There are plenty of 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 will 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 approximately to the exclusion associated with 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 perhaps the last player to score a goal. Prices 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 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 the traditional high street bookmakers for example 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 such as Pinnacle, and 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 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 click the next page, as well as can 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 prior to the Internet intervened, but the range of sports which 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 as well as maybe a couple 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 current affairs, politics, stage and film awards and reality TV. Several of the continental books provide prices on such enormously well recognized sports as trotting, bandy and innebandy.

And not simply is there such a selection of sports to pick from, but there are also all sorts of alternatives within each selection. So with a soccer match, as an example, for several bet not just 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 as well as the number of bookings to name but several.