Blag Some Cash (Blue Square)

Member Name: rob_writer

Product:	Blue Square
Date:	10/04/02 (145 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free money , Good gambling site

Disadvantages: None that I can think of

A gambling man I certainly ain't. Infact when my horse came home fourth in the grand national I had to wait until the website told me how much I'd won. But I still managed to make myself £15 on Saturday while only betting 50p of my own money. Wanna know how? Read on....

From time to time Blue Square offer a free £10 bet when you join up; they ran the promotion last Wimbledon, and again for this years Grand National. It's probably finished now, but that doesn't detract from the fact that they are a decent gambling site, although I can't say I've tried them all.

Typing www.bluesq.com in to your browser takes you to the site, where you have the choice to register, log in, or browse the site as a guest. You have to be a member to gamble, but joining is easy and free, and only takes a few moments. It's the usual stuff - name, address, declaring you are over 18 etc. Once this is done, you can deposit money in to your account - this is done using either a credit or debit card, and thankfully they accept just about all of them. To claim the ten pounds free offer you need to deposit a minimum of £10 in your account, and then make a bet. The site remembers your card number for future deposits and withdrawals from your account. On the one hand this saves time typing in your card details, but I'm never happy to know that my debit card details are sitting on a servers hard drive somewhere. Anyway, crediting your account is instantaneous, so within about 10 minutes of visiting the site you can make your first bet. Withdrawing money from your account is equally as simple, although depending on which credit/debit card you have it may take a week or so to arrive back in your account.

I had no real intention of betting lots of my own money, I wanted to have some fun with their free £10, but to gain this I needed to make a bet first. The minimum stake is 50p, so I had a quick check in the newspaper and put 50p on the nose on
a horse running at a race at Aintree. I had never had a real bet before, and watching the race on TV even for such a small stake was quite exciting. Unfortunately the horse I picked came dead last, but never mind, I'd only wasted 50p!

Betting on the site is easy as everything is split up in to categories. The site concentrates on sport but does have limited betting on other events, and the stock market. Within the sports section there are all the sports you would expect, football, racing, rugby, snooker - it's all there. There loads of options available, you can bet either on the current price or the price at the start of the race, add bets together and make forecasts on lots of things at once. It's all rather clever, most is way above my head, but the site does make it as clear as possible. Simple bets (ie on one horse) have a returns calculator to tell you how much you can win, but more complex bets (ie. the ones that might take you a while) don't have this calculator, which is annoying. Anyway, when you've chosen your bet you select how much money you want to bet, click the button, confirm it, and then wait for the event to take place. I have little knowledge of gambling but I managed to understand it, it really isn't that daunting!

Once I had placed my 50p bet the free £10 arrived in my account. They aren't as silly as to let you transfer this back to your bank, but I could transfer my original £9.50 (£10 minus the 50p bet) back in to my account. So I did. I was left with £10 in my Blue Square account, free to bet on whatever I wanted, and all I'd done was spend 50p. Good deal if you ask me!

If you want to play it safe at this point you can bet on a snooker or tennis match (or something where there are only two outcomes, player A wins or player B wins). If you choose one with even odds, say both players are 5-7. Bet £5 on each, then whoever wins you will then win the same amount of money, plus one of t
he £5 stakes back giving you about £7.50 for free.

But that would be boring - instead why not start off gambling for real, safe in the knowledge that you aren't losing your own money!

Details of all your bets are available in your user account on the site, you can see previous bets, bets waiting to be resolved and how much you've won. I was very impressed with the sites update time, when I won on the national the money was in my account on the site within 10 minutes of the race ending. Speedy service indeed!

Overall the site is slick, and easy to use for a newbie to the gambling scene. From what I saw odds are competitive when compared with high street bookies, and the range of bets available is impressive. It's also one of the biggest name online bookies, so you can have confidence in them.

Still, I won't be staying. Gambling isn't my thing, and in the end only the bookies will win. Unless, of course, you're using their money!

Summary: