The short version. Prices here are recent, not instantaneous. They can be a few minutes old, and on a fast-moving market a few minutes is enough for the price to change. The bookmaker's own price at the moment you place your bet is the only one that counts, and it is the only one either of you is bound by. Nothing on this site is an offer of a bet.
Why it is not live to the second
We hold no data agreement with any bookmaker. Nobody sends us prices, nobody pays us to carry them, and no bookmaker on this board has any say in what appears here. That independence is the point of the whole site, and the cost of it is latency: we read each bookmaker's published prices ourselves, on a cycle of about 4 minutes, rather than being handed a stream.
A comparison site with commercial data agreements can show you prices the instant they move. It also has a commercial relationship with the people whose prices it is judging. We chose the other trade-off, and this page is us being straight about what it costs you.
What that means in practice
- A price can be up to about 4 minutes old and usually is fresher than that. Every screen carries the time of the last read, in words and as an exact timestamp. If it goes past twelve minutes the page says so and turns the indicator off rather than leaving a stale number under a green dot.
- Prices move, and they move fastest when it matters most. In-play, late team news, a horse drifting in the last few minutes before the off. The closer to the event, the less you should rely on any comparison, ours included.
- A market can be suspended or closed between our read and your click. The bookmaker's page is the truth about whether a bet is available at all.
- Where we could not read a bookmaker, we show nothing rather than a guess. A missing price on this board means we do not have one. It never means the bookmaker is not pricing that market, and it is never an estimate, a carried-forward number or an average.
- We show best price, not availability. Stake limits, account restrictions and market rules are the bookmaker's, and we cannot see any of them.
So why call it live odds?
Because that is what the thing is: a board that keeps re-reading and keeps changing, all day, on its own, with the time of every read on the page. It is the ordinary meaning of the term in this market, and every odds comparison you have used works the same way, on a cycle, whether or not it tells you so.
What we will not do is let the word carry more than it should. We do not say prices are guaranteed, we do not say they are real-time, we do not say you will get them, and we do not hide the clock. If you think any page on this site oversells it, that is a correction we want: tell us and we will fix it and say we did.
What we are, and are not
Licensed Bets is a comparison site. It takes no bets, holds no money, has no access to any betting account and cannot accept, settle, void or pay out anything. If a bookmaker's price differs from what you saw here, the bookmaker's price stands, and that is the correct outcome rather than a fault on either side. If you believe a bookmaker has treated you unfairly, the licence number and issuing provincial board are on that bookmaker's page here, which is what that page is for.
18+ only. Gambling can be addictive. If it has stopped being entertainment, the National Responsible Gambling Programme is on 0800 006 008, free and confidential, 24 hours.