Bet99 Ontario Review 2024 - Is Bet99 legal in Ontario?

Yes, Bet99 is now one of several legal Ontario sportsbooks & online casinos.  Founded by a Canadian born Swiss hockey player, Doug Honegger, Bet99 was launched in 2020 with a seemingly endless marketing budget. Canadian and Ontario sports fans will have noted brand placements along various Canadian NHL club rink boards, as well as frequent TV ads for their dot-net domain with spokesperson, MMA legend Georges St-Pierre. While their for-money betting site and online casino for Canada (outside Ontario) are regulated from Kahnawake First Nations territory, Bet99 has been licensed by the AGCO for its Ontario iGaming license. Of late, Auston Matthews has starred in ads for their newly launched Ontario offering. How does the Bet99 experience compare to other licensed iGaming Ontario betting sites?  Not great, we're afraid. Let's get into our opinion & review of Bet99. You'll see why despite several email requests on their part to be marketed on SNBET.ca, we have refused their advances & they are not recommended.

But first, is Bet99 still available in the rest of Canada?

Indeed it is, as regulated from the "grey market" jurisdiction mentioned above. If you are outside Ontario, you would be able to play at bet99-dot-com.  However, as we outline in our Bet99 Ontario review here, you would be better off choosing from the top options as recommended and outlined in our list of the best betting sites in Canada, for players across the country.  We also outline the top Canadian Interac casino sites for players outside Ontario.  (If you are outside Ontario, you cannot play at legal Ontario sportsbooks & casinos.) Read on below and compare for yourself.  The difference between the top brands and Bet99 is crystal clear in our opinion.

Bet99 Ontario odds margins for most popular sports

When it comes to the most popular betting markets on the main four leagues for Canadian players, Bet99 has margins that are essentially equal to that of both bet365 and Betway for example.  For typical NFL or NBA point spread markets, you will often see odds of 1.90/1.90 or -110/-110 when the odds figures are equal on both potential outcomes, which is a margin of just over 5%. These odds are essentially bang-average for these often highly competitive markets, except that with Bet99, you are not getting a top-tier betting platform.  If you were getting lower margins and thus better odds, it might make up for a slow and wonky interface, but you don't get better value at Bet99.  If you are OK with these odds, we would play with essentially any other Ontario brand that we recommend, as they all have far superior platforms (we touch on this below). 

But let's not move on from Bet99 odds just yet. For top soccer events like the EPL, find margins on the main 1X2 market between 5.5% and 8%.  Especially when they are near 8%, Bet99 soccer odds margins are not competitive with top brands.  For other reasonably popular events and the most important markets, Bet99 odds margins tend to be about average, at 5% or slightly above.  Again, Bet99 is not providing the lowest odds margin or 'sportsbook hold' anywhere across the board in comparison to other Ontario providers.  In other words, the value on offer is average or below average.

Bet99 Ontario laptop/desktop experience

Can we sum up the Bet99 Ontario experience from a computer in one word? Yes: Awful. Bet99 is on the 'Dench' sports betting platform (find a link to 'Dench' at the base of the Bet99 site).  Other than Bet99, the Dench platform is only seemingly used by a combination of Bulgarian & Latvian gambling brands.  No top-tier international gaming brands use the Dench platform. 

In general, just loading the site is slow. In our review, even the homepage took a full 10 seconds to fully render. Loading popular pages from the 'Top Leagues' links is also slow compared to any top Ontario sportsbook brand.  Where Bet99 really falls down is if you decide to navigate through their sport icons in the middle of the page. From our PC, we simply tried to navigate around to find NBA pre-match markets through the main basketball icon.  We clicked it, then were shown a huge list of countries with tick boxes. We ticked USA, then clicked 'Show events'.  This gave us a little wheel that kept spinning.  In all, it took over one minute to load the page. Once finally loaded, the page was so big and unworkable, we could not even scroll the page smoothly or even click the odds tiles to add a bet to the bet slip, or click on other links to navigate to another page.  The site was essentially unresponsive.

Hopefully things have improved since we experienced this. Regardless if they improve load times or not, Bet99 is just so poorly structured in comparison to the multitude of platforms that are available to Ontario players.  If we expected to bet on any sports with our computer as our preferred device, we would find Bet99 very frustrating to use.

Bet99 Ontario mobile sportsbook experience

The Bet99 mobile experience is much like the one for computers - slow and poorly laid out.  When we tried to replicate the above basketball navigation, where we loaded all the US basketball events, we were left with far too many events on screen, and as we scrolled, we would be met with a black screen space that had yet to render the events. 

The 'Menu' or 'hamburger' button contains no A-Z sports list.  So if you are on a page with too many events and you are way down the page away from the navigation elements at the top of the page, you have to open the 'Menu' button, then tap 'Sports' to get back to the main sports page, then try to navigate to your desired destination.   You cannot just go in one step.  It's just not an intuitive design at all for mobile users.  There are so many better mobile sports betting options from leading companies that use top-tier sportsbook platforms in Ontario.

Bet99 Ontario International sports coverage & odds

Again, here is another area where Bet99 falls so far short of the competition in Ontario.  This bit of our review is not for most Ontario bettors, it is for those bettors that care about cricket, rugby or other internationally popular sports, likely because they have come to Ontario from another part of the world where these sports dominate.  Bet99 does not care about cricket betting. We reviewed their site while 'The Ashes' was being contested - and it was not even covered as an event. When we looked at the various leagues covered, like the BBL in Australia, Bet99 only offered a single betting market - the match winner.  On that market, for various BBL matches, we found margins in excess of 6%.  Compare this with most of our recommended sportsbooks for Ontario which have dozens of BBL markets for each match, and offer match winner odds margins closer to 4%, which means higher odds for you.

Rugby betting is slightly better at Bet99 as they had at least some selection of betting markets beyond the basic match winner market.  However, their odds margins were again on the high side of things compared to top providers, at 7% or higher for match winner, handicap or totals markets. Most of our top sportsbooks have rugby odds margins near 5%.  In the end, Bet99 just does not likely do enough wagering volume to offer more competitive odds margins or a more extensive selection of markets for these international sports.

Bet99 Ontario Esports coverage

Bet99 does cover esports.  They do however use the incorrect spelling: 'E-sports'.  While they offer a reasonable number of markets for each event, you might not even know it due to their poor site layout. When looking at a single event or match, you need to expand the details of the match by clicking the tiny down arrow near the right of the event, otherwise you might think they only offer a match winner market. 

When it comes to Bet99 esports odds margins, you are looking at 8% to 9% on most markets, which again, is not particularly competitive versus the top betting brands that serve Ontario, especially the ones that specialize in esports betting. 

Bet99 Ontario payment methods

Bet99 accepts Visa, Mastercard, Instadebit, Interac e-transfers, iDebit and MuchBetter among others, which is one positive tick for them.  This is a reasonably wide array of payment options for Ontario, though popular pre-paid options appear unavailable upon review. (Remember to try and avoid credit card usage for gaming payments in Ontario due to high interest charges and fees, as they are considered "cash advances" - not purchases.)

Bet99 Ontario Payout Limits

The maximum Bet Slip win amount is $100,000 as per the Bet99 Ontario sports betting rules. Compare this with some Ontario licensed betting sites that have maximum daily win limits between $500,000 and $4,000,000 per day for various sports.  If you might push the high end limits, Bet99 is at the low end of the spectrum in this regard.

Bet99 Ontario available support methods

Bet99 indicates that they have 24/7 customer support via live chat, email or via telephone.

Bet99 Ontario alternate gaming verticals

Bet99 is now one of many legal Ontario online casinos. They offer RNG online casino games and live dealer casino games, including those from Pragmatic Play.  They do not offer an online poker room vertical.  Given that Bet99 is able to access many of the same online and live dealer casino suppliers that other Ontario brands have integrated, Bet99 actually has a reasonably good casino offering in the province, but it is not among those we would rank as the best or most engaging.

Bet99 Ontario bottom line: Great celebrity partners, poor betting platform

As we reviewed the Bet99 sportsbook offering, we think it's pretty clear that they need to spend less money on ads, marketing and sponsorships, and invest more in improving their betting platform.  Sorry, being on the same gaming platform as Bulgarian and Latvian brands 'Alphawin.bg' and 'Spins.lv' is not going to cut it when Ontarians can play at world-leading brands like bet365 and Betway among others.  

Bet99 clearly has a strategy. They want to acquire new players with an interesting group of athletes & personalities in their marketing. But that's not going to keep players happy in the long term.  What keeps players happy?  A quick & intuitive betting platform with great sports coverage, features and competitive odds, but in our opinion, Bet99 does not have it.  This is why we will not recommend Bet99 to people in Ontario (or outside it), despite their requests to be marketed on SNBET.ca.  Take that as you wish.  They are licensed by the AGCO and are live for play on the iGaming Ontario platform, but you've read our stance and you see what we believe to be the top providers for Ontario & Canada.

Why do other "Canada sportsbook review" sites rate Bet99 highly?

As we point out on other pages of SNBET, sports betting & casino affiliate marketers are incentivised to get you to sign up with all the brands they list.  Think about this for a second. You are searching for a review on a given sportsbook brand.  It is far better for that "review" resource to simply validate to you that the given provider is "recommended" so that you can move on to become a customer, and they get paid a commission for that. 

If they have an honest review about a sub-par operator, with critical things to say, your journey as a potential sale/commission just got stopped.  Now you don't have that validation. Maybe you back out of their site, or stop looking for a new betting site altogether. They don't want that to happen, which is why you will rarely find a sportsbook review that actually has critical things to say.

Most reviews are full of a bunch of text fluff to fill the page and optimize for search engine results, then add in a bunch of four or five-star ratings which are total bunkum, but which are designed to fool you.  Given all that we've shown you about Bet99's platform, do you really think they deserve top marks or "5 stars" compared to platforms used by multi-billion dollar companies that dominate the global sports betting markets?  

You're smarter than that.

SNBET Ontario sportsbook reviews (are they legal?)