There are lots of 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” within this context one means simply which runner could 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 approximately to the exclusion of any other sport.

Today the situation 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 and also the name of the first or perhaps the last player to score a goal. Prices 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 better 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 simply do all the traditional high street bookmakers such as Ladbrokes, William Hill, Coral and Paddy Power all have a major online presence, however they will be in company of the large US-facing offshore sportsbooks for example Pinnacle, as well as 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 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 On this page of a mouse, and may 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 situation before the Internet intervened, though the variety 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 online 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. Some of the continental books also offer prices on such enormously well-known sports as trotting, bandy and innebandy.

And not only is there such a selection of sports to pick from, but there’s also all sorts of possibilities within each selection. So with a soccer match, for instance, it’s possible to 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 as well as the number of bookings to name but a number of.

With there being literally tens of thousands of distinct markets on such an enormous range 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.