Ladbrokes review
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The roots of Ladbrokes can be traced right back to the late 19th century to a horse training agency in Warwickshire.
In what was a turbulent time where the infamous Peaky Blinders were running riot across the Midlands, Ladbrokes held strong and built up their empire throughout the 20th century, not without one or two scandals and regulatory bumps along the way though. Ladbrokes now sits on a sprawling estate within Stakersland and its rich history of ups and downs is still far from over with it currently sitting inside a merger with another famous UK-based bookmaker, Coral. The Ladbrokes betting estate is still very much a firm favourite amongst the Brits though, as well as many other stakers from further abroad. In fact, Ladbrokes still caters to a 1.6M community of stakers who come to bet and watch the live broadcasts of their favourite racetracks from across the globe. Up to 80% of their revenues come from the Brits alone, so you can expect to see a British-inspired sportsbook here with the rest of the wagers coming from Ireland, Belgium, and Australia. Due to this heavy British inspiration, the popular sports at Ladbrokes are horse racing and the greyhounds with live in-play football also generating a lot of interest from stakers, too. Regardless of their strong traditions on horse racing, the marketing team still have their ears to the ground which has resulted in extra esports betting rooms being created with the Ladbrokes estate. Top tournaments based on CS:GO, DOTA, and League of Legends can all be found, so if you do follow the online world of esports then Ladbrokes has you covered.
The upper limits of the Ladbrokes payouts are set to £1 million for many of the top tier events including UK and Irish horse racing, full international football matches, the top English football leagues, the top European leagues like La Liga, Bundesliga, and Serie A, as well as competitions like the Champions League and the Europa League. The limit then drops down to £100,000 for all the lower leagues on the international scene. Other popular sports like golf, cricket, tennis, and the major US sports all come with £500,000 limits. Sports like motor racing, darts, and snooker offer a £250,000 limit and the lesser-known sports of cycling, chess, handball, and skiing drop to a limit of £100,000. Payouts on special bets and one-offs can drop to as low as £10,000. If you’re interested in the casino side of Ladbrokes, then the maximum that you can win (apart from jackpots) is set to £250,000 in total. Our maths experts here at Stakers HQ have calculated that it would take them to be up and running for 1.5 days to cover that top £1 million payout. If you win big on the live casino then it would only take them 9.5 hours to balance out that £250,000 winning amount. A total of 48 hours to satisfy those top limits is still good going though, especially for the loss-making GVC Holdings. However, due to them being publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange then we would imagine they would quickly source a million pounds to avoid any negative press coverage if they were struggling to source the funds during any dry betting patches.
LADBROKES ENJOY A TOTAL ANNUAL GROSS GAMING REVENUE OF £480M WHICH IS NOW BEING GENERATED BY THEIR HUGE 1.6M ACTIVE STAKER COMMUNITY, WHO ARE KNOWN TO BE SPENDING £25-30 PER MONTH. THE TOP £1,000,000 LIMITS HELP TO OFFER EXCELLENT VALUE FOR STAKERS, TOO.
If we turn our eyes to the balance books of Ladbrokes, then we can see that they are generating around £44 Million per month with an average spend of around £25-30 per staker. The annual profits then suggest that the Ladbrokes team are raking in roughly £480M excluding expenditure. This considerable amount is sure to be well-received by their loss-making owners GCV Holdings who are yielding -6% from their overall £3.6 billion gross profits at a net loss of £140 million. The development of credit markets had helped to boost the network of the Ladbrokes Coral Group across the world of Stakers to 3,000, which has now also turned out to be a loss-making enterprise during the present-day period. If we look to the rivals of Ladbrokes, then William Hill would be one of the top bookies with a community of 2.9 million active stakers a month. Looking at their ticket sales, it is estimated that stakers spend around £25-30 per month with an annual gross gaming revenue of £870 million from its online operations. Will Hill’s final profits are believed to be around the £143 million mark. Paddy Power is also a big enough bookmaker to rival Ladbrokes and their £420 million gross gaming revenue, from Flutter’s £1.12 billion total, remains profitable and generated a total of £150 million in 2019, although this was down -38% from the previous year.
Ladbrokes Offers
Social Buzz
1.4 / 5
0 / 5
3.2 / 5
Stakers are free to make complaints to the Ladbrokes customer service team but if the issue does not get resolved then they can always forward it on to a manager or supervisor. Response times are usually in and around the 48-hour mark for most general complaints. If you feel the need to take it up a level then their official ADR is IBAS. All other stakers can use the alternative routes of contacting the Gibraltar Gambling Commissioner or the European ODR Platform.
CONCLUSION
LADBROKES DISPLAYS A HALF-HEARTED ATTEMPT AT COMMUNICATING WITH THEIR STAKERS AND THE RECENT SAFEGUARDS AND COMPLIANCE PROCEDURES HAVE NO DOUBT FRUSTRATED MANY OF THEIR STAKERS.
Ladbrokes are not an actively social bookmaker with only one of the three most common social sites seeing any attempt of a response from the team. There is a lot of negative comments being made across the three sites and most of this seems to have started around 2016, which happens to be in line with their merger with Coral and the official investigations around anti-money laundering and social responsibilities. The resulting safeguards, compliance procedures, and tougher responsible gambling controls put in place would have no doubt annoyed the existing community of stakers, and this is most likely the reason for such social negativity against the Ladbrokes brand.
Bonus Clash
Ladbrokes are using the classic tactics when it comes to British sports bonus banners. You will often see these types of promotions flying across other UK-inspired bookies here at Stakersland as well. It’s a good mix of deals once you sign up with enough deals spread out over the top sports. First up though, some interesting comments from fellow stakers on the Ladbrokes promotional schedule.
For all new members, you are provided with a £20 free bet in return for a simple £5 bet after you open your Ladbrokes account. There are a number of market standard deals here as well, such as odds boost, acca insurance, extra places, and best odds guaranteed that are available for both horse and greyhound races.
PROMO NAME
PROMO TYPE
REQUIREMENTS
Place a 5+ accumulator bet on pre-match events and specific markets
RESTRICTIONS
Restricted for deposits made with Prepaid Cards, PayPal, PaysafeCard, Neteller or Skrill
The Ladbrokes marketing team have another market standard offer here in the shape of ‘acca insurance’. You will get rewarded with a £10 free bet if one selection of your 5+ acca placed on prematch events loses. The qualification legs of the accumulator are limited to the match result, both teams to score, match result & both teams to score, correct score, or total goals over/under markets. Each selection of the accumulator must have minimum odds of 1/10 and the accumulator as a whole must have combined odds of 3/1. Your free bet will be credited upon the settlement of your qualifying bet.
PROMO NAME
PROMO TYPE
REQUIREMENTS
Tweet @Ladbrokes with #GetAPrice
RESTRICTIONS
Cannot be combined with other bets
The Ladbrokes team have mastered the art of combining bonuses through the social networks. You might well have even been reading the promotion name ‘#GetAPrice' over and over from influencers trying to persuade you to get involved. Under this promotion, the Ladbrokes team expect you to send that hashtag message through your Twitter profile with your own custom bet and they will send you their suggested price. Prices are subject to fluctuation as it states in the terms and conditions, and you can take it or leave it.
PROMO NAME
PROMO TYPE
REQUIREMENTS
Find the markets with
RESTRICTIONS
Restricted to one boost per day
The good old odds boost is available across the kingdom of Stakers and Ladbrokes has resorted to offering it to their own stakers as well. The promotion is limited to specific events and markets according to the schedule and this particular promotion restricts stakers to using it once per day.
PROMO NAME
PROMO TYPE
REQUIREMENTS
Predict the score of three matches
RESTRICTIONS
Prepaid Cards, PayPal, PaysafeCard, Neteller, and Skrill are restricted
The good old times are back with this free-to-enter sports prediction game where stakers are required to predict the correct score from the 1-2-FREE weekly schedules. For those who correctly predict the scores for 90 mins, you will get rewarded with £100. Predictions must be entered before kick-off of the first game in the promo schedule and there is a maximum of one entry per customer per game each week.
PROMO NAME
PROMO TYPE
REQUIREMENTS
Place qualifying stakes to a total of £5 win or £5 each-way at odds totalling 1/2 or greater
RESTRICTIONS
Promotion is available to UK & Irish stakers opening a new account
Conclusion
The Ladbrokes promotion monitors follow the classic British approach without twists or sneaky turns, as you might notice at the likes of Paddy Power and the Skybet premises. We found the bonus conditions to be straightforward and without all those hidden surprises in the small print. You should expect exactly what you see from the capitalised text on the red banners of the Ladbrokes bonus promotions. The number of seasonal offers is quite limited though and there isn’t much to look out for during the week, except for those schedules for races connected to the best odds guaranteed promotion. We do know that they offer the ‘bet & get’ style promotions from time to time, but those are often delivered by email for registered members only, and so it does pay to get signed up to their marketing newsletters and campaign leaflets.
Sports Betting
LADBROKES IS HOME TO A SMALL TEAM OF HIGHLY SKILLED DEVELOPERS BASED IN LONDON WITH OTHER TEAMS WORKING OUT OF HYDERABAD, INDIA.
The Stakers sports betting team assess each of the online bookmakers and their featured betting tools here in the park. We keep a sharp eye on all the technology being used to ensure that you can experience the very best in sports betting entertainment. So, keep reading and we’ll explain to you what we found when uncovering the technology layers of Ladbrokes.
The London headquarters of Ladbrokes and Coral is home to a small team of Java developers that are specially selected from the top-rated list of Russell Group University graduates. This small team is accountable for the overall control and planning of the Ladbrokes system. However, a larger team of architecture developers are based further away in the city of Hyderabad, India.
SPORTS
BETTING SLIP
IN-PLAY STATS
BETTING MARKETS
MARGINS
EVENT RESULTS
| Sports | margins | live margins | markets | live markets |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
8.47% | 7.72% | 21 | 71 |
 |
3.67% | 7.6% | 174 | 109 |
 |
4.17% | 5.49% | 86 | 30 |
|
|
4.28% | 8.17% | 151 | 55 |
As mentioned in the table above, our Staker HQ statisticians has shown the margins at Ladbrokes to be lacking overall value across the top events. The live market margins in events connected to the Champions League shows some cause for concern for stakers with a huge 9.28% margin. Compare this to the likes of 888 Sport and Unibet with their 6.42% and 5.7% margins and you can start to see the clear lack of value amongst those specific, and popular, events.
FINANCIAL LIMITS
Ladbrokes do provide their stakers with a wide range of payment options, but at the same time they feel that it is ok to cut the upper withdrawal limit to £5,000 per day. You can bypass this limit but only through an individual request with the Ladbrokes support team. This limit is, however, a violation of the LCCP codes established by the Gambling Commission which requires operators to remove limits that prevents stakers from withdrawing all their winnings at any one point in time. The transparency regarding your privacy is very low here with no details available about how exactly your information is being used, what checks they perform, and what market agencies are collecting the personal data from the Ladbrokes site. As it stands, there are around 30 trackers on the site that are designed to collect personal data and follow you across Ladbrokes and throughout your Stakersland journey. Furthermore, there is no established source of wealth procedure in place, nor are the customer support agents equipped with the necessary information regarding these issues, despite our attempts to retrieve these details time and time again.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
The customer service team at Ladbrokes is designed with purely small talk in mind. In as much that you will always have someone to talk with, but a useful solution is not something you should be expecting to receive. Responses are neutral and it is clear that there is not much training being given. They do very well with the ping-pong style communication although you very rarely get to a resolution that you are happy with. When it comes to technical aspects of the sports betting markets, such as odds and margins, they will simply advise you to visit the helpdesk to find your answers. Templates are often used, and their replies never really provide much detail. We can foresee this support team being replaced with a chat bot in the not so distant future, and you would probably not even notice the difference.
SHOULD YOU EVER RUN INTO ANY STAKER-RELATED ISSUES WITH THE LADBROKES CUSTOMER SERVICES, THEN WE HOPE THAT THIS SHORT FAQ CAN HELP YOU OUT:
Are you able to complain with Ladbrokes?
Where to complain if they refuse the withdrawal?
How do stakers rate the Ladbrokes customer service?
Up or down
The 83.41% uptime rate of the overall Ladbrokes grounds shows a stable betting service and most of this can be tracked back to the hard work being done over in Hyderabad. Keeping those betting markets open for the multi-million staker community is no easy job and that 83.41% rate is definitely a respectable marker. If we look deeper into the loading times, then the Google Page Speed rating stands at 64/100 which is above the industry average but also shows some clear room for improvements.
TECHNOLOGY
DATA CENTER
SSL CERTIFICATE
Our tech team look at Ladbrokes online as a competent development structure but due to its old and tired past, they tend not to include it in the current overall Stakersland rankings. The use of Java is considered by most to be too heavy a solution. Not to mention the huge overheads related to serving that multi-million staker community. Updates have been made and the introduction of Angular is a start, but there are obvious flaws within the code that are simply not acceptable in this day and age. From our perspective, it looks as though they have tried to alter an important cog in the wheel, but only gone through with it 50% of the way. The use of Apache Kafka to deliver the odds updates is again a plausible attempt but this option is only ever temporarily avoiding the inevitable.
COUNTRIES WHERE LADBROKES IS LICENSED
The Ladbrokes betting operation is managed by the Ladbrokes Coral group which, in turn, is owned by GVC Holdings. They have three main offices, two of which are located in the UK (the head office in London and another office in Nottingham), and one other office in Gibraltar which also happens to be their legal address at Suite 6, Atlantic Suites, Europort Avenue, Gibraltar. Further afield, Ladbrokes Australia has an office in Brisbane which is part of GVC Australia Pty Ltd. According to the Glassdoor site, the locations involved in the Ladbrokes operations are both London and Glasgow in the UK, Ireland, Tel Aviv in Israel, and Brisbane in Australia. So, there is more than meets the eye with Ladbrokes with many more working offices in operation, but the central hub certainly seems to be the UK offices with the second largest based in Ireland, followed by the team in Gibraltar.
Ladbrokes is officially licenced by the government of Gibraltar and the UKGC, which is currently under the name of LC International Limited. These licenses allow Ladbrokes to provide the following betting services: remote bingo, casino, pool and general betting (on both real and virtual events) and betting intermediary. Further afield, Ladbrokes also holds betting licenses that have been issued by the HM Revenue Commissioners in Ireland for sports betting, and they also have a German, Belgian, and Australian license in place as well.
THE TWO CORE BETTING LICENSES FROM THE UKGC AND GGC ALLOW THE MAJORITY OF STAKERS ACCESS TO THE LADBROKES MARKETS, HOWEVER, ADDITIONAL LICENSES FROM THE IRISH, GERMAN, BELGIAN, AND AUSTRALIAN AUTHORITIES ALSO HELP TO EXPAND THEIR COMMUNITY.
Let us take you a bit further down Ladbrokes lane and fill you in on the major talking points of their long and turbulent past, which does happen to contain one or two legal issues being held against their historic name. From the top down, Ladbrokes is one of the leaders of the industry, but they are also currently part of the loss-making GVC Holdings Group. If we look back to the early years then 1979 was a fateful year with the uncovering of illegal marketing practices at their London casinos, with talks of bribing police officers to gain details on the high rollers at other rival casinos. This eventually led to Ladbrokes closing down their London casinos which was roughly 40% of their profits. Fast track to the turn of the millennium and the introduction of the Gambling Act 2005, we saw the relaxation of advertising laws which soon brought a Ladbrokes TV advert into question. The ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) eventually cleared the advert, but they had to step in once again in 2009 to do exactly the same with Ladbrokes again pushing the letter of the law.
More recently in December 2018, Ladbrokes ended up paying £1 million in compensation due to a problem gambler who was found out to be stealing his betting funds from his own business clients. Then, only half a year later, the UKGC announced a £5.9 million penalty in line with them not complying with anti-money laundering and social responsibility rules. It was stated that between 2014 and 2017, there were not enough safeguards in place to protect people from gambling problems at the site. On the other side of the world in Australia, another fine was placed on Ladbrokes Australia and another GVC Holdings brand, Neds, for offering illegal gambling enticements within NSW. The overall fine was to the sum of 207,500 AUD and regulators called it ‘the biggest of its kind’ in New South Wales.
Now, a few words on the connection to the loss-making GVC Holdings Group. It might be news to many people that the Ladbrokes connection to GVC is actually not the first time in history that this has happened. Back in 1956, the company was bought for a reported £100,000 by Mark Stein and his nephew Cyril Stein. Fast forward again around 50 years and the group made a decision to remove all gambling operations outside of Europe which included casinos, racetracks, and bingo business across the US and South America. The big-money sales were all completed by 2001, and it was only a year before that they also sold a total of 27 casinos in the UK to the Gala Group for £236 million. So, now you have a better picture of the top-level view of Ladbrokes. In fact, many stakers might not know that the owner from 1999 to 2006 was actually the Hilton Group plc, and now we have seen the GVC full circle. In 2018, GVC reacquired the Ladbrokes Coral Group with a 53.5% share in what was reported to be worth around £4 billion. The Ladbrokes story continues on…
