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There are several of us who are old enough 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 could 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 of any other sport.
Today the situation is a good deal different. Walk past the now more inviting frontage associated with any bookmaker’s and also you will be brazenly invited to predict the score of the next major learn soccer game as well as the name of the first or the last player to score a goal. Costs are offered on many sports and “long list” coupons are every bit as freely accessible for soccer punters as the small slips are for the greater traditional horse racing enthusiasts.
Of course by far the largest transformation in the culture of betting accompanied the arrival of the internet as the means through which we now spend most of our time communicating with the outside world. Not just do all the traditional high street bookmakers for example Ladbrokes, William Hill, Coral and Paddy Power all have a significant online presence, however they will be in company of the large US-facing offshore sportsbooks for example Pinnacle, and additionally of some much smaller as well as more obscure outfits whose budgets had never stretched to a chain of shops but who all the same will be able to deal with a website.
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, and can even where necessary lay their selections at one of 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 case before the Internet intervened, but the range of sports that 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 as well as maybe a few of other big sports when the occasion arose, customers of the on-line sportsbooks can select from between a very 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 additionally current affairs, politics, stage and film awards and reality TV. Some of the continental books provide prices on such enormously well-known sports as trotting, bandy and innebandy.
And not simply is there such a selection of sports to choose from, but there are also all kinds of available options within each selection. So with a soccer match, for example, for various bet not just on the winner of the fixture but additionally on the range of goals scored, the name of the very first scorer, the total range of goals, the time of the first goal, the total number of corners taken and the number of bookings to name but several.
With there being literally tens of thousands of distinct markets on such a huge variety of sports the proliferation of odds comparison sites at which customers can compare betting odds was always going to be an inevitability. Through interrogating each particular sport, event and line the customer can very rapidly establish which particular book is offering the most generous betting odds in every instance.
