StarSports is one bookmaker with a detailed horse racing coverage and also pays attention to Irish-loved sports. It’s an established bookmaker with many betting features we find impressive. But like other bookmakers, it has its own areas of concern. For example, it doesn’t offer support via live chat and only has 3 payment options.
To know if this bookmaker is good for you, read to the end. We cover every aspect of the bookmaker and also give you professional tips to make better decisions.
General Information and Licenses
Since licensing is one of our compulsory requirements before we proceed with any review, we check the parent company’s (STAR RACING LTD) license number on the revenue commissioner’s public registry. Since they pass, here’s a quick overview of the bookmaker.
Betting Offers and StarSports Sign-Up Bonuses
After registering, we were able to claim a free bet bonus after meeting the deposit requirement, and in addition to that, we found a range of other bonuses, including BOG for horse racing, and odds boost on selected sports events. Let’s check out these bonuses.
StarSports Welcome Bonus
The welcome bonus we claimed after signing up is a £10 free bet that was given when we deposited £20 and met the requirements. So, the bookmaker requires that we deposit and bet £20 on odds of 2.0 or higher on any sports of our choice. After the bet settled, we first got a £5 free bet immediately, and we received the other £5 bet after 24 hours.
But the bonus has its own rules too; they must be used on accumulator bets with 3 or more selections with minimum odds of 5.0, and it’s only valid for 24 hours.
No-Deposit Bonuses or Free Bets
At the time of our review, StarSports Ireland does offer a no-deposit bonus.
Ongoing Promos
Other than the welcome bonus we’ve mentioned, there are other bonuses available on StarSports, and they include Best Odds Guaranteed and an odd boost on specific events. You can check the promotion page for other ongoing offers
Event-Specific Offers
There’s no event-specific offer on StarSports at the moment.
Mobile-Exclusive Bonuses
There’s no mobile-exclusive bonus available to the mobile app users.
Loyalty Program / VIP Club
There’s currently no welcome bonus available on the StarSports site.
Important Bonus Information
All of the bonuses that are offered come with their unique rules; ensure you understand them so you can get the best out of them. You can visit the promotion page for more information on bonus terms:
StarSports Bonus Summary Table
Registration and Security
The registration process for us was a bit straightforward, in the sense that after registering, we just verified our account. It only took about 5 minutes to register, but the verification took about an hour to complete. Here’s what the process looks like
It’s most likely that after you register, StarSports will lock you out of your account, and if that happens, your only option is to send your documents for verification. For the age verification, you need to submit your driver’s license or passport, but for address verification, you’ll need a copy of your utility bill issued within the last 3 months.
Once those are in place, you can email them to info@starsports.co.uk. They’ll verify your account within hours.
Sports and Markets at StarSports
After verification, we had access to bet on more than 25 sports, and that includes popular sports like Football, horse racing, greyhound racing, tennis, and basketball, as well as Irish favourites like GAA Football and Hurling. Here are some of the sports you’ll find on the bookmaker:
Betting Tools
On all of the sports, we were able to place prematch bets, while for a selected few, like Football, Tennis, Golf, Cricket, and Darts, we could place both prematch and live bets. For the sports covered, there are tools that make our gameplay more interesting and easier. These tools include:
- Live Streaming: Although this is exclusively for horse racing and greyhound racing, you can use it to watch a match live while you place live bets.
- Detailed Racecard: It’s a horse racing tool that experts use to analyze horse racing. The tool shows all the important information about a race and the horses running in it.
- Live Statistics: Many sports have this, and it’s basically for tracking live matches. It’s what many use in place of live streaming while betting live.
- Cash Out: If a match isn’t looking like it’ll go as you want, this tool helps you to get out of markets and cut losses or take profit.
- Accumulators: This works for both pre-match and in-play bets. You can use it to combine two or more selections into one single bet.
- Bet Builder: This is similar to the accumulator tool, but it’s used to create a custom bet on a single match. It’s very useful in live betting.
- Search Function: This tool comes in handy when looking for specific events.
Live Betting and Streaming
For the StarSports live betting section, we find it a bit less crowded because of the fewer sports that are in the section. We could place bets on sports like Football, Tennis, Golf, and many more. The odds in this section were constantly changing and jumping on them to place betbuilder and acca bets was easy. For bets that weren’t going as intended, the cashout too came in handy in cutting losses.
Although StarSport supports live streaming of horse racing and greyhound races, it doesn’t cover sports like football, basketball, golf, and others. To remedy this, there’s a live stats tool in most of the sports that you can use to track live matches.
We could only stream the horse and greyhound racing events after we placed bets on the site. The streams are of good quality, and there weren’t frequent glitches.
Betting Odds and Margins
To check the quality of odds offered by StarSports, we used several football and basketball events. For the football, the English Premier League was what we used, meanwhile NBA was used for the basketball samples.
The average margin for football came out a bit over 6%, while the NBA margins came out at around 4.7%. The conclusion of this is that the odds offered on StarSports are generally reasonable and good for sports bettors.
StarSports Payment Methods
After verifying our account, we tried making deposits, and surprisingly, we only had access to just 2 deposit options, which are just debit card payment options. For these cards, the minimum deposit was capped at €10. We proceeded with the deposit and instantly got funded. Here’s what the payment options look like:
After playing with the deposited funds and winning a few bucks, we decided to place withdrawals with both the bank transfer option. Because the card we used for deposit was Visa Fast Funds, the withdrawal was processed within a day, but for our bank transfer withdrawal, it took about 2 days to payout.
The process for withdrawals on StarSports is in 2 phases, first is the internal process where the bookmaker is responsible for approving withdrawals, while the other is entirely up to the payment provider. But once your payment is approved by StarSports, getting it credited to your bank is a much easier task.
StarSports Mobile App and Mobile Version
After testing every feature available on the StarSports site, we moved further to download the Android and iOS apps from their respective stores. The app appears to be more organized compared to the site. The site looks too clustered because of the many details that appear on one screen, while the mobile app shows fewer details on a single page.
One of the features exclusive to the mobile app is the push notification feature. With it you’ll get important updates on active bets, withdrawal status, and other important match updates. For us, we’ll rather use the app, and we recommend it for you too.
Customer Support
Before signing up, we thought we couldn’t access live chat because we didn’t have access to our account, but after accessing the account, there still wasn’t a live chat support. The support available is email support and a phone number to contact. It takes hours to get feedback from email support sometimes.
Email support was the support channel we used in the verification of the account, because the phone support couldn’t handle such an issue. From what we’ve experienced, the phone support is just meant to handle basic inquiries and resolve some betting issues. Here are more details on the support channels:
Just in case you don’t want to wait that long to get a response, you may want to check out the FAQ section, although it’s not very detailed, ut still covers some important topics.
Responsible Gaming
Even though Irish bookmakers must have responsible gambling tools integrated into their betting systems, the responsible gambling tools have proven to help keep players safe. Most experienced bettors know to use these tools to their advantage. These responsible gambling tools are:
- Deposit Limits: With this tool, you can control how much money you deposit daily, weekly, or monthly.
- Play Break: This tool allows you to temporarily pause your gambling account for a short period, let’s say between 24 hours and a few days. During this period, you won’t be able to log in or place bets.
- Activity Check: This is like a reminder you can set on your account to tell you how long you’ve been playing. It’s good to time yourself so you don’t overbet.
- Take a Break: If gambling feels overwhelming to you and there’s a need to temporarily block yourself from gambling, this is the tool to use.
- Self-exclusion: This is more like a long-term blocker. You can self-exclude for months or even years.
During registration, StarSports brings up the option to set some of these limits on your account. We recommend it for you. In addition to these tools, there are support link organizations that are available to help you if you’re struggling with gambling addiction. Examples are GamCare, Gamblers Anonymous, and Gamble Therapy.
They’re there to provide you with the help you need. Don’t hesitate to contact any of these if you’re struggling with gambling addiction.
StarSports Betting Platform Online Reviews
Just so we don’t make conclusions based on our experience, we checked out what other players have to say about this bookmaker. And to be honest, the rating on Starsports seems low and contains large areas of concern. Many have complained about their accounts being suspended, even though that has not been the case for others.
There have also been complaints of delayed withdrawals. Here’s what some players have to say about the bookmaker.
Billy B (35) Trustpilot
“Not a bad website, live streaming and stuff offered. Big big let down is the processing time of withdrawals, most bookmaker firms are instant these days, but you still have to wait the best part of a week for your money from star sports. If they improved on that, it would be a 5 star.”
Paul Occie (5/5) Trustpilot
“Don’t know why some people are saying this site is a scam , i can assure you its a million miles from a scam . I only had my account suspended for security reasons which was dealt with by phone call which was efficient and without problems. I also received my funds within the hour . I urge more people to use star sports the app is good to use and easy to navigate 👍”
StarSports Casino Ireland Review
Casino Games
StarSports has a dedicated casino and live casino section. In the casino section, there are thousands of games in that include slots, jackpots, megaways, and drop and wins. We found many popular slots like Sweet Bonanza, Sugar Rush, Legacy of Dead, and many others.
The thousands of casino games are from over 45 providers, and that includes top providers like Hacksaw Gaming, NetEnt, Evolution, Pragmatic play and many more. You can go check them out.
Live Casino
There’s also a separate section for live casino games, and in that section, there are hundreds of live casino games from providers like Evolution and Ezugi. The games include live roulette, live baccarat, live blackjack, live game shows, and live poker games. For these live casino games, we were able to wager a minimum of €0.10 on some of the games, while others allow up to €10,000 wager.
Casino Promotions
In the casino section, there’s a welcome bonus and several other existing players’ bonuses. To get the full list of bonuses that StarSport has to offer to casino players, you can just sign up by clicking on the play button at the top of this guide.
Extra Features
Some of the features we found include a search tool that makes it easy to find casino games, and also the demo mode that StarSports provides to players. We recommend trying out demo mode before considering making real money wagers.
What BetBrothers.ie Thinks About StarSports
StarSports has been able to meet some of our expectations. To start with, the bookmaker offers very detailed markets for the sports, and their odds are quite competitive. Talk about the betting tools, they’ve got enough to help you bet better.
The registration process would have been seamless only if there was a faster way to verify a player’s identity without having to wait for hours to get a response from email support.
For security and licensing, the site is safe, and it’s one that we’ll recommend for horse racing lovers and football bettors. If you’re able to cope with the few payment options and the delay in customer support, it’s a good maker to try out.
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