Online Bookmakers / Andy Morris / 14 March 2009 / Leave a comment Bet Now

The new kid on the block is the TABCorp owned Luxbet, operating out of the Northern Territory. Operating as an entirely separate business from the TAB, it charter is to try and claw back some of the lost ground from the corporate bookmakers. Luxbet foothold in the business is a result of taking over the Bill Hurley Sportsbook business.

For the punter Luxbet offering Fixed Win, Top Fluc, Best of 3 Totes and Tote Plus 5% on all Metropolitan horse racing, as well as Fixed Win and Middle Tote all other thoroughbred racing. Luxbet also covers Harness and Greyhound Racing with a middle tote offering. With it's base being the TAB, it's not surprise that Luxbet is very strong in the pre-post markets, being one of the first bookmakers to price up the feature events each week, as well as the traditional longer-term pre post markets like the Cox Plate and Melbourne Cup.

With an enormous marketing war chest, and a desire to make as quite an impact as possible, Luxbet offered, and continue to offer many attractive promotions to lure clients. This is certainly good to see from a punters perspective as it provides the opportunity to top up your account, or win free bets, cash or prizes through a myriad of competitions.

It is however disappointing to see with the amount of money at Luxbet's disposal to spend, that they didn't invest more in their core asset, their website. The Luxbet website greets you with a relatively dull, black interface, clunky navigation icons and an overall uninspiring outlook. The racing pages which most punters spend the majority of their time on are far too compressed, and the ability to distinguish between different options (Fixed Wins, Tote prices and Fluctuations) is frustratingly hard to do. One of the other surprises is the fact that they do not offer a sign-up bonus, which is pretty standard practice these days amongst corporate bookmakers.

There sports offering is quite good, and on see feature markets the depth to their exotic options is quite staggering. In particular Grand Slam tennis and Golf are quite impressive. Their markets are competitive, whilst not necessarily offering the top of the market.

Luxbet have odds of 41.0 about North Melbourne winning the flag in the AFL this year; they go 1.57 about Queensland in the State of Origin; Phil Mickelson is quoted at 8.75 to win the US Masters.