Free Bets on Coral

Coral has long been established as one of the ‘Big Three’ bookmakers in the UK and was first established in 1926 when Joe Coral began his bookmaking business. He was one of the first bookmakers to take advantage of legislation allowing off-course betting shops in 1960 and Coral was soon established as one of the big bookmaking names on the high street.

Nowadays, Coral forms part of the Gala Coral Group with over 1600 betting shops, online gaming sites, large telephone betting business, two greyhound stadia, bingo clubs and casinos. In recent years Coral has been expanding its foreign interests developing a chain of betting shops in Italy having won over 400 sports and horserace betting licenses in 2006 and has also set up a joint venture in China.

Coral ventured into online gaming when it acquired the internet betting business Eurobet in 1999 to establish Coral Eurobet. In developing its online presence, the Coral.co.uk website is predominantly UK facing while Eurobet has been retained and continues to cater for international customers.
 

Offers and Promotions

Coral regularly change their introductory offer and has recently launched a new £50 Free Bet offer. It is a commendably simple offer, requiring new customers to deposit and bet £50 to receive a £50 Free Bet. Customers preferring to sign up and place smaller stakes will receive a free bet matching their first bet stake.

The big traditional bookmaking names, Coral, Ladbroke and William Hill, aren’t generally noted for giveaway offers, preferring to rely on the excellent reputation built over the years and their powerful brand names.

To Coral’s credit, they are becoming more competitive in this area and in addition to its very good introductory offer it is endeavouring to retain customers with its latest ‘Win More, Green Tick’ initiative for horse racing fans. Customers logging on to Coral.co.uk when racecourse shows are available will get the opportunity to take the enhanced odds available behind the Green Tick on selected runners.
 

Odds & Markets

Coral’s prices are competitive, the football and racing odds compilers don’t seem too afraid to back their opinion and will often offer the stand out price against the rest of market opinion.

Visitors can quickly identify the horseracing and football prices that are the industry best as Coral conveniently highlight those odds.

Coral provide odds on a wide variety of sports, politics and special interest markets with a good depth of betting markets for the major sports, especially football with as many as 50 pre-match markets on games in the top European leagues.

Coral provides a good live betting service with in-play betting available for a number of popular sports and a decent range of in-play betting markets for each live event.
 

Website

Coral.co.uk has had the benefit of a recent overhaul and the website now offers a much improved experience for the visitor. The clean interface is well laid out with simple navigation and a straight forward registration process.

Coral has ensured the new website has quick access to live betting markets and upcoming betting opportunities for racing and other sports via the Quick Bet panel at the heart of the homepage. The list of sports and other betting events are clearly listed and extra features, such as radio, form, stats, scores are also easy to find and access.

Coral provides live video streams of horse racing action provided customers are logged into their account and have placed a bet of £1 or more on the race to be viewed; unfortunately there are no live streams for other major sports action.

Customers looking to access Coral.co.uk while out and about will find the website is quite usable from smartphone browsers, but it would be good to see an optimised mobile version of the website or better still, dedicated apps for java, Android and iPhone.