There are several of us who are old sufficient to remember the time when sports betting effectively meant betting on the outcome of either a horse race or possibly a greyhound race. By “outcome” in this context one means simply which runner would be the winner, or which would come in placed.
It was not unheard of for a person to place a bet on a football match or perhaps an important boxing bout. Nonetheless the grim, smoky street corner bookmaker’s shop was essentially synonymous with horse racing more or less to the exclusion associated with any other sport.
Today the specific situation is a good deal different. Walk past the now more inviting frontage associated with any bookmaker’s and how you can help will be brazenly invited to predict the score of the next major soccer game and the name of the very first or perhaps the last player to score a goal. Prices are offered on many sports and “long list” coupons are every bit as freely available for soccer punters as the small slips are for the more traditional horse racing enthusiasts.
Of course by far the biggest transformation in the culture of betting accompanied the arrival of the web as the means through which we now spend most of our time communicating with the outside world. Not simply do all of the traditional high street bookmakers for example Ladbrokes, William Hill, Coral and Paddy Power all have a serious online presence, nevertheless they are within company of the large US-facing offshore sportsbooks such as Pinnacle, and of some much smaller and many more obscure outfits whose budgets had never stretched to a chain of shops but who all of the same are able to manage a web page.
Online sports betting has drastically altered the culture of gambling for all time. Hobbyists and professionals alike can now place wagers at the click of a mouse, as well as can even where necessary lay their selections at among the betting exchanges to lock in a guaranteed profit.
Not simply are there quite literally hundreds of times more sportsbooks available to the everyday punter today than was the situation ahead of the Internet intervened, though the selection of sports which are covered has mushroomed similarly. Whereas at the old betting shop the focus was largely on horse and greyhound racing with a smaller emphasis on football and maybe a few of other big sports in the event the occasion arose, customers of the online sportsbooks can select from between a really substantial array of lines on sports as diverse as soccerrugby union, rugby league, cricket, boxing, volleyball, motor racing, darts, snooker and US sports (football, hockey, baseball and basketball), and current affairs, politics, stage and film awards and reality TV. Several of the continental books also offer prices on such enormously well recognized sports as trotting, bandy and innebandy.
And not just is there such a selection of sports available, but additionally there are all sorts of possibilities within each selection. So with a soccer match, for instance, one can bet not simply on the winner of the fixture but in addition on the range of goals scored, the name of the first scorer, the total number of goals, the time of the first goal, the total number of corners taken and also the range of bookings to name but a number of.