About Joel
Joel started covering Counter-Strike in 2015 for a small Spanish esports site, moved to HLTV in 2017, and spent four years on the global English desk writing match reports, team profiles and tournament previews. The betting beat came in around 2019, when the first wave of esports-focused sportsbooks started moving real volume on CS:GO and Dota.
From esports he expanded into football, primarily the Spanish La Liga and the South American leagues that the Madrid sportsbooks treat as second-class but that move real money. He has been comparing odds boards every Saturday for six years. The takeaway: most sites are within 1 to 2 percent of each other on EPL, but the edges live in Liga MX, Brasileirao and Copa Libertadores.
At PotsOfGold he reviews every sportsbook on margin, market depth, live-betting latency and cash-out behaviour. He places real bets. He records the line at bet-time, the line at settle-time, and the actual cash-out value if he uses it. The screenshots end up in the review.
Outside the desk, he plays five-a-side football twice a week in Madrid and is responsible for the only consistently profitable accumulator strategy on the PotsOfGold internal slack. The rest of the team has stopped trying to copy it.
What Joel covers
Recent work
Credentials
10 years covering sportsbooks and esports. Tests odds, margins and live-betting flow personally on every site reviewed.
Editorial standards
Every piece carrying this byline has been tested by Joel personally, deposit through withdrawal, before publishing. Bonus terms are pulled from the live cashier on the day of writing. Numbers, licence details, and small print are then independently double-checked by our compliance lead before anything goes live.
Read the full PotsOfGold editorial policy.
