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 a greyhound race. By “outcome” in the context one means simply which runner would be the winner, or which may come in placed.

It was not unheard of for someone 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 the other sport.

Today the matter is a good deal different. Walk past the now more inviting frontage of the bookmaker’s and 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 within 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 simply do all of the traditional high street bookmakers such as Ladbrokes, William Hill, Coral and Paddy Power all have a significant online presence, but they will be in 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 the same are able to deal with 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 of a mouse, and can also 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 situation prior to the Internet intervened, though the array 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 as well as maybe a couple of other big sports in the event 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 (fantastic football online, hockey, baseball and basketball), and current affairs, politics, stage and film awards and reality TV. Some of the continental books offer prices on such enormously well recognized sports as trotting, bandy and innebandy.

And not simply is there such a selection of sports available, but there are also all sorts of alternatives available within each selection. So with a soccer match, for example, for a number of bet not just on the winner of the fixture but in addition on the number of goals scored, the name of the first scorer, the total range of goals, the time of the first goal, the total range of corners taken and also the number of bookings to name but a couple of.

With there being literally tens of thousands of different markets on such a massive 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 each and every instance.