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 this context one means simply which runner will be the winner, or which would come in placed.

It was not unheard of for someone to place a bet on a quality football match or even 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 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 the name of the very first or the last player to score a goal. Prices are offered on many sports and “long list” coupons are every bit as freely readily available for soccer punters as the small slips are for the more traditional horse racing enthusiasts.

Of course by far the biggest transformation within 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 online presence, however they are within company of the large US-facing offshore sportsbooks such as Pinnacle, and of some much smaller and even more obscure outfits whose budgets had never stretched to a chain of shops but who all of the same will be able to deal with 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 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 ahead of the Internet intervened, but the array 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 couple of other big sports in the event 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. Several of the continental books provide prices on such enormously well-known sports as trotting, bandy and innebandy.

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

With there being literally tens of thousands of distinct markets on such an immense selection 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.