Betting on Curling Online in 2026: What the UK Market Actually Offers

Updated October 2026

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Current as of 26 October 2026 against the Gambling Commission’s public register for Great Britain. Curling sits in an odd corner of the British betting market. Football, horse racing and tennis fill the front page of every licensed sportsbook; curling sits one or two menus deeper, dependent on which international tournament is live and whether the operator has bothered to price it up. That thinness is not a bug in the market; it is the sport. Curling’s main events arrive in distinct bursts — the World Championships, the European Championships, the Grand Slam of Curling, the Olympic cycle every four years — and between them, the in-running offering is narrow. A bettor in Great Britain who wants to back or lay a curling match has to plan around the calendar, and the rest of this page is about how.

The shape of the market follows from one structural fact. There is no statutory list of permitted sports or events in the Gambling Act 2005: a bookmaker serving customers in Great Britain needs a Gambling Commission licence wherever it is based, and what may be priced under it is the operator’s own choice. That is why a niche sport like curling appears in fits and starts: it appears when the operator thinks there is money to be made, with the markets and margin it thinks it can hold. The reader’s job is to know which operators carry the sport at all, which markets they actually show when they do, and what those prices are costing in margin once the headline number is stripped away.

This page is built around five angles. The first is the legal frame that makes the rest of the analysis possible — who is allowed to take one, what is the test of a licence, what is the protection the licence buys. The second is the safer-gambling scaffolding that surrounds every licensed site: the tools that exist, the ones that are announced, the ones that have not yet started. The third is the sport itself — what curling is, how an end is scored, what tournaments draw enough betting interest to be priced up. The fourth is the top-ten ranking of bookmakers the Gambling Commission register lists for Great Britain and that price up curling or carry a sportsbook deep enough to plausibly do so, with the comparison that follows. The fifth is the overview: the markets offered, how odds are built and what a margin of five per cent on a two-way line means for a £10 stake.

Five frequently asked questions sit at the end, in their own section.

The Legal Frame for Betting on Curling in Great Britain

A curling bet placed online in Great Britain sits inside the Gambling Act 2005, which covers England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland runs on its own older regime and is not regulated by the same statute, so a licence that says “Great Britain” does not regulate Northern Ireland, and a brand licensed for the British mainland can still refuse customers from there. Since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 an operator whose remote facilities are used in Great Britain needs a Gambling Commission licence wherever the operator itself is based: a Curaçao or Maltese or Gibraltar licence on its own does nothing for a UK-facing customer, because the test is where the customer is, not where the company sits. Sections 33 and 36 of the 2005 Act carry the offence for providing gambling in Great Britain without the licence the Act requires, and the sanction is aimed at the operator — up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment or a level-5 fine on summary conviction, six months in Scotland. The law does not create an offence aimed at a customer who merely bets on an unlicensed site, which is why the honest framing is “loss of protection” rather than “illegal to use”.

The Commission’s public register is the whole test of who holds a licence. It can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and what shows there is the answer to “is this brand licensed?”. A domain ending in .co.uk proves nothing — licensed operators use .com as well — and the count of licence holders is large and not the point of this page. The remote licence type relevant to a curling bet is the remote general betting standard (real events) category, which is the one this page’s operators all carry. Other remote categories exist — virtual events, pool betting, the betting-intermediary licence that runs the exchanges — but a single-event sports bet on a curling match falls under the first. Financial spread betting is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, not the Commission, which is why a brand like Spreadex can sit on the Commission register for fixed-odds betting and the FCA register for spread betting at the same time: the two regimes cover different products.

Minimum age is 18. Name, address and date of birth are verified before the first deposit or bet, including with a free bet or a bonus, and that verification has been a licence condition since 7 May 2019. There is no anonymous play at a licensed site, and anyone who treats that as friction rather than as a feature is reading the regime backwards. What may be bet on is, again, the operator’s choice under its licence: no statutory list of permitted events exists, which is why a curling fixture can be priced up one week and absent the next. In-play betting is offered by GB bookmakers and is controlled by the operator’s licence conditions and customer-protection duties, not by a free-standing statute, so it is never correct to describe it as “unrestricted” as a legal conclusion. Esports, virtual events, politics and novelty markets are similarly offered where the operator chooses, with virtual events sitting under a separate category on the register.

Offshore is the other side. An unlicensed site accepting a British customer has not passed the test of the public register, and what the customer gives up is concrete: no GAMSTOP coverage, no Commission complaints route, no approved dispute-resolution body, no British consumer redress if the operator withholds funds, no obligation to honour the bonus-cap rules, no £150 vulnerability check. Enforcement against unlicensed operators is disruption rather than blocking — cease-and-desist notices, search-engine referrals, work with registrars and hosts and payment providers — and the Commission has been given, or is about to receive, court-order DNS blocking powers. None of that protects a customer who has already deposited with a brand that does not pay out. The cleanest version of the trade-off: licensed means verification, limits, GAMSTOP and a bonus cap; unlicensed means none of those and a real risk of losing the money in the account. Neither is “the safe choice” by default, and the choice is the bettor’s.

Safer Gambling Around a Curling Bet

Every GB-licensed online operator takes part in GAMSTOP, which is the multi-operator self-exclusion scheme run as a mandatory licence condition since 31 March 2020. Self-exclusion periods are six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal; once the minimum period has run, the exclusion stays in place for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. The service covers online sites and apps; high-street betting shops use a separate scheme. Anyone who has self-excluded and then tries to open a new account at a licensed site will be blocked at the verification stage, which is one of the more visible payoffs of the licensed-only regime.

Deposit limits are a separate lever, and they sit inside the Remote Technical Standards rather than as a customer’s free choice. The Commission’s RTS 12 requires operators to offer a gross deposit limit on a fixed time frame, with the first changes live since 31 October 2025 and a second phase postponed to 30 September 2026. The state does not set a deposit or loss ceiling for betting; the ceiling is the limit the customer sets for themselves, and the ceiling the operator imposes by RTS. Financial vulnerability checks have been in force since 30 August 2024 for licensed remote betting where a customer’s deposits minus withdrawals exceed £150 in a rolling 30 days; that check has run since 28 February 2025. It is a public-record check — bankruptcy and county-court judgment territory — not an income check and not a credit-reference check, and the line between it and the more onerous “affordability checks” the press has covered is the one to watch. Financial risk assessments have been announced in a staged plan with no start date — write “announced, staged, no start date” rather than “in force” — and the staging is exactly what makes the rules hard to read in plain English.

Help exists outside the operator. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline; GambleAware funds treatment and education; NHS gambling clinics operate in several regions; Gamblers Anonymous runs peer-support meetings. A bettor who has decided the curling season is the wrong place to be is not on their own at any of those doors, and the route in is the same route out. Several of the operators reviewed below — Fitzwilliam Sports is one example among the broader market — link directly to GambleAware, GAMSTOP and Gamblers Anonymous from the safer-gambling page, and that linking is part of what a licence buys.

Identity verification before the first deposit is the other quiet feature of the regime. A new account at a licensed site cannot place a bet, claim a free bet, or trigger a welcome bonus without name, address and date-of-birth checks having passed. That cuts both ways: it removes anonymous play, and it is also the route by which a self-excluded customer is caught at the door. The reader’s question is not whether to verify but whether to bet at a site that does not — and the answer the rest of this page gives is to use the Commission’s register as the test and to take the verification as the price of admission.

The Sport of Curling and Where the Betting Calendar Comes From

A curling team has four players in the standard format and two in mixed doubles, and each player throws two of the team’s eight stones. A game is played in ends rather than in innings, and an end runs until sixteen stones have been delivered — eight by each side — and the score is then counted: the team with the stone closest to the button, the painted target at the centre of the house, scores one point for each of its stones that lies closer to the button than the opponent’s closest stone. Only stones in the house count, and only the team that lies in it scores. Games usually run eight or ten ends, and the international competitive game is generally ten. Ties do not exist as a final score: tied games go to extra ends.

The hammer — the last stone of an end — is the single most important tactical fact in the sport, and the one a curling betting market is quietly built on. The hammer passes to the team that did not score in the previous end; if an end is blanked, with no score, the hammer stays with the same team. A team that scores without the hammer is giving the hammer back; a team that blanks an end while holding the hammer keeps it. The reading for a bettor: a side that goes into the last end with the hammer and the lead is in the strongest position the sport allows, and the in-running odds on a one-shot lead with hammer are tighter than the in-running odds on a one-shot lead without it. The strategic texture of curling is not a side note; it is what makes the sport legible at speed.

The stones themselves weigh between 17.24 and 19.96 kilograms under World Curling Federation rules, which is what makes the sport slow in absolute terms even when it is fast in tactical terms. A stone takes roughly twenty-five seconds of travel from hog line to the house, and the sweepers can change its line by a metre or more. That slowness is part of why the sport reads so well on a streamed broadcast and so badly on a betting screen: there is time to set up a market and time to move it, and a bookmaker can run in-play prices on every stone if it wants to.

Curling has been an official Olympic medal sport since the 1998 Winter Olympics, and mixed doubles has been an Olympic discipline since 2018. The Olympic cycle is the betting calendar’s biggest driver: every four years, the qualifying tournaments and the Games themselves generate a deep market across GB operators, and the rest of the time the market contracts to the World Championships, the European Championships and the Grand Slam of Curling. The bettor’s calendar follows that pattern, and the operators’ coverage follows the bettors’.

The other reason the sport reads thinly between events is that the player pool is small. A regular World Curling Championship features ten men’s and ten women’s teams, and the qualifying path for the Olympics is even narrower. That is not a market failure; it is the sport, and a bookmaker pricing up ten teams in a ten-end final will struggle to find liquidity on anything other than the match winner. The realistic curling menu at most GB-licensed sportsbooks during a non-Olympic year is match winner, sometimes a totals line on ends, occasionally a hand-built same-game multi on a high-profile final. Olympic years the menu lengthens, and the lines tighten.

The ten operators ranked below are all holders of a Gambling Commission remote licence for Great Britain, which is the test this page applies. None is “the only” licensed operator: the Commission’s public register lists many more brands than any single article can feature, and a place in a top-ten is a placement, not a licence. Several of the brands sit under common ownership — a detail that affects how offers are structured more than how prices are set — but each appears on the register under its own trading name and under its own account number, and each is reviewed as the brand a customer opens an account with.

A note on offer terminology: every sportsbook below runs a welcome promotion for new customers, and each describes it in its own terms. Some pay free bets whose stake is not returned with a winning selection, some refund as a free bet, some pay bonus cash with turnover attached, and some run a price boost on a marquee event. The headline number is rarely the whole offer, and the assessment below tries to give the shape of each one without quoting working codes or steps to claim. A reader who wants the precise terms checks the operator’s own promotional page at sign-up.

1. Bet365

bet365 is the official global betting partner of the UEFA Champions League, and the brand’s app is the most downloaded sports betting app in the UK. The product depth on football is the headline, but the sportsbook carries curling when the calendar brings a World Championship or an Olympic Games, and the in-play menu is the deepest in the British market on most sports. The features that show on the app include Bet Builder+, which combines markets from one event into a single bet available pre-match and in-play; Super Boosts, which are price boosts on a small set of marquee selections; Winnings Boosts on Bet Builders and selected singles; and daily Bet Boosts across the sportsbook. The brand is licensed under a Commission account that sits in the register’s remote general betting standard (real events) category.

The welcome offer for new UK customers is structured around free bets that require an opening sports bet at minimum odds, with the free-bet stake not returned on a win. The exact mechanics change between promotions, which is why this page does not pin a number to the brand’s current welcome. The right read is that bet365 pays in free bets rather than in bonus cash, which keeps the wagering load on the customer lighter than a turnover-attached bonus but shifts the expected value onto the qualifying bet’s odds.

For a curling bettor, bet365 is the deepest sportsbook in the British market and the one most likely to be running a price during the World Championships or the Olympic cycle. The in-running offering on curling is thin outside those bursts, which is the sport’s fault. The bet builder product is the place to look first when curling is live, because the same-game-multi menu is what makes the deeper markets accessible from a single betting slip.

2. William Hill

William Hill is one of the older names on the British high street and holds a remote general betting licence through the Commission’s register. It prices curling during the major international windows, and the same-game-multi and cash-out products sit on the platform. The brand is best known for horse racing — antepost markets, best-odds-guaranteed on UK and Irish racing, non-runner money-back rules — but the sportsbook menu outside racing is wide, and curling sits on it during the calendar’s live windows.

The introductory promotion for new UK users involves a free-bet package requiring a qualifying sports bet at minimum odds, with the free-bet stake not returned on a win. The shape is similar to other major sportsbooks; the real differentiator is the racing product underneath, which holds little value for a curling bettor.

For a curling bettor, William Hill is a major presence on the British high street, which makes it easier to walk into a shop and place a bet on a televised World Championship final than to do the same online. The weakness is that the in-play product on curling is thin outside the major events, and the welcome offer is comparable to that of other major sportsbooks.

3. Betfair

Betfair is a betting exchange rather than a traditional sportsbook, which changes the way the curling menu reads. The exchange lets a customer back a selection at one set of prices or lay it at another, with the operator taking a commission on net winnings rather than building a margin into the price. That structure produces tighter odds on the events the exchange covers and no coverage at all on the events it does not. Curling coverage on the exchange is thin between major events, but the price on a high-profile World Championship final or an Olympic final is the best in the British market, because the back-lay spread is set by customers rather than by a single bookmaker’s margin.

The sportsbook side of the brand — sometimes called Betfair Sportsbook — runs alongside the exchange and carries a more traditional fixed-odds product with a margin built into the price. The promotional entry point for new UK customers is a free-bet or bonus structure requiring a qualifying bet at minimum odds; the brand is licensed through the Commission’s register, and the exchange runs under the betting-intermediary licence category rather than the remote general betting standard one.

For a curling bettor who can read a back-lay market, Betfair is the place to find the tightest price on a marquee event. For a bettor who wants a same-game-multi on a less-prominent match, the sportsbook is the better entry point. The exchange’s weakness is liquidity on anything other than the biggest events; the sportsbook’s weakness is that its margin is wider than the exchange’s.

4. Paddy Power

Paddy Power runs under the same licensee as Betfair on the Commission’s register, and the sportsbook carries curling during the international calendar. The brand’s strength is its promotional cadence: price boosts on marquee events, money-back specials on multi-leg accumulators, and an aggressive welcome offer for new UK customers that is structured around free bets at minimum qualifying odds. The free-bet stake is not returned with a winning selection.

The in-play product on curling is similar in depth to the rest of the British big-six sportsbooks, and the same-game-multi product sits on the platform. The brand does not set itself apart on curling specifically; it sets itself apart on football and horse racing, where the price boosts and money-back specials are most aggressive.

For a curling bettor, Paddy Power is one of several British big-six sportsbooks that will run a price during a World Championship or an Olympic Games and one of the few that will run a price-boost or money-back special on the same event. The promotional cadence is the brand’s edge, and the edge cuts both ways: a price boost on a curling match is a bettor’s friend when the boosted price is bigger than the true price, and a money-back special is a bettor’s friend when the qualifying leg loses; both promotions exist to bring the bettor in rather than to enrich the bettor’s expected value.

5. Coral

Coral runs under the same licensee as Ladbrokes on the Commission’s register, and the two brands share much of their product and pricing. The sportsbook prices curling during the major international windows, and the same-game-multi and cash-out products are available. New UK customers can access a free-bet package that requires a qualifying sports bet at minimum odds, with the stake not returned on a win.

The brand’s strength is its high-street presence in the UK, and its weakness on curling is the same as elsewhere: the in-play offering is thin outside the major events. For a curling bettor, Coral is an option; the choice between it and others is more often about the welcome offer and the promotional cadence.

6. Ladbrokes

Ladbrokes shares much of its product and pricing with Coral. It prices curling during the major international windows, and the brand’s racing product — best-odds-guaranteed on UK and Irish racing, antepost markets, non-runner money-back rules — is heavily promoted.

For a curling bettor, Ladbrokes is one option among many. The brand’s edge is its racing product, which is irrelevant to a curling bet; the weakness on curling is the same as the rest of the market: the sport’s calendar rather than the operator’s effort.

7. Sky Bet

Sky Bet is licensed through the Commission’s register, and it prices curling during the major international windows. The brand’s strength is its integration with Sky Sports’ television coverage: a customer with Sky Sports can watch a curling tournament on the same platform that takes the bet. New UK users can access a free-bet package requiring a qualifying sports bet at minimum odds.

The brand’s weakness on curling is the same as the rest of the market: the in-play offering is thin outside the major events. For a curling bettor who already has a Sky subscription, Sky Bet is the most integrated platform; for a bettor without one, the integration is irrelevant.

8. BetVictor

BetVictor holds a remote general betting licence through the Commission’s register, and the sportsbook carries curling during the major international windows. The brand has a longer history on the British market than most of its peers and runs a more conservative product than the rest of the major sportsbooks.

For a curling bettor, BetVictor is one of several sportsbooks that will run a price during a World Championship or an Olympic Games. The brand does not set itself apart on curling specifically, and its offering on the sport is a standard one, constrained by the calendar.

9. 888sport

888sport is licensed through the Commission’s register, and it prices curling during the major international windows. The brand’s strength is its integration with 888’s casino product, which makes the platform a one-stop shop for a customer who plays both; its weakness on curling is the same as elsewhere: the in-play offering is thin outside the major events. New UK customers are offered a free-bet or bonus structure that requires a qualifying sports bet at minimum odds.

For a curling bettor, 888sport is a solid platform, and the choice between it and other operators is often about the welcome offer and the casino integration rather than specific curling-focused tools.

10. Unibet

Unibet states it has operated since 1999, and its UK site is run by Platinum Gaming Limited, Gibraltar, under Gambling Commission account 45322. The brand carries curling during the major international windows, and the sportsbook’s product depth is comparable to the rest of the British big-six. The welcome offer for new UK customers is “Get £40 in Free Bets when you bet £20”: a deposit and sports bet of £20 or more at minimum odds of 2.0 (1/1), with free bets expiring within 7 days of issue, for new GB customers using a debit card or instant bank transfer. The free-bet stake is not returned with a winning selection, and the wagering load is on the qualifying bet rather than on the free bet.

For a curling bettor, Unibet is one of several British big-six sportsbooks that will run a price during a World Championship or an Olympic Games. The welcome offer is competitive with the rest of the market but does not set the brand apart; the assessment on the curling product is the same as for the rest of the big-six.

How Curling Markets Are Built and What the Margin Costs

A curling match winner market is a two-way line: one side at one set of decimal odds, the other at another. A typical World Championship final might be priced at 1.90 for the favourite and 1.90 for the underdog, which looks symmetric but is not. The asymmetry sits inside the price: the bookmaker’s margin is the share of every pound staked that the operator keeps on average, and it is calculated by adding the implied probabilities of every outcome and subtracting the result from one. The implied probability of a decimal price of 1.90 is one divided by 1.90, which is 52.63 per cent; add the two sides’ implied probabilities together and the result is 105.26 per cent, which is 5.26 per cent more than 100 per cent. The 5.26 per cent is the margin: the bookmaker’s edge on every pound staked, before any promotional offer or price boost is layered on top.

A margin of around five per cent on a two-way curling line is at the cheap end of the British market. Football match winner sits closer to two to four per cent on a balanced Premier League fixture, tennis match winner on a men’s Grand Slam main draw is similar, and horse racing is wider — eight to fifteen per cent depending on the race and the bookmaker. Curling at five per cent is reasonable, and a bettor comparing two operators on the same fixture is comparing the difference between two margins of around five per cent: small in absolute terms, but real over a season of betting. The British convention writes prices in fractional form for horse racing and in decimal form for most other sports; the math is the same, and a fractional price of 9/10 is exactly a decimal price of 1.90.

The return on a winning bet is the stake multiplied by the decimal odds, and the net profit is the stake multiplied by the odds minus one. A £10 bet at 1.90 returns £19, of which £9 is profit. The payout share of the market — the proportion of every pound staked that is returned to customers on average — is one minus the margin, which is 94.74 per cent on the example above. That payout share is what the bettor keeps on average across a large number of bets at the same margin; no single bet pays out at that rate, and the bettor’s actual return over a handful of bets will be either better or worse than the average depending on the outcomes.

A combination bet — an accumulator or a same-game multi — multiplies the odds of the legs together into one price, and the margin compounds. A two-leg same-game-multi at 1.90 and 1.90 has a combined price of 3.61, and the combined margin is the sum of the legs’ margins minus the cross-term: in practice, a two-leg multi on a five-per-cent-margin market carries a margin closer to nine or ten per cent, and a four-leg multi carries a margin closer to eighteen or twenty per cent. That compounding is why accumulator insulators and price boosts are aimed at the same product: the bookmaker’s edge on a multi is wider than the edge on any single leg, and a price boost can be sized to look generous while still leaving the operator ahead on margin.

A free bet is the offer type the British market uses most often, and the value of a free bet is the free-bet amount multiplied by the odds minus one, divided by the odds, multiplied by the payout share of the market. A £10 free bet at 1.90 on a market with a 94.74 per cent payout share is worth roughly £4.74 on average: the £10 stake is not returned with a winning selection, and the expected value of the free bet is the expected profit times the probability of winning, which collapses to the formula above. That is the realistic ceiling on what a free bet is worth, and any marketing language that promises more is promising what the arithmetic cannot deliver.

The bonus-cap rule is the piece the licensed-operator regime adds on top. Wagering requirements on bonuses have been capped at 10x since 19 January 2026, and mixed-product promotions — an offer that requires gambling on two or more product types, such as “bet on football to get free spins” — are banned. A £10 bonus at 50x wagering would require £500 of qualifying bets; under the cap, no more than £100 of qualifying bets is required for a £10 bonus. Whether the cap applies to free bets with no wagering condition, and any cap on the money value of a bonus, are not established. The honest read: a £10 free bet with no turnover attached is worth roughly what the formula above says, and a £10 bonus with 10x wagering attached is worth less, because the qualifying bets are made at the bookmaker’s margin.

Overview: Putting It Together for a Curling Bettor

A bettor in Great Britain who wants to back or lay a curling match in 2026 starts with the calendar. The Olympic cycle dominates the betting interest; the World Championships and the European Championships carry it between Olympic years; the Grand Slam of Curling fills some of the gaps. Outside those windows, the in-running offering at most sportsbooks is narrow, and the realistic menu is the match winner market with an occasional totals line on ends.

The next move is to pick a sportsbook. The British big-six — bet365, William Hill, Betfair (exchange and sportsbook), Paddy Power, Coral, Ladbrokes, Sky Bet, BetVictor, 888sport, Unibet — all carry curling during the major windows, and the differences are on the welcome offer, the promotional cadence and the in-play depth rather than on the curling product itself. Betfair’s exchange is the place to find the best price on a marquee event, because the back-lay spread is set by customers rather than by a single bookmaker’s margin; the sportsbooks are the place to find the same-game-multi product on a less prominent match. The bettor’s edge is to compare two operators’ prices on the same fixture before placing a bet, and to remember that a margin of five per cent on a £10 stake is £0.53 of expected cost on every bet.

The safer-gambling scaffolding is the part the licensed-only regime adds on top. GAMSTOP is the self-exclusion route; deposit limits are the customer’s own lever; the £150 vulnerability check is the operator’s lever; the bonus cap is the regulator’s lever. None of those protections exist at an unlicensed site, and the honest framing is that an unlicensed site is not “illegal to use” but is unprotected to use. A bettor who has decided the curling season is the wrong place to be can self-exclude at GAMSTOP and be blocked from every licensed site in Great Britain for six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal, and the route back is GAMSTOP’s own process.

The arithmetic is the part the marketing tends to skip. A winning curling bet at 1.90 returns £19 on a £10 stake, of which £9 is profit. A free bet is worth roughly its face value multiplied by the odds minus one, divided by the odds, multiplied by the market’s payout share, which is around 47 per cent of face value at 1.90 on a five-per-cent-margin market. A accumulator compounds the bookmaker’s margin, and a four-leg multi carries roughly double the margin of a single leg. None of those numbers is hidden from the reader; the published numbers are the decimal prices, and the rest of the calculation is the reader’s to do.

The rest of this page is the questions readers ask most often about curling betting in Great Britain, with the answers the public register, the operator’s own terms and the math above support.

Frequently Asked Questions About Online Curling Betting

How do I bet on curling?

Pick a sportsbook licensed by the Gambling Commission for Great Britain, open an account, pass the identity verification (name, address, date of birth), deposit with a debit card or bank transfer (credit cards are banned for gambling in Great Britain), and find the curling match under the sportsbook’s winter-sports or niche-sports menu. Place a single bet on the match winner market, or build a same-game multi on a high-profile final if the operator offers a bet builder. Settle the bet from your betting slip; in-play bets settle as the match ends, pre-match bets settle once the event starts.

Can I bet on curling online in the UK?

Yes, at any sportsbook licensed by the Gambling Commission for Great Britain. The Commission’s public register is the test of who holds a licence, and the brands reviewed on this page all appear there. The sport is offered during the international calendar — the World Championships, the European Championships, the Grand Slam of Curling, and the Olympic cycle — and the menu narrows between major events. There is no statutory list of permitted sports, so what is offered is the operator’s own choice under its licence conditions.

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

Search the Commission’s public register by business name, trading name, domain or account number. The register lists every licensee, the category of remote licence held (general betting standard — real events, general betting standard — virtual events, pool betting, betting intermediary), and the trading names the licence covers. A domain ending in .co.uk proves nothing — licensed operators use .com as well — and a brand that does not appear on the register is not licensed, regardless of what its footer claims.

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

For decimal odds, multiply the stake by the odds to get the total return, and subtract the stake to get the net profit. A £10 bet at 1.90 returns £19, of which £9 is profit. For fractional odds, convert to decimal first (a/b becomes a ÷ b + 1; 9/10 becomes 1.90), then apply the same formula. A combination bet multiplies the legs’ odds together into one price, and the return is the stake multiplied by the combined price.

What is the bookmaker’s margin and how can I see it in the odds?

The margin is the share of every pound staked that the bookmaker keeps on average, and it sits inside every price. To calculate it on a two-way market, divide each decimal price into one to get the implied probability, add the two implied probabilities together, and subtract the result from one (or 100 per cent). A two-way line at 1.90 and 1.90 gives implied probabilities of 52.63 per cent each, summing to 105.26 per cent, which is a margin of 5.26 per cent. A lower margin means a higher payout share and a cheaper bet for the customer; a higher margin means a lower payout share and a more expensive bet.

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

The conversion is fractional divided by fractional plus one: 5/1 becomes 5 ÷ 1 + 1 = 6.00. A fractional price of 1/2 becomes 1 ÷ 2 + 1 = 1.50. The decimal price is the total return per unit staked, including the returned stake, and the net profit is the decimal price minus one, multiplied by the stake. A £10 bet at 6.00 returns £60, of which £50 is profit.

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