About PaddyPower
PaddyPower is an Irish bookmaker that’s basically been around since 1988, having been formed by the merger of a number of small bookmaking shops. Upon its merger with Betfair in 2016, PaddyPower became one of the top three bookmakers in the UK and Ireland, with an online presence as well as brick and mortar shops – several hundred of them across the British Isles. This started out as a betting site and not a gambling site, so you have a great variety of options for sports betting as well as an online casino – and it’s available as a mobile app as well as a site so that you can meet all of your gambling needs. They’re famous in the UK and Ireland for all of their novelty bets, and have been known to offer some pretty odd markets that you just won’t find anywhere else – so if you follow the news and want to bet on something, you can probably find it here if you’ll find it anywhere. If all of this weren’t enough to convince you that PaddyPower is a legitimate site, you can rest assured because it’s registered with both the UKGC and the Malta Gaming Association. And it’s licensed in the Isle of Man to boot.
When you visit PaddyPower
While PaddyPower isn’t going to win any accolades for the best web design, the sight is easy enough to navigate if you know what you’re looking for. Because of the sports betting focus, most of the links that you find on the main page have to do with the huge variety of sports that this bookmaker specialises in – with the main page highlighting games you can bet on which are currently in-play. There’s a side menu with various sports as well as a direct link to the in-play ones, a link for cashing out, and then an A-Z list of sports if there’s something in particular that meets your fancy. At the bottom of the page there’s another menu for other PaddyPower products, and this includes an online casino, a live casino, online bingo, and online poker. You shouldn’t be disappointed in getting lost on this site because everything is fairly easy to find if you just keep looking, even if it’s not the best-looking gambling site on the internet. Besides that, it’s pretty easy to find what you’re looking for, and given the variety of what they have on offer there’s little reason for complaint.
Bonus & Promotions
PaddyPower will give you £30 when you bet your first £10, and otherwise there are a few other bonuses that will be of use to the new user on here. The qualifying bet must have the odds of at least 1/2, and the stakes will be unavailable for any of your three free £10 bets. The offer is valid for thirty days. Otherwise there are plenty of bonuses and promotional offers on PaddyPower that will crop up from time to time, and there are money-back specials on a daily basis on a variety of different events. This money-back comes in the form of free bets, and one of these free bets involves a £250,000 jackpot.
PaddyPower in the Mobile
There are individual sports apps available for PaddyPower on iOS, which can be found on both the PaddyPower site as well as the App Store. There’s also an Android app, and the apps are great to use for sports betting because it makes betting a lot easier on the small screen that your mobile offers. Basically you get all of the features that you need on the app, but the downside is that the live streaming feature for sports betting is unavailable in the app, which makes betting on certain sports a bit less appealing. Otherwise it can sometimes be difficult to access some of the promotions through the app, but overall it’s generally a good experience.
Games at PaddyPower
The focus on PaddyPower is betting, and that’s pretty clear from the options on their home page. That being said, they do offer online gaming facilities as well, so you get your choice of games on their online casino, live casino, online blackjack, and online bingo if it suits your fancy. But if you’re coming to PaddyPower, do note that their speciality is providing all sorts of betting options on things that you might never have thought were possible with a bookmaker. You can bet on live sports matches that are in-play as well as in advance, and aside from that there are plenty of other things that you can wager on like elections and television shows. Aside from that you can have your choice of different novelty bets, since that seems to be one of the specialities here. Basically, PaddyPower is great for making all kinds of different bets and they have an online casino as well which functions quite nicely – but this is definitely more about having a great variety of bets than it is about online slots. The odds definitely aren’t the greatest in the market either, but if it’s a great variety that you’re looking for then PaddyPower might just be the ideal place for you.
Deposits and Withdrawals at PaddyPower
You get a great selection of deposit options on PaddyPower, including VISA, MasterCard, Skrill, Entropay, PayPal, Neteller, Moneybookers, wire transfers and even cheques. If this wasn’t enough, you can always go to a PaddyPower storefront and deposit funds into your account if you’d prefer to do things that way. The only requirement here is that your betting account balance needs to be below £200 – which includes the total balance as well as any outstanding bets.
Withdrawals are processed fairly quickly, and if you’ve deposited funds using an online service like PayPal or Neteller then you’ll get your funds within about four hours. For credit cards it will take around three days, and regardless of method the minimum withdrawal amount is £10. There have been no complaints about this site withholding funds, so you should feel confident that you’ll get your withdrawals without any issues.
Getting Help at PaddyPower
To be fair, the link for getting help at PaddyPower is a bit obscure – it’s on the left hand side, about halfway down the page rather than the more popular floating menu that many betting sites you tend to see today. If you need help, you can ring them up, send an email to their support address, Tweet to them, or use their live chat if you cannot find any answers to your queries in the FAQ page. Both the phone and live chat help options are available 24/7, so you can be sure that you’ll be able to reach someone regardless of the time of night that you might need to. In general, their replies are fairly helpful and courteous, so there’s not a lot to worry about here.
Because it’s now UK law to enforce responsible gambling, PaddyPower takes a lot of steps to ensure that you’re only betting for fun and not gambling away your life savings. You can set deposit limits, stake limits, loss limits, exclude yourself entirely, exclude certain sports that you’re prone to lose money on, and a full customer history so you can track your losses and then look back at them to guilt-trip yourself into not betting if need-be. They also provide advice and services for those folks who think that they might have a gambling problem and need help.