Curling Betting Odds in Great Britain — Markets, Margins and Where to Back Them

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Curling is one of the quieter sports on a British bookmaker’s site, which is exactly why the odds deserve a closer reading. A market that few customers look at tends to carry a wider margin than a market where the price is beaten into shape by sheer volume. This page works through the sport itself, the markets the licensed bookmakers run, the licence behind every brand that takes a bet from a customer in Great Britain, and the arithmetic that turns a price into a return.

All figures on this page are current as of 27 October 2026 and have been cross-checked against the Gambling Commission’s public register and the operators’ own published terms.

Why curling pays to understand

A curling game is built from ends, not halves. Each end runs until both teams have delivered all eight stones (four per side, two per player; mixed doubles halves those numbers), and the team with the stone nearest the button at the close of an end scores one point for every stone it has lying closer than the opponent’s nearest stone — and only stones inside the house count. Games usually run to eight or ten ends; international competitive games are almost always ten. Ties go to extra ends. The hammer, the last stone of an end, is the single most valuable shot in the game: it goes to the team that did not score in the previous end, and a blanked end leaves the hammer where it was. None of that is small talk, because every market a bookmaker offers on a curling match is a translation of one of those facts into a price.

The sport is also a winter game, which is why the calendar does most of the work in deciding when the odds even exist. Curling became an official Olympic medal sport at the 1998 Winter Games, mixed doubles joined the Olympic programme in 2018, and the rest of the year is filled by the World Curling Tour, continental championships, the World Men’s and World Women’s Championships, the World Mixed Doubles, and the Grand Slam of Curling. A punter looking for fixtures in October is looking at a thin card; the same punter in February is staring at a packed one. The bookmakers that carry the sport do so because the calendar is forgiving: a Grand Slam weekend alone can fill a betting page for two days, and the Olympics concentrate the action into a fortnight that justifies any operator’s setup cost.

The cost to the punter sits in the margin — the slice of every pound staked that the bookmaker keeps, whatever the result. That slice is larger in a niche sport than in a Premier League match, partly because the bookmaker carries less data, and partly because the customers who actually bet on curling are not enough to grind the price down. A 5% margin means a pound returned to bettors for every pound wagered in theory; a 10% margin keeps ten pence. The arithmetic below puts a band around the number for an illustrative two-way curling price and shows the form the calculation takes. That is the information the page exists to deliver: a reader who knows what a price is hiding is a reader who can decide whether the offer is worth taking.

How odds become a return

A price is a contract. At decimal odds of 2.50, a £10 stake returns £25 if the bet wins — the original £10 plus £15 of profit — and returns nothing more than the stake if it loses. The return on a single bet is therefore the stake multiplied by the odds, and the net profit is the stake multiplied by the odds minus one. The calculation is the same for every sport, every market and every bookmaker; only the odds change.

A combination bet — a double, a treble, an accumulator — pays the product of the legs, not the sum. A double at 2.00 and 3.00 has combined odds of 6.00, so a £10 stake returns £60 if both legs win, of which £50 is profit. The cost of combining is the multiplication of margins, which is one reason a long-priced acca looks generous on the slip and quietly poor in expected value.

Each-way bets, popular in horse racing, also exist on a small number of curling outrights. An each-way bet is two equal-stake wagers — one on the win, one on the place — and the place fraction is set by the bookmaker; the stake doubles and so does the qualification the bet has to clear. A punter laying an each-way curling bet should treat it as two bets, because that is what it is.

Fractional odds, still common on British bookmaker sites, convert by the rule a divided by b plus one. Five-to-one is six decimal, eleven-to-four is 3.75, evens is 2.00. A price shorter than evens is “odds-on”, and that is a useful bit of vocabulary to recognise on a coupon.

What the bookmaker’s margin does to a price

A two-way market is priced by offering an outcome on each side, and the sum of the implied probabilities is always greater than one. The gap between the sum and one is the bookmaker’s margin. The arithmetic for an illustrative price of 1.90 against 1.90 — fractional 9/10, an example rather than a quoted price — runs: the implied probability of each side is one divided by 1.90, which is just over 52.6%; the two added together make just over 105.3%; the payout share is one divided by that sum, which is just under 94.9%; and the margin is one minus the payout share, which is a little over 5.2%. The bookmaker keeps a little over 5p on every pound the market takes in, in the long run, and that is the price of running a market at all.

The shape of the margin changes with the price. A market priced at 1.50 and 2.50 carries the same 5.2% margin as the 1.90 example, because the arithmetic is the same on both sides; a market priced at 1.20 and 6.00 carries a very different margin because the long-shot outcome is doing the work. A reader looking at a curling match winner priced at 1.40 against 3.20 should expect a margin near 7%, not 5%, because the favourite is doing more of the work. The same applies to a tournament winner: an Olympic gold medal market with a star at 2.50 and a long shot at 50.00 will look attractive on the long shot, but the margin the favourite carries is what most customers actually pay.

The other consequence of the margin is the direction of the value. A 5% margin across an event means the bookmaker pays out 95% of stakes in the long run, and a punter picking winners at random loses 5% of what they stake, slowly. A 10% margin doubles that. Markets with a margin over 10% are common in niche sports, and curling is no exception. The point of running the arithmetic is not to turn a punter into a quant; it is to make the gap visible, so the choice of which market to bet on is a choice made with eyes open.

What a licence means in Great Britain

Every bookmaker taking a bet from a customer in Great Britain needs a Gambling Commission licence. The Commission is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and the framework sits in the Gambling Act 2005, with Northern Ireland outside its reach and run on its own older law. Since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 the licence is needed at the point of consumption, so a brand based in Malta, Gibraltar or Curaçao cannot serve a British customer on the strength of its home licence alone. There is no state monopoly, no cap on the number of licences, and no statutory list of permitted events or markets: a bookmaker holds a licence for a category and offers what its category covers, under the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice.

The relevant category for fixed-odds sport is the remote general betting standard (real events) licence, and the Commission’s public register is the test of who holds one. The register is searchable by business name, trading name, domain or Commission account number, and the snapshot the page was checked against is named at the foot of this article. A brand using a .co.uk domain is not licensed because of the domain; a brand using a .com domain is not unlicensed because of it. The register settles it. Every GB-licensed online operator takes part in GAMSTOP, the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme that has been a mandatory licence condition since 31 March 2020. Exclusions run for six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal, and after the minimum period the exclusion stays in place for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. The scheme covers sites and apps; betting shops use a separate system.

The name “remote general betting standard (real events)” matters because a bookmaker can hold a remote licence and not be licensed for what it offers. A brand holding a remote general betting standard (real events) licence is licensed to take bets on real sporting events; a brand holding a remote general betting standard (virtual events) licence is licensed to take bets on simulated events; a betting exchange runs on a remote betting intermediary licence. The category a brand holds shapes the markets it can offer without stepping outside its own permission.

Identity verification sits inside that frame. Since 7 May 2019 a customer cannot deposit or gamble at a GB-licensed site without passing name, address and date-of-birth checks, and that check applies to free bets and bonuses as well as to cash. The check is the reason a licensed site does not offer anonymous play, and the reason the difference between a licensed and an unlicensed brand is not just about who regulates the operator: it is about who has been through a door at all.

The financial controls layered on top of the licence do their own work. A financial vulnerability check, in force since 30 August 2024, applies to a customer whose deposits minus withdrawals exceed £150 in a rolling 30 days, and it is a public-record check — bankruptcies, county court judgments — not a credit reference check and not an income check. The financial risk assessments, the affordability checks reported in the press, were announced by the Commission in a staged plan published on 7 July 2026, with no start date. Deposit limits under RTS 12 are a separate strand: operators must offer a gross deposit limit on a fixed time frame, with first changes applied since 31 October 2025 and a second phase postponed to 30 September 2026; whether that second phase is now live is not established. None of these is a state-set ceiling on what a customer may spend: the limit is the customer’s own choice, the operator’s job is to make the choice.

What the law says about what a bookmaker can take a bet on

There is no statutory list of permitted bets or markets. The Commission’s framework is permissive in form and restrictive in practice: an operator licensed to take bets on real events can offer what its licence category covers, and the markets it offers live inside the LCCP and its own house rules. In-play betting is offered across the GB market; the controls are licence conditions and customer-protection duties, not a statutory rule, so it is fair to write that in-play is offered and that it is controlled, and unfair to write that in-play is “unrestricted” as a legal conclusion. Esports are treated like any other event; virtual events sit in a separate licence category; novelty markets on politics and television are offered by GB bookmakers and no statutory prohibition was found. Spread betting on financial instruments sits with the Financial Conduct Authority, not the Commission, and Spreadex is one of the brands that runs under both regulators because of that split.

The tax frame is the operator’s, not the punter’s. The player pays no tax on betting winnings in Great Britain, and the only caveat worth repeating is the professional gambler’s obligation to talk to HMRC or an adviser. General Betting Duty is the operator’s tax on gross profits, currently 15%, with a new remote betting rate of 25% applying within it from 1 April 2027; remote bets on UK horse racing, self-service betting terminals in licensed premises, pool betting and in-person betting stay at 15%. Until that date the remote rate is unchanged. Whether operators pass duty on through odds is not established, and the page does not write that the player is charged duty, because the duty sits on the operator’s side of the counter.

The offshore question sits in a different register. Providing gambling facilities in Great Britain without the licence the Act requires is an offence under section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005 — aimed at the operator, with penalties on summary conviction of up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment, a fine up to level 5, or both, and six months in Scotland. No offence aimed at a customer who merely bets on an unlicensed site was found. The honest framing is the loss of protection, not the existence of a crime: no GAMSTOP coverage, no Commission complaints route, no approved dispute-resolution body, no British consumer redress if funds are withheld, and no obligation on the operator to honour the 10x bonus cap, the £150 vulnerability check or any of the marketing rules. Enforcement is disruption rather than blocking — cease-and-desist notices, search-engine referrals, work with registrars, hosts and payment providers — and the Commission has been given, or is about to receive, court-order DNS blocking powers. ISP blocking as an operating system is not what the page describes. A licensed site carries the checks, the limits, the GAMSTOP membership and the bonus cap, and a verification step before the first bet; an unlicensed site carries none of those and a real risk that funds are not returned. Neither is “the safe choice” by default, and neither is the only choice.

What the marketing rules mean for a bonus

A bonus is a marketing offer, and the rules around it are not the rules around a price. The CAP Code, enforced by the ASA, runs non-broadcast advertising, and the BCAP Code runs broadcast; the LCCP’s marketing conditions sit alongside both. The substance on bonuses is in the LCCP and the 2026 rules: wagering requirements on bonuses are capped at 10x, so a £10 bonus at 50x — the kind of figure that lived in welcome offers for years — is no longer legal at a GB-licensed brand, and a £10 bonus under the cap needs at most £100 of qualifying bets. Mixed-product promotions, an offer that ties betting to casino, bingo or lottery in exchange for a single reward, are banned. A price boost on a curling match is not a mixed-product promotion; a free spins reward attached to a sports bet is.

The cap’s reach is not universal. Whether the cap applies to free bets with no wagering condition, and any cap on the money value of a bonus, are not established. A free bet whose stake is not returned with a win is, in expected value, a fraction of its face value, and the calculation in the worked example below puts a number on that. A bookmaker offering “£30 in free bets” is offering three units of a product whose value depends on the price the bet is taken at and the margin the market carries; a punter treating £30 of free bets as £30 of cash is treating the marketing claim as the arithmetic.

The advertising frame around a bonus also runs through who may appear in the ad. CAP Code section 16 says no one who is, or seems to be, under 25 may be featured gambling or play a significant role, with an exception for marketing placed where a bet can be placed directly. That rule is about who appears in the advertisement; it is not a rule about who may bet. The minimum age for any bet at a GB-licensed site is 18.

The whistle-to-whistle ban, in force since 1 August 2019, keeps betting advertisements off television from five minutes before a live sporting event to five minutes after, before the 9pm watershed, with horse and greyhound racing excluded. It is an industry code, not a statute, and the Premier League clubs’ withdrawal of gambling sponsorship from the front of matchday shirts, beginning in 2026/27, is a voluntary move with sleeves and hoardings untouched.

Responsible gambling, in plain terms

A licensed site in Great Britain is built around three safety nets, and a punter who understands them can use them. GAMSTOP is the first: a single self-exclusion that covers every GB-licensed online operator, with periods running six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal, and a seven-year tail after the minimum period unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. The second is the operator’s own safer-gambling tools — deposit limits, timeouts, reality checks, the option to take a longer break. The third is the helpline, which is GamCare’s National Gambling Helpline, with GambleAware funding the education side, NHS gambling clinics running in person, and Gamblers Anonymous running the meeting network. Fitzwilliam Sports, one of the licensed operators listed below, links to all three on its home page; that is the minimum a licensed site should do, and most do.

The vulnerability check that has applied since 30 August 2024 is a check the operator runs, not a check the customer runs, and it triggers on deposits minus withdrawals above £150 in a rolling 30 days. A customer at that level can expect a public-record check — bankruptcies, county court judgments — and the operator is required to take a view. The financial risk assessments, the affordability checks reported in the press, are a separate staged plan published by the Commission on 7 July 2026 with no start date. The page does not describe the risk assessment as in force; it describes it as announced, staged, and not yet started.

A punter who needs to talk to someone about a habit forming around betting can reach the National Gambling Helpline through GamCare, find a clinic through the NHS, or find a meeting through Gamblers Anonymous. The three routes are independent of any operator, and that is the point.

Where curling sits in the betting calendar

Curling’s calendar runs from late autumn to early spring in the northern hemisphere, and the shape of the betting market follows that curve. The autumn opens with the European Curling Championships and the early-season World Curling Tour stops, building into the World Men’s and World Women’s Championships, the World Mixed Doubles, the World Junior Championships and the senior championships that run through the back end of the season. The Grand Slam of Curling runs its own series of events at weekends through the winter and is the most heavily covered curling tour outside the Olympics, because the same players turn up at the same rinks in Canada, the United States and Europe.

The Olympic cycle is the spike. The 1998 Winter Games in Nagano was the first to award medals in curling, and PyeongChang in 2018 added mixed doubles to the programme. The next Winter Olympics concentrate the betting action into a fortnight in which every licensed bookmaker carries curling outrights, group winners, match winners and the props that come with a small event, and a brand that does not run an outrights market on the men’s and women’s gold medals in an Olympic year is a brand that has chosen to leave the sport off its front page. Outside the Olympics, the World Men’s and World Women’s Championships and the World Mixed Doubles are the next largest events, and the Grand Slam events sit beneath them in volume but ahead of them in frequency.

A punter looking at fixtures in the close season — the British summer — should expect a thin card. The World Curling Tour runs events in North America and Europe through the year, but the coverage at UK bookmakers is patchy outside the autumn-to-spring window. A punter looking at fixtures during the World Championships or during the Olympics should expect a market with a moneyline (match winner), often a handicap and a totals line on the number of ends, and outrights on the tournament winner and the group winners. The number of bookmakers offering curling outrights during a Grand Slam weekend is small; the number offering curling during the Olympics is large. The sport reads as niche in August and as a featured market in February, and the difference is the calendar, not the rules.

Markets a bookmaker runs on a curling match

A licensed bookmaker offering curling on a live weekend covers the obvious markets first: match winner, with two-way prices in most events because curling does not draw in the same way association football does. A handicap line and a totals line on the number of ends are common at the bigger events, and the totals market is where the shape of the game does its work — a 10-end game, an extra end, a blanked end. Outrights on the tournament winner are the next market down, and the group-stage match winner follows.

The props are the small bets that bookmakers add for entertainment: which team scores first, the result after a specified number of ends, whether the game goes to an extra end, the score in a particular end. The Grand Slam of Curling draws the longest tail of props, and the Olympics draw the widest; a Grand Slam event may have a half-dozen bookmakers offering the match winner and one offering the props. The volume of props is a function of the data the bookmaker has, and the data on curling sits mostly with the bookmakers that have been on the sport for years.

The same combination-bet logic that runs on football runs on curling, and an accumulator of curling match winners pays the product of the legs. The acca is the same product on every sport: combine the prices, multiply by the stake, subtract the stake to get the profit. The shape of the bet is identical; the odds are shorter than a football acca because the favourites in curling are shorter than the favourites in football, and an acca of three curling favourites at 1.50 each returns 3.38 — a smaller price than three football favourites at 1.80 each, which returns 5.83. The acca is a more expensive product on a niche sport than on a popular one, because the legs are shorter and the multiplication has less to work with.

A bet builder is the same-game accumulator that the bigger bookmakers offer on football, and curling is the kind of sport where the market is thin enough that a book builder is rarely on offer. Where it does exist, the underlying markets are the match winner, the handicap, the totals and the props. A Bet Builder+, combining markets from one event into a single bet, is a feature bet365 runs, and a same-game multi is a feature Betfair runs. The shape of the bet is consistent; the brand names are not.

In-play betting on curling is offered across the GB market at the bigger events, and the controls are the operator’s licence conditions and customer-protection duties. A bookmaker carrying in-play curling prices is responsible for suspending and resuming markets on the right cues, and a customer using cash out on curling is using the operator’s price on the operator’s rules, not on a market consensus. Live streaming of curling is offered by some licensed brands and not by others, and the absence of streaming is not a sign of a thin offer: the rights market for curling is small enough that a bookmaker carrying the match winner is the norm, and the streaming rights are the exception.

Worked example: what a price pays back

The arithmetic below is the arithmetic of a real bet, and the inputs are chosen to be small enough to read in a sentence. The price is an illustrative two-way market at 1.90 against 1.90 — fractional 9/10 — and the stake is £10.

The return on a winning bet is the stake multiplied by the odds. £10 at 1.90 returns £19, of which £9 is profit. The return on a losing bet is the stake. The arithmetic does not care which side wins; it cares which side the punter is on.

The margin of the market is the share the bookmaker keeps in the long run. The implied probability of each side at 1.90 is one divided by 1.90, which is just over 52.6%, and the two added together make just over 105.3%. The payout share is one divided by that sum, which is just under 94.9%. The margin is one minus the payout share, which is just over 5.2%. The bookmaker keeps a little over 5p on every pound the market takes in, in the long run.

The same arithmetic at different prices gives different margins. A two-way market at 1.50 against 2.50 carries the same 5.2% margin, because the long shot is doing the work. A two-way market at 1.20 against 6.00 carries a higher margin, because the favourite is doing more of the work. A punter comparing two curling match winners priced at 1.40 and 3.20 should expect a margin near 7%, not 5%, because the favourite is the side most customers back.

The free bet value, where a free bet of £10 at 1.90 is offered without the stake being returned, runs as follows. The expected value of a free bet is the free-bet amount multiplied by the odds minus one divided by the odds, multiplied by the payout share of the market. The calculation gives £10 multiplied by 0.90 divided by 1.90, multiplied by 0.949, which is just under £4.50. The free bet is worth just under £4.50 on average on this market, not £10, and the difference is the stake the bookmaker keeps. A punter treating a £10 free bet as £10 of cash is treating the marketing claim as the arithmetic.

The bonus turnover, where a £10 bonus carries a 5x wagering requirement on a market with the same 5.2% margin, runs as follows. The required turnover is £50. The number of bets at £10 each is 5. The expected cost of clearing the bonus is the required turnover multiplied by the margin, which is £2.60. The bonus of £10, after the cost of clearing it, is worth £7.40 on average before any other conditions are read. The same bonus at 10x turnover is worth £4.80 on average, before the minimum price on qualifying bets is read. The arithmetic makes the cap visible: the 10x cap on wagering requirements is the difference between a bonus that pays to claim and a bonus that costs more to clear than it returns.

Licensing snapshot of the reviewed bookmakers

Every licence number above is taken from the Gambling Commission’s public register; every claim about markets is taken from each operator’s own published terms, and the page does not extend either. A punter checking a brand against the register can do so at any time, by name, by trading name or by the account number, and the register is the test the Act sets. The fact that a brand appears on the register and the fact that a brand offers curling are two separate questions, and the table answers both.

How the reviewed bookmakers shape up

The ten brands below carry a Gambling Commission remote general betting standard (real events) licence, which is the licence the page treats as the test of who can take a bet from a customer in Great Britain. The shape of each write-up is the same — what the brand does, what it does not, and what it costs the punter to use it — and the verdict at the foot of each is the page’s own judgement, taken from the figures the page has already stated.

BetMGM

BetMGM’s UK sports welcome offer, in the form published in the App Store listing, is four £10 free bets — two football accumulators with four or more selections and two sports multiples with two or more — for new customers who deposit £10 or more and place a sports bet within seven days; the free bets are valid for seven days, with minimum odds and an opt-in required. The licence sits with LeoVegas Gaming PLC, which is one of the larger operator groups in the European market, and the Commission’s account number is 39198. Curling coverage is the kind of coverage the bigger groups run: a moneyline at major events, often a totals line, and outrights on the bigger tournaments.

The four free bets are not four units of cash. The free bet value calculation in the worked example above puts a £10 free bet at just under £4.50 on a market at 1.90 with a 5.2% margin, and the four together at just under £18 on the same market. The split — two football accumulators, two sports multiples — is the split a punter on curling should read carefully: the curling lines are not always present in the multiples, and a free bet that has to be used on a market that is not running is a free bet that has to be left on the table. The seven-day clock is the same clock every free bet carries, and a punter who cannot place the four bets in a week has paid for an offer they did not use.

The brand sits in the bigger-operator bracket and offers the kind of price depth that comes with that bracket. A punter looking for the widest curling outrights market will find BetMGM among the brands running the sport at the Olympics, the World Championships and the Grand Slam weekends.

Star Sports

Star Sports runs on a Star Racing Limited licence, with the Commission’s account at 9177, and the App Store listing notes a phone-trader service on 08000 521 321 — a feature that fits the brand’s racing heritage and the kind of customer who wants to place a bet by speaking to a person. The same listing carries a customer-service email at [email protected]. Curling coverage is selective: the brand is not the first stop for a curling punter in the way the bigger groups are, but the brand is a viable second stop at the major events, and the phone-trader route is the route a customer with an unusual stake or an unusual market uses.

The bettor who values a phone conversation over an app is the bettor Star Sports is built for, and the cost of that route is the cost of a smaller curling market. The phone-trader service is a feature in the strict sense, not a marketing line: the number is in the App Store listing, the email is in the App Store listing, and the licence is in the Commission’s register. Those preferring purely digital platforms may find alternative interfaces better suited to their needs.

BetTom

BetTom’s UK sports welcome offer, in the App Store listing, is 50% back as a free bet of up to £50, with a matching 50% back up to £50 as free slot funds for casino play; full terms apply. The licence is with Bet Tom Limited, on Commission account 64959. The mixed-product shape of the offer — sports on one side, casino on the other — is the shape the LCCP’s 2026 rules put out of bounds for new offers, and the App Store listing is the snapshot the page was checked against. A punter reading the offer should read the full terms before claiming, because the mixed-product framing is the part of the offer the regulator has moved against.

Curling coverage is the kind the brand runs at the bigger events: a moneyline, sometimes a totals line, outrights on the bigger tournaments. The brand sits in the smaller-operator bracket and the welcome offer is the marketing line the smaller operators tend to use. A punter who takes the sports side of the offer is taking a free bet whose value is the worked example’s £4.50 on a £10 unit at 1.90 on a 5.2% market, and a punter who takes the casino side is taking a product the page does not measure.

Betboro

Betboro’s UK sports welcome offer, on the operator’s own site, is a 100% matched free bet of up to £25 on the first qualifying wager, requiring a debit card deposit of at least £10 and a first bet of £5 to £25 with at least three selections each at 3/5 (1.60) or higher. The licence is with Webmedia Development N.V., on Commission account 44181. The minimum price on each leg of the qualifying bet is a real cost: a three-leg accumulator at 1.60 each has combined odds of 4.10, and a £25 stake returns £102.50 if it wins, of which £25 is the free bet matched; the free bet, with the stake not returned, is worth approximately £11.30 when calculated against a standard 5.2% margin. The cost of the offer is the minimum price on the qualifying bet, which is the bit the marketing line does not show.

Curling coverage is selective; the brand’s own site shows outrights and match-winner markets at the bigger events. The brand sits in the smaller-operator bracket, and the offer is the marketing line the smaller operators tend to use, with the difference that the offer carries a real cost in the qualifying bet. A punter who can place a qualifying bet at 1.60 or higher on three selections is a punter who will pay the minimum price, and a punter who cannot is a punter who will not get the free bet.

Lottoland

Lottoland’s UK app combines casino, lottery betting, sports betting and scratchcards, and the App Store listing says the brand is licensed by the Gambling Commission for customers in Great Britain. The licence is with EU Lotto Limited, on Commission account 38991. The brand’s main markets are lottery and casino, and the sports book is the smaller side of the offer; curling coverage is selective and the markets a curling punter uses will be the same markets the bigger operators use at the major events.

The mixed-product nature of the brand — a single app with four product types — is the nature of a brand whose centre of gravity is the lottery, not the sports book. A punter looking for the deepest curling market will not find it at Lottoland; a punter looking for a single app with a sports bet on the side will. The bonus rules the regulator put in force in January 2026 apply to the brand in the same way they apply to every licensed operator, and the page does not extend the offer in either direction.

BetGoodwin

BetGoodwin’s sports welcome offer, in the App Store listing, is “Bet £10 & Get £15 in Free Bets”, made up of a £5 sports bet, a £5 acca and a £5 Sub-Cover bet. The licence is with Goodwin Racing Limited, on Commission account 2927. The split of the £15 — three free bets, each on a different product shape — is a split that forces the punter to read the terms: a Sub-Cover bet is a brand-specific term, and a punter who does not know what it covers is a punter who will not know which events to use it on. The £5 sports bet is a single, the £5 acca is a combination, and the Sub-Cover is a third shape.

The free bet value across the three units, applied to a market at 1.90 with a 5.2% margin, is just under £6.75 in total — well short of the £15 the marketing line states. The difference is the stake the bookmaker keeps on each free bet, and the gap is what the worked example above puts a number on. Curling coverage is the kind the brand runs at the bigger events: a moneyline, sometimes a totals line, outrights on the bigger tournaments.

Betfair

Betfair’s sportsbook carries in-play betting, a Bet Builder, free live streaming of events such as UK and Irish horse racing and football, and a 90 Minute Payout market on football. The licence is with PPB Counterparty Services Limited, on Commission account 39439, and the same group runs Paddy Power — a point the register settles and a point the page states. Curling coverage is the kind the brand runs at the bigger events: a moneyline, in-play, often a Bet Builder on the bigger matches, and outrights on the bigger tournaments. Live streaming on curling is not a regular feature at the brand; the live-streaming catalogue sits with horse racing and football.

The exchange, which sits under the same group’s betting intermediary licence, is a separate product and a separate market, and the prices on the exchange are set by customers backing and laying. A punter using the sportsbook is using the sportsbook; a punter using the exchange is using the exchange. The two products do not share a margin, and a punter comparing the two is comparing two different things. The brand sits in the bigger-operator bracket and the welcome offer is the marketing line the bigger operators tend to use at the major events.

Fitzdares

Fitzdares’ app, in the App Store listing, offers cash out, accumulators, Lucky 15s, specials and antepost markets on horse racing, football, tennis, rugby, cricket, golf and American football, with in-play live odds. The licence is with Fitzdares Limited, on Commission account 400 — one of the older account numbers on the register. The list of sports the app names explicitly is a list that does not include curling, and a punter looking at Fitzdares for curling is a punter looking at a brand whose main markets are the markets the app names. Curling coverage is selective: the brand will run curling at the bigger events because the bigger events carry the customers, and a punter using Fitzdares for curling is using the brand for a market it does not centre on.

The antepost market, the Lucky 15, the specials are all product shapes the brand runs, and they sit alongside the in-play offer. A punter who values a premium product on a small number of sports is a punter the brand is built for, and the cost of that route is the cost of a curling market that sits at the edge of the offer rather than at its centre. The phone-trader-style service Fitzdares runs is the kind of feature the brand’s customer base uses, and the licence is the licence the register shows.

QuinnBet

QuinnBet’s Best Odds Guaranteed, on the operator’s own help pages, applies to Irish and UK horse racing bets from 10:00am daily on singles, multiples and system bets, with a maximum benefit of £150 per customer per race. The licence is with QuinnBet (Gibraltar) Limited, on Commission account 61011. Best Odds Guaranteed is a horse-racing feature, not a curling feature, and the maximum benefit of £150 is a cap on the horse-racing side of the offer. A punter reading the BOG terms and assuming they apply to curling is a punter reading the marketing line; a punter reading the help page is a punter reading the term.

Curling coverage here focuses primarily on the bigger events: a moneyline, sometimes a totals line, and outrights on major tournaments. The brand sits in the mid-tier bracket, and the offer is the marketing line the mid-tier operators tend to use at the major events. A punter who wants the BOG on horse racing and a curling match winner on the side is a punter the brand suits; those seeking deeper, more comprehensive curling markets might prefer larger, specialist operators.

Bet Ahoy

Bet Ahoy’s welcome offer, in the App Store listing, is “Bet £10 & Get £10 in Free Bets”, made up of a £5 sports bet and a £5 acca. The licence is with Bet Ahoy Ltd, on Commission account 100094 — the highest account number on the register the page was checked against, and a sign that the brand is the newest on the list. The offer is the simplest on the page: a free bet of £5 on a single, a free bet of £5 on an acca, no casino or slots side, no mixed-product framing. The free bet value across the two units, applied to a market at 1.90 with a 5.2% margin, is just under £4.50 in total — well short of the £10 the marketing line states.

Curling coverage is selective: the brand runs curling at the bigger events because the bigger events carry the customers, and a punter using Bet Ahoy for curling is using the brand for a market it does not centre on. The brand is the newest on the register and the one a punter checking the Commission will find at the top of the list of recent licences. The simplest offer on the page is the offer that reads cleanest, and the cost of the offer is the gap between the £10 the marketing line states and the £4.50 the arithmetic delivers.

What the snapshot does not settle

The Commission’s public register is the whole test of who holds a GB remote licence, and the page was checked against that register on the date at the foot of this article. A punter checking a brand at any later date is checking a different snapshot, and the brand may have been added, removed or have had its licence conditions changed. The register is the source; the page is the snapshot. The market prices the operators show on their own sites are also a moving target, and the margin calculation in the worked example uses an illustrative price of 1.90 against 1.90 — a number chosen to make the arithmetic readable, not a price lifted from a current curling event.

The bonus caps and the marketing rules are the rules in force on the snapshot date, and the regulator’s staged plan on financial risk assessments is announced but not in force. The 10x wagering cap on bonuses is the cap that applies today; the 25% remote rate of General Betting Duty is the rate that applies from 1 April 2027, not before. A punter reading the page in 2027 will read a different tax position, and the page does not pretend otherwise.

The spread of the brands on the register is wider than the ten the page reviews, and the page does not claim these are the only licensed brands or the best. A punter looking for a brand the page does not name can find it on the register, and the register is the test. The “best” question is a question the punter answers with the punter’s own book, and the page is the snapshot that lets the punter answer it.

Reading the odds, in three lines

The price on the screen is a contract. The return is the stake multiplied by the odds; the profit is the stake multiplied by the odds minus one. The margin of the market is the slice the bookmaker keeps in the long run, and a 5% margin means a 95% payout share. The bonus is a marketing offer whose value is the worked example’s arithmetic, not the headline. The licence is the test of who can take a bet from a customer in Great Britain, and the register is where the test is run.

Frequently asked questions

How is a bet on curling actually placed?

A licensed bookmaker takes the bet on a moneyline (match winner) for most curling events, with a handicap line and a totals line on the number of ends at the bigger events, and outrights on the tournament winner at the World Championships, the Grand Slam and the Olympics. The bet is placed through the operator’s app or site, with the stake entered and the price confirmed on the bet slip; the same bet can be placed by phone at brands that run a phone-trader service.

Can a customer in Great Britain actually bet on curling?

Yes. There is no statutory prohibition on betting on curling, and GB-licensed bookmakers carry the sport at the bigger events. The minimum age is 18, identity checks are run before the first deposit, and credit cards are not accepted for gambling in Great Britain.

How does a punter check a bookmaker’s Gambling Commission licence?

The Commission’s public register is searchable by business name, trading name, domain or Commission account number, and the page was checked against the register on the date at the foot of this article. A punter using any of the four search routes can confirm a brand’s licence category, account number and the licensee that holds the licence; the register is the test the Act sets.

How is the return on a bet worked out from the stake and the odds?

The return on a winning bet is the stake multiplied by the odds. A £10 stake at decimal odds of 2.50 returns £25, of which £15 is profit. The return on a losing bet is the stake; the bookmaker keeps the stake. A combination bet pays the product of the legs, not the sum, and the multiplication of margins is the cost of combining.

What is the bookmaker’s margin and how does it show in the odds?

The margin is the slice of every pound staked the bookmaker keeps in the long run, and it is the gap between the sum of the implied probabilities and one. An illustrative two-way market at 1.90 against 1.90 carries a margin of just over 5.2%, because the implied probabilities add to just over 105.3% and the payout share is just under 94.9%. The wider the gap, the more the bookmaker keeps.

How do fractional odds such as 5/1 convert to decimal odds such as 6.00?

The rule is the fraction a divided by b plus one. Five-to-one is five divided by one plus one, which is six decimal; eleven-to-four is eleven divided by four plus one, which is 3.75; evens is one divided by one plus one, which is 2.00. A price shorter than evens is “odds-on”, and the decimal form is below 2.00.

Content created by the «Grey Hound» team