Proline betting in Ontario does not include NBA basketball. (Photo credit: Keith Allison / Foter / CC BY-SA)
Proline sports betting, like most things in life, has both pros and cons.
Here’s a look at the arguments against Proline sports betting compared to online sportsbooks:
Proline Sports Betting – The Bad
1. Don’t lose your ticket
When you make a Proline bet in Ontario, you’ll get a lottery ticket. If you lose this ticket or run it through the wash, you won’t be getting paid.
Provinces are slowly adding online sports betting to their lottery offerings, but not all of them have it yet. Internet sportsbooks, on the other hand, keep an online record of all your wagers.
2. Worse odds than sportsbooks
The juice (commission) that Proline charges on its wagers are far higher than sportsbooks charge, making for much smaller payouts.
The average Proline payout on a winning wager is up to 50% less than you’d receive from winning a similar bet at a sportsbook.
British Columbia’s PlayNow is the only provincial sports lottery that offers comparable odds to online sportsbooks.
3. You must bet more than one game
Thanks to a long-standing law in the Canadian Criminal Code, Canadian sports bettors can’t wager on the outcome of a single game.
Proline requires you to bet on at least three games (two, if betting point spread) on your ticket, and you must get all your games right in order to get paid.
Sportsbooks allow you to bet one game at a time. You can bet multi-game (parlay) tickets as well, but your odds of winning are much higher when betting one game at a time.
4. Limited betting selection
If you like betting on college sports, you’re likely out of luck with Proline. Proline offers wagering on only a select number of college football and basketball games each week.
Proline does offer wagering on professional hockey, baseball, football and soccer, as well as some individual prop bets. Wagering on basketball is not available in Ontario, a stipulation the NBA insisted on when expanding to Toronto 20 years ago, but is available in the rest of the country. There is a movement underway to get NBA basketball back on Proline tickets in Ontario, but it hasn’t been successful.
Almost every sportsbook offers wagering on all college men’s basketball and football games in addition to all the mainstream professional sports. Many also offer betting on some of the most unique sports and events you can think of, like handball, billiards, darts, politics and reality TV. You can also bet on first and second halves of games with sportsbooks, and almost all sportsbooks offer live in-game betting as well.
5. No bonuses
Picture the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld, shouting “No bonuses for you!”
That’s the stance of the provincial sports lotteries. The best perk they offer is allowing you to enter your losing ticket into a draw for more tickets or free merchandise.
Nearly all sportsbooks offer generous signup and reload bonuses that you can use to build your bankroll.
6. Confusing rules
Where can one team finish with more points than another, yet have the game be declared as a tie? Proline, that’s where. The provincial sports lotteries have a number of confusing tie rules when it comes to grading your wagers, rules designed to stack the odds against you a little bit more.
Any football game decided by three points or less (a fairly common result) is declared a tie by most provincial sports lotteries, so if the team you bet on wins by a field goal, you lose. Same goes for any basketball game decided by five points or less.
Hockey can also be infuriating. If you pick a tie and the game is decided in the five-minute overtime session, you lose your wager at some provincial sports lotteries. Proline only credits a tie to a game that takes a shootout to decide.
If you bet on a team to win a game at a sportsbook (betting on the moneyline), you win if the team you bet on wins. Plain and simple. How much your team wins by only matters if you bet on the point spread or puck line.
7. Limits
The most you can risk on a single Proline ticket is $100. You can get around this by betting the same ticket several times, but the machine won’t accept an identical ticket twice in a row.
Sportsbooks won’t even raise an eyebrow at your $100 bet. Almost all sportsbooks accept bets up to $300 on any event, and many books routinely accept wagers of more than $1,000 per game.
8. Convenience
Have you ever watched the pregame show and learned a key player was out of the lineup or a backup goalie was starting?
In order to capitalize on this new-found information with a Proline bet, you have to throw on your shoes and jacket (or your big thick winter coat if its hockey season) and run down to the convenience store to get your bet in before the game begins (unless you live in a province that offers online betting).
Or you can just log onto the Internet and quickly place a bet with your sportsbook in the comfort of your own home or on your mobile device. Does it get any better than that?
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