Betfair are a bit of an odd fish to be honest. While they are well known and have a good set of products, they have demonstrated a somewhat laissez-faire attitude towards their customers in the past.
The following review concentrates on the product and mobile casino experience itself but potential players should be aware that the company definitely has the attitude of “we do what is best for us” rather than “we do what is right” in times of adversity. But anyway, onto the review…
There are two ways that you can access the mobile casino, through the Betfair iPhone app for Iphone and Ipads or the mobile browser application that can support Android, Windows 8 & iOS devices.
There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of difference between the two options. The Web based games seem to take a little longer to load, but once loaded there are no obvious differences so kudos to Betfair for keeping the user experience uniform.
When playing on the tablet though, a tip: make sure you setup your browser to be full screen if it doesn’t already (not a problem on my iPad) as the play and betting buttons on some games were obscured by the address bar and the start bar on my Android tablet. Like most of the mobile casinos we’ve reviewed Betfair’s casino runs on android tablets and phones, iPads and iPhones (iOS) plus Windows 8 for the record.
The mobile site will give you access to Betfair’s In-Play, Horse Racing, Football and Tennis betting as well as the Casino. For the purposes of this review I will be concentrating on the Betfair Casino functionality which runs on Playtech’s popular software but the review pretty much applies to both the web and client based versions.
There Games are distributed between :
- Table Games
- Baccarat
- Blackjack
- Blackjack Switch
- Casino Hold’Em
- European Roulette
- Premium European Roulette
- Premiun Blackjack
- Roulette
- Video Poker
- Jacks Or Better
- Scratch Cards
- Chicago Streets
- Love Match
- Rocky
- 5 Reel Slots
- Iron Man 2
- Pink Panther
- A Night Out
- Beach Life
- Captains Treasure
- Desert Treasure
- Dr Lovemore
- Fantastic Four
- Football Carnival
- Frankie Dettori’s Magic 7
- Geisha Story
- Gladiator Jackpot
- Gold Rally
- Golden Tour
- Great Blue
- Halloween Fortune
- Highway Kings
- Hulk
- Ice Run
- Irish Luck
- Iron Man 3
- Jackpot Giant
- Kong
- Lotto Madness
- Monty Python’s Spamalot
- Mr Cash Back
- Panther Moon
- Penguin Vacation
- Plenty O’Fortune
- Rocky Slot
- Safari Heat
- Samba Brazil
- Santa Surprise
- Secrets Of The Amazon
- Sherlock Mystery
- Silent Samurai
- Spiderman
- Streak Of Luck
- Sweet Party
- Thai Pardise
- The Avengers
- The Three Musketeers
- Wanted
- White King
- Who Wants To Be A Millionaire
- Zhao Cai Jin Bao
- 3 Reel Slots
- Chinese Kitchen
- Club Night
- Everybody’s Jackpot
- Fish-O-Rama
- Santa’s Gifts
- Vacation Station
Initial Impressions
My initial impressions are good, the games are intuitive and tell you whether to play in landscape or portrait mode. I like this, although it’s a bit fiddly to get to the Casino section, you have to swipe the screen along the top banner and then tap on Casino.
I also like the fact that you get a description of the game as you enter it, I’m lazy and don’t like having to go to other screens to find how to play, once I’m at the play screen, that is what I want to do, play!
Games & Functionality
The games are all optimised for the touch screen, some work in the traditional way of pressing buttons, others use swipe to activate the spinning of wheels, for example in slots.
One thing to watch though is where some games allow you to tap the screen to increase the bet. This can be anywhere on the screen and if you’re not careful, you can increase your bet without realising it. It happened to me a few times, so I learned the hard way but be careful. I would like to see this functionality centred on the area of the screen where the bet is displayed and I will be sending this feedback to Betfair 🙂
I found that sounds on Blackjack didn’t quite match up with the action. Now I prefer to play with no sound, so it wouldn’t really bother me, but I could see this being annoying after a while if you like sounds switched on.
Conclusion
In summary, Betfair have done a good job with keeping the look and feel consistent between the versions. The games are presented well and do what they say on the tin, in fact I found it difficult to distinguish between the app and web versions which is ideal. It’s essentially the same offering as BetFred mobile casino .
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