Realbookie.com.au gives you the chance to do battle with real bookmakers

About Realbookie

Realbookie.com.au gives you the chance to do battle with real bookmakers, as Australian punters have relished doing since the earliest days of racing in this country. Far from being a faceless, corporate machine, Realbookie.com.au is backed by real, licensed on-track bookmakers, men who have been there and done that, and have years of experience among the cut and thrust of on-track betting rings across Victoria. The halcyon days of packed betting rings at racetracks may be behind us, but the contest of punter vs bookmaker, as it used to be, lives on at Realbookie.com.au.

Our Team

Mark Sampieri doesn’t just have a tradition of bookmaking in his family – he has a tradition of innovation. His father, Graeme, was a giant of the game, not only becoming one of the leaders of the Melbourne betting ring when it was at its strongest, but an early adopter of new technologies – he was among the first to offer telephone betting to his clients in the early 90s, and was a seed investor in one of Australia’s first online betting ventures. Mark joined forces with his father in 2003 and helped build Victoria’s first bookmaking partnership into a highly successful on-course operation, but the time is right to take that heritage, experience and taste for innovation to where the action is in the modern betting world – online.

Chris Lester may not have a pedigree in the game as deep as Mark’s, but in parallel with other successful ventures he’s held a bookmaking licence since 2013, and has been around bookmakers and betting a lot longer than that – back in the 80s, an opportunity to sit in the gold Mercedes (with a car phone!) belonging to legendary rails bookie Allen Cleary was an eye-opener and while Chris has pursued many other professional and business interests, the desire to be part of the action of the betting never left him. Chris is currently Joint Chairman of the Victorian Bookmakers Association and has become a well-known figure on the Melbourne rails, but like Mark, realises it’s time for a new challenge.