Swopstakes Review

Swopstakes is a social sweepstakes website where visitors can place bets on horse racing and live sports. While the sweepstakes concept isn’t new, Swopstakes has won awards for its unique twist on a popular format.

On Swopstakes, you compete in live racing and sports events. Unlike a traditional sweepstake contest, Swopstakes differs from the competition because your contest will play out throughout the meeting. In this Swopstakes review, we’ll review the details of the website to see what it offers to players in Australia. 

A Swopstakes game or contest is played out over a race or game. For easier understanding, we’ll use a horse racing tournament or ‘meeting’ as an example, as it is relatively easy to grasp for those of you who may be new to social sweepstakes. 

A pool of unique tickets is issued at the start of each meeting. At the end of the meeting, the ticket with the winning runner of each race is declared the winner. 

With Swopstakes, there are two ways in which you can play. The simpler, more straightforward method is to buy several tickets, sit back and enjoy the races. You can check your tickets to see if you’ve bought one with the winning combination. 

If you prefer a more elaborate strategy, you can deploy any of these methods to see if you’ve picked the winning ticket: 

• Fold – cash out the tickets that you think will lose.
• Hold – hang on to the tickets that you think will win at the end.
• Raise – buy a larger number of tickets to improve your chances of being the winner.
• Swop – throw out all the tickets in your possession and purchase new ones.

In the Swopstakes format, every game offers you a chance to win cash prizes. With the grand prize usually set to A$250 for a day of horse racing, Swopstakes puts an exciting spin on the traditional sweepstakes model. Players who get knocked out late are awarded free-to-play credits that they can use for the next set of Swopstakes Australia tickets. 

Swopstakes – How Does It Work?

Understanding Swopstakes will be much easier if we first glance over how a traditional sweepstake contest works. Let’s consider this example of a sweepstake on a horse race: 

• 24 tickets are issued – one for each participating horse, ensuring a single winner at the end.
• You buy and draw a ticket at random before the race commences.
• Ultimately, you will win if your ticket has the winning horse’s name.

A game of Swopstakes plays out almost identically, except it takes place over a series of races called rounds. For example, a Swopstakes game could play out over race day as follows: 

• Each game has a ticket for every possible combination of winning outcomes.
• Only one ticket will have the winning outcome in each event, guaranteeing a winner in each round.
• As each round is completed, tickets with losing combinations are knocked out. 
• Tickets with winning combinations progress to the next round.

As each round progresses, the number of participating tickets decreases, while conversely, the value of surviving tickets increases. As race day draws to a close, only one ticket will remain, and the holder will win the grand prize.

To be thorough, let’s dive into how a Swopstakes game might play out in the real world. 

In our contest, there are three horse races, with four participants per race. Accordingly, this game has a pool of 64 unique tickets, each prized at A$1. The value of each ticket is decided based on its chance of winning the game. 

To win the first round, we need Jetset or TheBiff to win the first race; since we have both these horses as winners on our set of three tickets, with two potential winners on our hands, we have a decent 75% chance of surviving the round. 

If TheBiff wins at the end of race one, 48 of the original 64 issued tickets will be knocked out, while the value of all surviving tickets will increase. Our first ticket, which lists Jetset as a winner, gets knocked out. Accordingly, we’ll go into the next round with only two tickets remaining (#45 and #53) since both list TheBiff as the winner. 

If TimeOut wins the second round, our remaining tickets will be knocked out, leaving us nothing. Had we chosen to cash out earlier, we could have exited the game with the new value of our two remaining tickets. 

In a game of Swopstakes, there would be a much larger number of tickets due to the high number of participating horses on a typical race day. With this example in mind, you can make an informed choice about the strategies you may want to deploy while playing a game of Swopstakes. 

Swopstakes Website

With its bright blue and white theme, the Swopstakes website is refreshing and pleasant. Swopstakes has done well in moving away from the bland and overdone design style adopted by most sports betting sites. Instead, it has styled itself more like a social media site. In fact, it reminds us of the old Twitter interface before it adopted an all-black theme.

The Swopstakes website is undergoing redevelopment to launch bigger games, and we look forward to seeing what it offers. However, we were able to check out the rest of its site and found it to be quite helpful, especially to a new player who may need to learn about the concept of a social sweepstakes. 

Swopstakes offers a ton of information on how to play and even in-depth explanations of different strategies that you can use to improve your chances of winning. Its ‘learn’ page is among the better knowledge hubs we’ve seen on a sports betting site. We especially appreciated how transparent Swopstakes is with the information provided, making it easy to access and absorb. 

In addition to horse racing, the Swopstakes website usually allows you to participate in games at live sporting events such as the AFL, NFL, NBA, and NRL. 

Deposits and Withdrawals at Swopstakes

Since Swopstakes operates as a social sweepstakes, depositing and withdrawing funds is simple. Here’s a breakdown of all the payment options available at Swopstakes Australia: 

Swopstakes Customer Support 

Swopstakes offers several ways to reach its customer service team. You can contact support using the live chat option or by emailing support@swopstakes.com. Since the homepage was under redevelopment when writing this review, we could not run a test assessment of the customer service team’s effectiveness in handling potential issues.  

While Swopstakes has gained a large following of players, we’re curious to see what new features it launches at the end of redevelopment. Accordingly, here’s a snapshot of its pros and cons: 

Overall, Swopstakes offers a unique experience unlike anything you can experience with traditional sports wagering formats. It builds on the classic sweepstakes model by providing games that can be played over an entire tournament rather than on a single event or race. 

Its website is well-designed, easy to use, and offers plenty of information that can enrich your visitor experience. Lastly, depositing and withdrawing money is simplistic and requires no additional thought or decision-making. 

The only downside, in our view, is that the Swopstakes site is down for redevelopment. However, we’re confident it will return with an even more robust offering in the near future.