Resorts sportsbook review

So normally we’d start our review with a look at the welcome bonus for the sportsbook. After all that’s what most people go for first right? It’s not called a ‘welcome bonus’ for nothing. The problem though is while Resorts does have a welcome bonus unfortunately it’s exclusive to the casino. 

Not offering a sportsbook bonus is admittedly odd especially since our research indicates that Resorts online sportsbook did have a welcome bonus exclusive to the sportsbook in the form of a $250 free bet offer. With any luck this offer will appear again fast but till then we just have to make do with what we’ve got. Unfortunately there isn’t much. (More on that below).

Resorts likes to rotate its offers with small offers coming and going every week and major ones every month. The problem is that a lot of these offers are exclusive to the casino with the sportsbook getting almost nothing. Currently Resorts online sportsbook only has one promotion a month-long lottery that is shared with casino players where bettors have a chance of winning up to $1000 every Monday. 

As this bonus will eventually go we’ll update the review in the future. As for other promotions frequent bettors have a chance to become VIPs and gain exclusive promos. These also rotate however with VIPs occasionally getting deposit bonuses free bets and even gifts. Again a lot of these promos are exclusive to the casino so even if you are a VIP you might not get a good bonus for the sportsbook.

Since all of these bonuses rotate you can never know if a month or week will be good or bad for promos. Sometimes it might be brilliant like a nice cashback promo on losses or sometimes there might be almost nothing for the sportsbook. It all comes down to luck.

Resorts should consider themselves lucky that the score (28) is not lower. A sportsbook without a welcome bonus is already a disgrace but a sportsbook without any permanent bonus at all is downright shameful.I don’t even hate the idea of rotating promos. It’s nice to always have something fresh and new every week. Thing is there also has to be something permanent that I can rely on. I want to log in knowing that there is a guaranteed daily boost or cashback or anything. Instead I come in and find almost nothing.With rotating promos there is the extra problem of not knowing if the next promo will be any good. In my opinion some of the promos I’ve seen have been great and some have been utter trash. If I get a bad month then I just have to fiddle my thumbs and hope the next month has something better. Or more realistically I’d drop Resorts altogether to go to a competitor with some decent promos and an actual welcome bonus like BetRivers. On the pros side VIPs get to benefit from some nice extras including the occasional deposit match or deposit bonus and even some gift giveaways. Be warned though there’s no way to sign up for being a VIP and instead VIPs are chosen by Resorts online sportsbook management. This unfortunately means that you just have to keep playing till someone notices you. As for the contest it’s completely free to enter and gives players a chance to win some extra money just for making bets on the NFL which we’re all doing anyway. There may not be a large number of promotions but the ones that are there are great and let you win just by participating in normal bets.

The payments section for Resorts is a bit of a muddled mess of highs and lows. On the one hand Resorts offers 8 different payment methods yet only 4 of those can also be used to withdraw cash. On the other the Resorts Play+ card is a fantastic deal and an excellent option for bettors.

Full list: VIP Preferred Play+ (VISA Mastercard Discover) PayNearMe Mastercard VISA PayPal Cash at the casino cage

The first immediately noticeable thing about the Play+ card is the general lack of limits. The Resorts Play+ card doubles down on being a card that can be used at any store where Discover is accepted so there are pretty much no limits on it (though of course moderation is always advised when dealing with gambling). Deposits and withdrawals are also instant for this option and there are no fees. It’s a one-of-a-kind Play+ offer.

Policies are very easy to find with a banking page that goes through the terms and conditions of every offer and throws in a few FAQs for good measure. You’ve got your standard options like VISA Mastercard and PayNearMe but you can only withdraw with PayPal VIP Preferred the Play+ card or going on-site and picking up the cash at the casino cage.

As always safety is a high priority for us and we’re always particularly happy when a sportsbook scores highly in this section. Thankfully this Resorts online sportsbook review did not disappoint and the security in this sportsbook is airtight.

Resorts is licensed by the NJDGE and it proudly displays a huge green Responsible Gaming logo on the header which in it has contact details for 800 GAMBLER the Council on Compulsive Gaming and The National Council on Problem Gambling. To top it off Resorts is an award winner with awards from the Casino Player Best of Gaming Awards.

If you start feeling like a gambling addiction is taking hold you can impose limits on yourself with deposit limits session time limits and spend limits all available to the player. 

Finally the site has strong SSL encryption so your credit card details are safe from any nefarious people lurking about the internet.

When it comes to safety there’s very little to fear here. Resorts is a safe and reliable site in every possible way. From a Responsible Gaming perspective all of the tools a person could need are there and free to use from the ‘My Account’ section at any time. It’s also nice to see Resorts offer links to so many different councils letting players get in touch with whomever they feel most comfortable with. I do however wish that it was available in more than 1 state. When a sportsbook is available in more than one state that means that it has several pairs of eyes looking at it and judging it. A sportsbook like BetRivers which is available in 11 states would have had to pass through 11 licensing boards and impress them all. So Resorts only being available in 1 state is unfortunate there.Still 1 is always better than nothing and the NJDGE is a very reputable source so I’ll take it. If Resorts wants that perfect 100 though it’ll need to open in more states and have its own Responsible Gaming platform.

Resorts pulled out all the stops in this section. The support for the sportsbook is nearly flawless. I’ve received a lot of pointless surveys in my emails from sites asking how to improve only for said site to do nothing. Here however the work clearly shows and Resorts have built an exceptional support section.As for the staff themselves they were incredibly helpful. They guided me through every dilemma I had and gave me friendly but informative answers. One staffer in particular gave me extra information that I did not even know I wanted till I had it as if he could see exactly what my mind would want next. These guys and gals nailed it so kudos to them all.The only thing stopping this section from being a perfect 100 is the available times. I know that 24/7 live support is somewhat rare but it’s also the only thing stopping Resorts from having one of the best support systems out there. Just this one change is all it will take to make this a perfect score so Resorts if you’re reading this make it happen.

As always we sampled a bunch of games over time and converted the odds into percentages. After we did all this we took a look at the Resorts percentage payout and saw that it was fine. Not good or bad just fine.

To clarify a bit we normally consider 93% to be on the lower end. So when Resorts came out with 94.71% average payouts at first we were not exactly thrilled. It’s not bad mind you but it’s closer to the 93% number than we would have liked. 

However things start to look far more positive when we look specifically at the football and basketball percentage payouts. Both of them are fiddling around the 96% mark which is excellent. Seeing how Resorts has doubled down on football this is very nice to see as it at least is not trying to rob its players on the one sport that it excels at.

What’s impressive though is the live payout percentages. We always expect live percentages to be a little bit lower than the alternatives because players have the advantage of seeing the game in front of them. However 94.22% is almost the same number as the average payouts which is excellent. This means players can safely bet on live without losing too much money to Resorts. 

*data gathered 20th January 2021

I’m pleasantly surprised with how things turned out in this section. 94.71% is a solid number for average payouts overall so Resorts is already off to a good starting point here. Mix that in with the higher percentage payouts for both football and basketball and you should be having a good time overall with this sportsbook. I’m especially happy to see that there is only a small dip between general and live payouts. To compare Borgata dips from 94.70% general payouts to 91.58% live payouts so Resorts only going from 94.71% to 94.22% is great. Still things could always be better. I would have loved to have seen Resorts hit the 97% mark for the payouts or at the very least offer some boosted odds. Looks like we’ll just have to make do with what we’ve got.

Resorts unfortunately is also lacking in the ‘features’ department. There are several missing features that we expect most sportsbooks to have starting with a cash-out feature. Nowadays most sportsbooks let you cash out of existing bets either partially or fully however Resorts has decided to omit this. A bet builder is present but it doesn’t make up for the lack of this crucial feature.

A live stream is also missing when players decide to move to live betting. This one is not so bad as Resorts makes up for this by showing a large amount of data regarding the match and the teams. Players can open a pop-up window that will show the team’s history. This also includes in-game data such as attacks and dangerous attacks so live betting is still a very good option. Odds are also quickly updated so all in all the live betting section is doing ok.

Finally Resorts only offers parlays as a special betting option. This is not entirely the fault of Resorts and simply something that all US sportsbooks suffer from but with both cash out and live streams missing we were certainly hoping that Resorts would make up for it with something else.

When I saw how few sports Resorts had I was hoping that they would at least make up for it with the features available. If you can’t have the quantity then surely you would go for quality? However with both cash out and live stream missing as well as only parlays being available as a different betting option I’m sorely disappointed.Nowadays it’s pretty unheard of to have a US sportsbook not offer some kind of early cash-out. When you have sites like bet365 allowing you to partially cash out early and still keep your parlay bonus going you have to step up your game to compete.The good news is that the live betting section is still very good with very fast odds and a ton of data. I could barely keep up with the tennis odds as they rapidly changed from number to number and the amount of information available in the pop-up could fill an entire book. So live betting is still viable.I still have hope for this Resorts online sportsbook review so let’s move onto the odds and see how Resorts fairs over there.

Many things add flavor to a sportsbook. Bonuses features support these are all things that add value to a sportsbook and help make it enticing. But the true beating heart of any sportsbook will always be the sports themselves. So it’s shocking to us that Resorts only has 15 sports available on its roster.

15 sports is not a great number at all. Considering Resorts has been open since 2019 we fully expected to find more sports on their site by now. To put this into perspective the NJ sportsbook bet365 comes in at 34 sports more than double what Resorts is offering.

The bad news doesn’t stop here. Resorts doesn’t even have all the essential sports with baseball being completely missing. Bet365 Golden Nugget BetRivers all of these and more have at least offered futures markets for baseball with players being able to bet on baseball teams to win outright in major upcoming leagues. At Resorts there’s nothing forcing baseball fans to wait till it’s available or more realistically go to a different site.

There is at least some good news though. Football does have an impressive amount of markets available with 326 total options. Basketball and soccer also have a high amount of markets with both clocking in at 100+ (though with basketball this number drops significantly in the NCAAB). 

Other than those sports the rest is somewhat unimpressive with ice hockey coming in at 50+ markets and everything else struggling to crack the 20+ mark.

I sure hope you’re a football NBA or soccer fan because that’s pretty much all that you can get over here. The sports selection is not great and the sports that are here have very few markets if they’re not popular. Even in a popular sport like basketball the less popular leagues have far fewer markets. The NCAAB has 18 markets which is just flat-out embarrassing. There’s really not much else to say. Sure the football section is fantastic but in this day and age what online sportsbook doesn’t have a good football section? Most sportsbooks out there throw in something else to stand out whether it’s a massive sports selection like BetRivers or something unique like virtual sports with bet365. Resorts has nothing. Not even something unusual like esports or politics. Instead Resorts threw all of its eggs into the football basket and hoped for the best. Its best though is simply not good enough and if Resorts doesn’t want its player abandoning ship for other sportsbooks then it has to up its game and bring in something to make it stand out from the rest.