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 perhaps 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 of any other sport.
Today the matter is a great deal different. Walk past the now more inviting frontage of any bookmaker's and you will be brazenly invited to predict the score of the next major soccer game and also the name of the very first or perhaps 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 more traditional horse racing enthusiasts.
Of course by far the largest transformation in the culture of betting accompanied the arrival of the net as the means through which we now spend most of our time communicating with the outside world. Not simply do all the traditional high street bookmakers for example Ladbrokes, William Hill, Coral and Paddy Power all have a significant online presence, but they are 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 are 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 will even where necessary lay their selections at among the betting exchanges to lock in a guaranteed profit.
Not just are there quite literally hundreds of times more sportsbooks available to the everyday punter today than was the case ahead of the Internet intervened, however 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 and maybe a few of other big sports in the event the occasion arose, customers of the online 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 online, hockey, baseball and basketball), and additionally 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 simply is there such a selection of sports to select from, but additionally, there are all sorts of options available within each selection. So with a soccer match, for instance, for several bet not simply on the winner of the fixture but also 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 range of corners taken and the number of bookings to name but several.