notcfootball.org

We are the champions, my friend. If you need to know more about us, go ask your mom.

But you do need to know more about online sportsbooks. Specifically, what to look for when you’re trying to figure out whether they’ll do right by you, or just take your money and leave you on the corner in the bad part of town with no ride home.

Sometimes you can tell right away when an online sportsbook is good. Take Bodog, for instance — they just look like quality, and they are quality — from their sportsbook to their poker to their online slots. So it’s all good. But that doesn’t work all the time; some online sportsbooks look great but aren’t, and some simply don’t bother with looking good and just concentrate on Being Good. So you can’t always go by looks.

If you dig a little deeper, you’ll find the technical stuff that tells you when the site is actually concerned with your privacy and security. Look for 128-bit encryption, which just means that even an uber-mega-hacker would see it and be all like “oh noes, let’s find something easier to hack like your mom” and run away.

Another thing you want to look for is whether you are actually cool to play from where you live. Some places just aren’t down with the whole online gambling scene (Turkey and Israel agree on that, if nothing else). However, some places are more vague about it, so if you live in some place like the US, you’ll need to make sure the site takes US players. It’s true for a sportsbook as well as an online poker room or an online casino USA.

Our ‘best online sportsbooks’ page separates the great ones for the US from the great ones for pretty much everywhere else. The situation’s kinda messed up (the international situation, I mean, not our ‘best of’ page, which is frankly the coolest thing that has ever been or ever will be), and the online sportsbooks may or may not come right out and say that they don’t take players from the US. At least, not until you start winning money…