There are various 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" within this context one means simply which runner would be the winner, or which may come in placed.
It was not unheard of for a person to place a bet on a football match or an important boxing bout. Nonetheless the grim, smoky street corner bookmaker's shop was essentially synonymous with horse racing approximately to the exclusion of the other sport.
Today the situation is a great 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 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 available for soccer punters as the small slips are for the greater 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 just do all of the traditional high street bookmakers such as 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 for example Pinnacle, and additionally of some much smaller and even more obscure outfits whose budgets had never stretched to a chain of shops but who all the same are able to manage a site.
Online sports betting has drastically altered the culture of gambling for all time. Hobbyists and professionals alike can now place wagers at the
click through the following page of a mouse, and can even where necessary lay their selections at among the betting exchanges to lock in a guaranteed profit.
Not only are there quite literally hundreds of times more sportsbooks available to the everyday punter today than was the case prior to the Internet intervened, though the range of sports that can be 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 perhaps a few of other big sports in the event the occasion arose, customers of the on-line sportsbooks can select from between an extremely 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 provide prices on such enormously well-known sports as trotting, bandy and innebandy.
And not simply is there such a selection of sports to select from, but there's also all kinds of alternatives available within each selection. So with a soccer match, as an example, it's possible to bet not just on the winner of the fixture but additionally on the number 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 the number of bookings to name but several.
With there being literally tens of thousands of different markets on such a tremendous variety of sports the proliferation of odds comparison sites at which customers can compare betting odds was always going to become 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.