There are numerous 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 particular 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 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 you will be brazenly invited to predict the score of the next major soccer game and also 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 more traditional horse racing enthusiasts.

Of-course by far the biggest 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 only do all the traditional high street bookmakers such as Ladbrokes, William Hill, Coral and Paddy Power all have a significant quality online casino presence, but they are in company of the large US-facing offshore sportsbooks for example Pinnacle, as well as 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 will be 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, and also 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 situation ahead of the Internet intervened, however the array of sports that will 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 possibly a few of other big sports when the occasion arose, customers of the internet 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 also 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 available, but there are also all sorts of choices available within each selection. So with a soccer match, for instance, you can bet not simply on the winner of the fixture but also 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 range of corners taken and the range of bookings to name but several.

With there being literally tens of thousands of different markets on such a tremendous array 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.