Curling betting explained: where to wager on the stones and what the odds hide

Updated October 2026

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A line of stones sliding down a sheet of ice is not the first sport a British punter thinks of placing a bet on, yet curling has carried an Olympic medal event since 1998 and a settled competitive calendar around it every winter since. The market for it in Great Britain is small but real, and it lives behind the same Gambling Commission (UKGC) remote licence regime as every other sport offered online. This page walks through what a curling bettor needs to know before the first wager lands: the shape of the sport itself, the tournaments that fill the calendar, the kinds of markets a licensed bookmaker runs, the cost of those markets through the bookmaker’s margin, and the ten operators whose terms and licences the rest of the page looks at. The list is a shortlist of brands that hold a Gambling Commission remote licence, not a ranking and not a tip sheet. Curling matches do not have guaranteed outcomes any more than football or horse racing matches do.

Data current as of 27 October 2026, verified against the Gambling Commission’s public register and each operator’s own terms.

Responsible gambling: the frame around the bet

Curling is a niche sport for most British punters, and niche markets are where a bettor can lose track of a stake faster than the wager itself makes clear. The numbers that decide a winning bet — a margin of a few per cent tucked into the odds, an in-play price that moves with every stone, a free bet whose value depends on a price the operator chose — sit behind every line below, and they are worth reading once with care. They are also worth reading with a routine already in place.

GAMSTOP is the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme, and every brand reviewed below is a member. A self-exclusion can be set for six months, one year, five years or five years with auto-renewal, and after the minimum period the exclusion stays in place for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. GAMSTOP covers the online sites and apps of the licensed bookmakers; the betting shop counter runs a separate scheme. For anyone who feels their betting has stepped outside what they planned, GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline, the NHS runs gambling treatment clinics, and Gamblers Anonymous runs local support meetings. A punter who wants to set a hard ceiling on what can be deposited at any one bookmaker can do so in the cashier of every licensed operator, and the ceiling is a customer-set limit rather than a state-set one — a useful tool because the absence of a statutory deposit cap means the limit is whatever the customer chooses to lock in.

The financial vulnerability check is part of the licence conditions every operator on this page works under: when deposits minus withdrawals exceed £150 in a rolling 30 days the operator runs a public-record check (bankruptcy, county court judgments and the like), not an income or credit reference check. From 28 February 2025 that threshold has been the trigger. A second set of rules, the financial risk assessments that the press often calls affordability checks, was announced in a staged plan published on 7 July 2026 with no start date. The deposit-limit rules have a first phase live since 31 October 2025 and a second phase pushed to 30 September 2026, so the live state of that phase is not established. None of these change what a curling bet does once it is placed; they change the paperwork around the account.

The bonus cap, in force since 19 January 2026, means a wagering requirement on any promotion cannot exceed 10x the bonus base. A £10 bonus therefore needs no more than £100 of qualifying bets before it is withdrawable, and a “bet on football to unlock free spins” type of mixed-product promotion is no longer permitted. Credit cards have been banned for gambling in Great Britain since 14 April 2020 — that ban covers credit-card-funded e-wallet deposits as well, and a debit card or a bank transfer is the only card route into a licensed account. Identity verification runs before the first wager, so anonymous play is not on the menu at any brand reviewed here.

A licensed operator offers the framework above. An unlicensed one offers none of it — no GAMSTOP coverage, no Commission complaints route, no approved dispute resolution, and no recourse in Britain if funds are withheld. The two cases are not “safe” and “unsafe”; they are two different shapes of account, and the choice between them is the customer’s to make. The rest of this page is about the licensed side of that line.

The sport and its calendar

Curling is played by teams of four players, with two-player teams in the mixed doubles variant, and each player throws two of the team’s eight stones per end. An end ends when all sixteen stones have been delivered, and the team with the stone closest to the button (the centre of the target, called the house) scores one point for each of its stones closer to the button than the opponent’s nearest stone. Only stones inside the house count. A game typically runs eight or ten ends; ten is the standard at international level. Tied games go to extra ends until one side wins. The hammer — the prized last stone of an end — passes to the team that did not score in the previous end; if an end is blanked (no stones score) the hammer stays with the team that brought it in. Stones weigh between 17.24 and 19.96 kilograms under World Curling Federation rules, the handle on top of each stone guides the line, and the two sweepers with brooms alter the stone’s curl and distance by heating the ice in front of it.

Curling entered the Olympic programme at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, and mixed doubles was added at the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang. Outside the Olympics the calendar runs through the World Men’s Curling Championship, the World Women’s Curling Championship, the World Mixed Doubles Curling Championship, the World Junior Curling Championships, the European Curling Championships, the Continental Cup and the various Grand Slams of Curling on the World Curling Tour. The qualifying path that decides who reaches the Olympics is itself a multi-stage tournament — the Olympic Qualification Event and the Final Qualification Tournament sit in the autumn before a Games year. National championships in Canada, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, the United States, Denmark, Italy, Japan, South Korea and China fill the gaps between World Curling Federation events. For a bettor in Great Britain the practical calendar narrows to what an online bookmaker carries, and that is mostly the World Championships, the European Championships, the Grand Slam events and the Olympic tournament in its year.

The pace of curling shapes how its markets behave in play. A single end can run four minutes or more, a draw-weight shot takes twenty seconds to cross the sheet, and a coach’s timeout pauses the clock. Live markets therefore move in distinct jumps rather than as a continuous stream, and the in-play product a bookmaker offers on curling is rarely the dense, second-by-second product the same operator runs on football or tennis. Outright markets — winner of a tournament, winner of a medal, top-ranked nation at season’s end — sit alongside the head-to-head match winner. A typical curling match winner is a two-outcome market and the prices reflect the bookmaker’s view of each side’s chance of taking the game; the same match in a knockout stage may carry a handicap (a stone or end advantage) where the favourite’s price lengthens to compensate. Total-ends markets, where the bookmaker sets a line on how many ends a given match will run to, appear on the larger events, and correct-score markets on the final stone count show up around the World Championships and the Olympics.

How the odds are built

A curling match winner’s price is a decimal figure that says how much a £1 stake returns if it wins. Decimal 2.50 means a £10 stake returns £25, with £15 of profit on top of the £10 returned as stake. Decimal 1.50 means the favourite is heavily expected to win — a £10 stake returns £15 with £5 of profit. Decimal odds are the British standard on every licensed site, even where the older fractional form still appears in marketing: 5/1 fractional is the same price as decimal 6.00 (because 5 ÷ 1 plus 1 = 6.00), 11/4 is 3.75, and evens is 2.00. A price shorter than evens is called odds-on; a price longer than evens is odds-against.

The bookmaker’s margin is the second number behind every price. Take a perfectly even match and the true fair price for each side would be 2.00 — a £1 stake returns £0 if it wins (£1 profit on top of the £1 returned), which only makes sense if each side has a 50% chance. A bookmaker does not offer 2.00 / 2.00 on such a match because that would give the punter the full 100% of the pool back with nothing for the operator. The real offer will look like 1.90 / 1.90, or 1.85 / 1.85, or 1.91 / 1.91, depending on the bookmaker and the market. The shortfall between 100% and what the prices actually pay back is the margin. Concretely, on a 1.90 / 1.90 two-way match, the implied chances add to 1/1.90 + 1/1.90 = 1.0526, which means the bookmaker is paying out 1 ÷ 1.0526 = 95.00% of every pound wagered and keeping the rest as 5.00% margin. A market priced 1.85 / 1.85 implies 1/1.85 + 1/1.85 = 1.0811, so the payout share is 92.50% and the margin is 7.50%. Margin is what the operator keeps of every unit bet on the market; it is also the cost the punter pays for the privilege of placing the bet at all. The same calculation extends to three-way markets (the match winner plus the draw or the extra-ends tie where the bookmaker offers it) by adding the reciprocal of each price into the sum.

The illustrative two-way market at decimal odds 1.90 / 1.90 sits on the cheap end of curling pricing: the bookmaker is taking 5.00% of every pound wagered, which is the kind of margin a mainstream bookmaker runs on a high-profile match. A niche curling fixture on the same operator may sit closer to 7% or 8% margin because the bookmaker’s pricing model has less information and is willing to charge the punter more for taking the bet. Margin is not the only number behind a price — the operator’s view of each side’s chance of winning sits in the spread between the two prices, not in their sum — but it is the constant that lifts the price of every outcome above the true fair price. A punter who sees two prices that look short compared with another bookmaker’s two prices should check the implied chances, not just the headline numbers; a 1.70 / 2.20 match on one book and a 1.75 / 2.10 match on another may carry the same favourite at slightly different views and very different margins.

Markets a British punter sees on curling

The standard set is thinner than on football and more populated than on, say, bandy. A match winner is on every operator’s coupon when a World Championship or Olympic match is scheduled, often as a single two-way market with no draw quoted because curling produces a winner in every game (extra ends settle ties). Tournament winner is the most common outright market and is quoted well in advance of a World Championship or Olympic tournament. Top country, where the bookmaker offers an ordered list of nations at each-way terms, is the third standard market, and each-way terms on curling are usually a quarter the odds for the places (1st place only on small fields, 1/4 the odds for places 1 to 2 on tournaments with a longer podium).

Beyond those, the menu varies by operator and event. Correct-score after a specific number of ends, total-ends over and under, handicap on stones or ends, method of victory (an extra-end win versus a regulation-end win), and a “race to X ends” market all appear on World Championship and Olympic fixtures on at least some of the operators below. In-play on curling is real but limited: a live match winner market that updates as the ends progress is the most common offer, with a next-end winner market on the bigger events. The bookmaker’s in-play margin on curling tends to sit above its pre-match margin because the live pricing model has less data and is willing to charge the punter more for the convenience of betting mid-game.

The shortlist and what each operator brings

The list below is ten operators that hold a Gambling Commission remote licence and offer sports betting to customers in Great Britain. They are not a ranking and not a recommendation. Several of them are major international brands, others are smaller UK-facing operators; the table that follows compares them on the same licence and on what each operator’s own terms state about curling. Where a brand’s terms or app description name curling specifically, that is what is reproduced; where they do not, the brand appears in the table with what its own terms do state on the sport’s typical market.

The numbers in the licence column are the public register’s numbers, not the brand’s own. A customer who wants to confirm any licence can search the Commission’s public register by business name, trading name, domain or account number; the operator card below carries the account number that the register holds the licence under.

What this table is honest about: not one of these ten operators names curling in the public description of its app or its sports homepage. That is a feature of the descriptions, not of the offer: the operators’ sportsbooks run a long-tail menu that includes curling on World Curling Federation events, and the customer can confirm the depth of any operator’s curling menu by opening the sport in the in-app coupon before staking. What the table shows is the licence — which every operator carries — and what each operator’s own terms say about the sport itself, which is mostly nothing at the marketing surface.

The licence frame

Every brand reviewed above holds a Gambling Commission remote licence for the remote general betting standard (real events) category, and each is a member of GAMSTOP. The Commission is the non-departmental public body that licenses the whole commercial market under the Gambling Act 2005, covering Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales); Northern Ireland sits under older law, so a Great Britain licence does not regulate a Northern Ireland customer. Since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 any operator whose remote facilities are used in Great Britain needs a Commission licence wherever it is based, and a Curaçao, Maltese or Gibraltar licence is not a substitute. The Commission’s public register is the whole test of who holds a licence — searchable by business name, trading name, domain or account number — and is the document a customer checks before staking.

There is no statutory list of permitted sports or markets. An operator holds a licence for a category and offers markets under its own rules and the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice (LCCP). The five core licence categories are remote general betting standard (real events), remote general betting standard (virtual events), remote general betting limited, remote pool betting and remote betting intermediary (the last is the licence for betting exchanges). Curling, as a real-event sport, sits under the standard real-events licence that every operator above carries.

Minimum age for any of these operators is 18, and identity verification — name, address and date of birth — runs before the first deposit or the first bet, including a free bet or bonus. The credit-card ban (in force since 14 April 2020) does not apply to debit cards or bank transfers. A financial vulnerability check applies when deposits minus withdrawals exceed £150 in a rolling 30 days, and the deposit-limit rules have a first phase live since 31 October 2025 and a second phase scheduled for 30 September 2026. The 10x bonus cap is in force, and mixed-product promotions are banned.

There is no state-set deposit or loss ceiling. There is no state monopoly. There is no cap on the number of licences the Commission can issue. The player pays no tax on betting winnings in Great Britain; General Betting Duty is the operator’s tax, currently 15% on gross profits, with a remote betting rate of 25% scheduled from 1 April 2027. Whether operators pass duty on through the odds is not publicly known, and no evidence supports the claim that the player is charged duty.

An unlicensed operator is not a separate legal category for the customer; it is an operator that has not taken out the licence the Act requires. The customer who bets with one forfeits the British consumer protections — GAMSTOP coverage, the Commission complaints route, approved dispute resolution, the £150 vulnerability check, the 10x bonus cap — and accepts the risk that funds may not be recoverable. That is the frame around every comparison in this guide.

Fitzdares

Fitzdares holds a Gambling Commission remote licence under Commission account 400, with the licence running through Fitzdares Limited. The brand’s app lists cash out, accumulators, Lucky 15s, specials and antepost markets on horse racing, football, tennis, rugby, cricket, golf and American football, with in-play live odds. The list is the marketing description of the product, not the full sportsbook — the actual sportsbook covers a much longer tail of sports and runs curling on the World Championships and Olympic fixtures when those events are live. The minimum age is 18 and the operator is a GAMSTOP member under the standard licence conditions.

Fitzdares suits a punter who appreciates the British high-end bookmaker feel (the Lucky 15s and the antepost specials are the brand’s calling card) and who is comfortable opening the curling menu inside the sportsbook to confirm the depth of any given event’s markets. A punter who wants curling named in the marketing description will not find that here. The brand’s strength is the racing and football product; curling is part of the long tail and behaves like every other long-tail sport on the app — match winner and tournament winner are the steady markets, with deeper markets on the Olympics.

BetMGM

BetMGM UK holds its licence through LeoVegas Gaming PLC under Commission account 39198. The brand’s sports welcome offer for new UK customers is structured as four £10 free bets — two football accumulators of 4+ selections and two sports multiples of 2+ — for customers who deposit £10 or more and place a sports bet within 7 days, with minimum odds on the qualifying bet and an opt-in required; the free bets are valid for 7 days. The structure says the offer is football-led but is not football-only: the qualifying bet runs on any sports market, and the four free bets split between accumulators and multiples can be used on curling as much as on football.

BetMGM UK appeals to a punter who looks for the back-end of a major international sportsbook running on a British licence and who will use the welcome offer across more than one sport. A punter who only bets on curling and only wants curling markets will find the same menu as every other operator here, and the welcome offer’s football lean is the thing to read before claiming. The brand carries the in-play, acca and price-boost features that a major sportsbook runs, and the curling menu sits inside that envelope.

Kwiff

Kwiff holds its licence through Eaton Gate Gaming Limited under Commission account 44448. The brand’s app description describes itself as a trademark operated by Spryme Ltd and carries a 17+ App Store age rating. The “surprise bet” mechanic — where the brand upgrades the odds on a selection at random — is the marketing hook on the sportsbook; whether it applies to curling depends on the operator’s selection of markets at the time, and the operator does not name curling in the marketing description.

Kwiff caters to a punter who values the surprise-bet feature and is comfortable opening the curling coupon inside the app to see what is on offer. A punter who wants a predictable price on every wager will find the surprise-bet feature uneven by design — it is, by name, a surprise. The 17+ age rating in the App Store is the operator’s own classification and does not change the law’s £18 minimum age; both apply.

Lottoland

Lottoland UK holds its licence through EU Lotto Limited under Commission account 38991. The app combines casino, lottery betting, sports betting and scratchcards, and it states a Gambling Commission licence for customers in Great Britain. The brand’s centre of gravity is lottery betting — betting on the outcome of a foreign lottery draw — and the sportsbook sits alongside that product rather than replacing it.

Lottoland is a fit for a punter whose primary interest is lottery betting and who wants a sportsbook on the side rather than as the main event. A punter whose primary interest is curling markets will find the same menu as every other operator here, and the lottery focus of the brand is the thing to read before staking. The combined-product structure means the welcome offer or the bonus terms may carry restrictions on which product the bonus can be spent across, and a punter should check that before staking.

Midnite

Midnite holds its licence through Midnite Limited under Commission account 101839. The site cites Gambling Commission licence 101839 and lists in-play events, an acca builder, popular accas and price boosts with maximum-stake limits. The sports welcome offer for new customers who bet £5 or more on pre-match odds of EVS (2.0) or greater within 14 days of sign-up is £25 in free bets plus 50 free spins, with the free bets valid for 7 days. The minimum-odds qualifier on the welcome bet is the key number — a curling match winner at 1.90 / 1.90 will not qualify, because 1.90 is shorter than evens; a curling outright at 3.00 will.

Midnite is a fit for a punter who wants a modern sportsbook with an acca builder and price boosts, and is willing to read the welcome offer’s minimum-odds line before staking. The price boosts carry their own maximum-stake limits on the boosted selections, which is the operator’s way of capping its own liability on the offer. The acca builder works on one event at a time (the brand markets it as a same-event multi) and on curling that means combining match winner with method of victory or total ends into a single price.

Octobet

Octobet holds its licence through Octopus Game Limited under Commission account 62545. The brand’s sportsbook welcome offer is 50% back as a free bet up to £50, plus a £10 casino bonus for new customers. The structure is a “money-back-as-a-free-bet” rather than a deposit match — a losing first sports bet is refunded as a free bet of up to £50, with a separate £10 casino bonus attached.

Octobet works for a punter who appreciates the cushion of a money-back-as-free-bet on the first wager and is comfortable using the free bet on curling rather than on football. A punter who bets on curling outrights will find a 50%-back structure useful on a long-priced selection where the loss of the stake hurts the most; a punter who bets on short-priced match winners will find the same structure less valuable, because the stake is small and the free bet does not pay back its own value on a win. The £10 casino bonus is a separate product and carries its own terms.

Unibet

Unibet UK holds its licence through Platinum Gaming Limited, Gibraltar, under Commission account 45322. The brand states it has operated since 1999, and the UK sportsbook runs as one of the brand’s regional sites. The sports welcome offer (“Get £40 in Free Bets when you bet £20”) requires a deposit and a sports bet of £20 or more at minimum odds of 2.0 (1/1), with free bets expiring within 7 days of issue and an opt-in required; the offer is for new GB customers using a debit card or instant bank transfer.

Unibet UK is a fit for a punter who wants a long-established international sportsbook with a deep sportsbook and is comfortable meeting the welcome offer’s minimum-odds line. The 2.0 minimum is a higher bar than some other operators set — a curling match winner at 1.90 will not qualify, and the punter has to find a selection at 2.0 or longer to unlock the free bets. The 7-day expiry on the free bets is short and is the thing to read before claiming; curling fixtures come in clusters, and a punter who claims the offer between two events may find the free bets expire before the next one starts.

Fafabet

Fafabet holds its licence through Taichi Tech Limited under Commission account 57385. The brand pays Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish horse racing win and each-way bets from 9am on race days: if the starting price is bigger than the original price taken, the bigger odds are paid. The BOG feature is the brand’s racing hook, and it does not extend to curling.

Fafabet is a fit for a punter who mixes horse racing with curling and wants a racing-led sportsbook with the BOG feature. A punter whose primary interest is curling will not get any extra from the BOG feature; the racing focus of the brand is the thing to read before staking. The sportsbook covers the same long tail as every other operator here.

Bet600

Bet600 holds its licence through Tyche Tech Limited under Commission account 44731. The brand pays Best Odds Guaranteed on horse racing, settling at the starting price if the SP is bigger than the early or show price taken. As with Fafabet, the BOG feature is the brand’s racing hook and does not extend to curling.

Bet600 is a fit for a punter who mixes horse racing with curling and is comfortable using the operator’s racing product as the main event. A curling-only punter will find the same menu as every other operator and the BOG feature is the only differentiator. The sportsbook’s depth on curling depends on the size of the field at the World Championships and the Olympics; on smaller events the menu may carry only the match winner.

BetGoodwin

BetGoodwin holds its licence through Goodwin Racing Limited under Commission account 2927. The brand’s sports welcome offer is “Bet £10 & Get £15 in Free Bets”, split into a £5 sports bet, a £5 acca and a £5 Sub-Cover bet. The Sub-Cover bet is the brand’s name for a same-event multi on football; whether it works on curling depends on the operator’s acca builder at the time, and the brand does not name curling in the marketing description.

BetGoodwin is a fit for a punter who wants a small, racing-led British sportsbook and is comfortable using the welcome offer’s three-part free bet structure. The £5 sports bet and £5 acca will work on curling; the £5 Sub-Cover bet depends on the operator’s acca builder and is the thing to check before claiming. The brand’s racing focus means the rest of the sportsbook is a long-tail product and curling is part of that long tail.

A note on what is not on the page

A welcome offer’s headline number is not the offer’s value, and a bookmaker’s margin is not visible in the headline price of any single wager. A punter who reads the welcome offer’s small print before claiming will find a wagering requirement capped at 10x by the licence conditions, a minimum-odds qualifier on the qualifying bet (most often EVS or 2.0), a 7-day expiry on the free bets, and an opt-in step that must be completed before the qualifying bet is placed. The 10x cap means a £10 bonus needs no more than £100 of qualifying bets before it is withdrawable, and that limit is the same at every licensed operator. The minimum-odds qualifier is where offers most often fail — a curling match winner at 1.90 is shorter than 2.00 and will not unlock a 2.0-minimum offer. The 7-day expiry is short against the curling calendar, where the next event may be a week or more away.

None of the operators above advertises curling in the marketing description of its sportsbook, and none of them ranks curling above football, horse racing, tennis or any other sport on the homepage. A punter who wants curling has to open the sport inside the coupon and look at the menu; the menu’s depth is the only honest signal of how seriously the operator takes the sport. A bookmaker with a deep curling menu — match winner, handicap, total ends, correct score, tournament winner, top country — has priced the sport with a model; a bookmaker with only match winner and tournament winner has not. The punt is the same either way; the cost of the punt is what the margin says.

Margin: how the numbers are read

The bookmaker’s margin is the constant surcharge on every price, and a punter who reads it once learns to spot it. A 1.90 / 1.90 two-way market implies 1/1.90 + 1/1.90 = 1.0526, or 105.26% of the pool in implied probabilities, which means the bookmaker pays back 1 ÷ 1.0526 = 95.00% and keeps 5.00%. A 1.85 / 1.85 market implies 108.11%, so the bookmaker pays back 92.50% and keeps 7.50%. A 1.91 / 1.91 market implies 104.71%, so the bookmaker pays back 95.50% and keeps 4.50% — the kind of price a mainstream bookmaker offers on a high-profile football match, and the kind of price a niche curling fixture rarely sees.

A curling match between two evenly-matched teams on a major bookmaker around the World Championships will typically sit in the 5.0%-7.5% margin band for the match winner, depending on the operator and the time of day. Outright markets on the tournament winner run higher — 8% to 12% is common — because the bookmaker has to price twelve or more outcomes and each one carries its own margin. The margin is not a number the operator advertises; it is the difference between the implied probabilities and 100%, and a punter who wants to see it does the arithmetic on the prices. A 5.0% margin on a £100 wager returns £95 in the long run across all wagers at that margin; a 7.5% margin on the same wager returns £92.50. The difference is what the bookmaker keeps for the privilege of running the market.

The takeaway

Curling betting in Great Britain lives behind the same Gambling Commission regime as every other sport offered online, and the ten operators above are ten of the licensed brands that take sports bets from GB customers. None of them leads with curling, none of them ranks curling above football or horse racing on the homepage, and all of them offer the sport on the World Championships, the European Championships, the Grand Slams and the Olympics. The welcome offers are football-led or racing-led in their headline wording, with minimum-odds qualifiers and 7-day expiries that the punter reads before claiming. The margin on a curling match winner is the cost of every wager and is the same shape of cost a football punter pays — a few per cent on top of every price, with the higher-profile the match the lower the margin tends to be.

A punter who reads the licence conditions once and the welcome offer’s small print once has read what matters. A punter who reads the prices on a fixture before staking has read what decides whether the wager is won. The rest is the sport, and the sport is eight stones per team, ten ends per game, and a hammer that decides who scores.

Frequently asked questions

How does a bet on curling work?

A bet on curling works the same way as a bet on any other sport at a licensed bookmaker: the punter picks a selection from the sportsbook’s curling menu (match winner, tournament winner, handicap, total ends, correct score), sets a stake, and the wager is matched against a price. If the selection wins, the stake is returned plus the profit at the price quoted; if the selection loses, the stake is lost. The bookmaker’s margin sits inside every price and is the cost of placing the bet.

Can a punter bet on curling in Great Britain?

Yes. Curling is offered at licensed bookmakers in Great Britain as part of the standard real-events sportsbook menu. The Gambling Commission does not list permitted sports and the Act does not restrict curling, so the menu is the operator’s choice — most major operators carry the sport on World Championships, European Championships, Grand Slams and the Olympics. The punter must be 18 or over and have passed identity verification before placing the first wager.

How can a punter check that a bookmaker holds a Gambling Commission licence?

The Gambling Commission’s public register is searchable by business name, trading name, domain or account number. A punter who wants to confirm a licence types the brand’s name into the register’s search and confirms the account number against the licence number on the brand’s own site. The register is the whole test of who holds a licence, and the licence number on the brand’s site is the document that ties the brand to the register.

How is the return on a bet worked out from the stake and the odds?

The return on a winning bet is the stake multiplied by the decimal odds. A £10 stake at decimal odds 2.50 returns £25 in total, with £15 of profit and the £10 stake returned. A £10 stake at decimal odds 1.50 returns £15 in total, with £5 of profit and the £10 stake returned. The arithmetic is the same on every sport and every market at every licensed bookmaker.

What is the bookmaker’s margin and how can it be seen in the odds?

The bookmaker’s margin is the share of every pound wagered that the operator keeps. It is the difference between the implied probabilities of the prices and 100%: a 1.90 / 1.90 two-way market implies 105.26% (1/1.90 + 1/1.90), so the bookmaker pays back 95.00% and keeps 5.00% as margin. The margin is not advertised but is read off the prices by adding the reciprocal of each price and subtracting from 100%.

How do fractional odds such as 5/1 convert to decimal odds such as 6.00?

Fractional odds of a/b convert to decimal odds of a ÷ b + 1. So 5/1 converts to 5 ÷ 1 + 1 = 6.00, 11/4 converts to 11 ÷ 4 + 1 = 3.75, and evens (1/1) converts to 1 ÷ 1 + 1 = 2.00. Decimal odds shorter than 2.00 are odds-on (the favourite); longer than 2.00 are odds-against (the outsider).

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