker has it at 8/1. Someone at the site has typed the prices in incorrectly and it is obvious that has happened and those bets are voided. This is not the case at an exchange, when you submit a wager and it is matched then that is that.
There have been occasions where people layed horses at 1000/1 by accident and the horse went on to win, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds losses in minutes. That was just tough for the unlucky layer and good news for the backers who got such fabulous odds. At bookmaker sites in the case of a palpable error the customer support will cancel the stake.
Football Exchanges
There is no such thing, however, all companies allow bets to be placed on football using a range of markets. We have gone into great detail above explaining how to place a bet on the exchange, from both the perspective of a backer and as a layer. Please refer to these step by step explanations to help you.
Horse Racing Betting Exchanges
There is no such thing as an exchange for horse racing exclusively: all platforms allow bets to be placed on horse races. A major thing that becomes obvious when using an exchange to bet on horse racing is how much fluctuation there is in the odds just before the off. It is not at all uncommon to see a horse’s odds swing about from perhaps 5/1 out to 7/1 and then back into 4/1 (for example) in the space of ten minutes. The timing of your bets can be just as important as the bet that you place.
Tips from Match.Center on How to Exchange Bet
- What is great about betting on an exchange is the flexibility you have over the odds you get, so it is a great idea to decide what wagers you want to place (stake amount and odds) BEFORE you look at what is available. Then go to the exchange and if the odds are higher than you wanted then you just get the higher odds as a windfall, if the odds are lower then submit your stake anyway and leave it. If at any time the odds rise to your desired level then you get the higher odds, but if they do not then your bet is cancelled.
- When comparing odds to a traditional bookmaker remember that an exchange has no extra promotions to boost the payout value, it is what it is and (usually) there are no refunds or cashback under any circumstances. There is also commission to take into account, which can be as much as 8%! Although exchanges are normally the best value odds they are not always. So step back and look at the bigger picture.
- If you have placed reasonably long odds, what you can do is then lay your stake amount at 1.01 (or anything up to 1.2 works) and tick the box to make it go live in-play. There are two reasons why, and both of them revolve around the fact that at some point your bet might look incredibly likely to win. Firstly by laying at 1.01 if this is matched then you instantly free up this money to bet again with, you do not need the event itself to end and the wager settle, you can use your stake again straight away. Secondly, the stake might not actually win, and you do not want to have been so close to winning and then have victory snatched away and lose money right at the end, so this way at least when it is very likely you will win, you can rest assured that you will no longer lose no matter what. Placing low odds lays in this way is a bit like “cashing out” at a traditional bookmaker.