There are plenty 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 perhaps a greyhound race. By “outcome” in this context one means simply which runner will be the winner, or which may come in placed.

It was not unheard of for a person 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 associated with any other sport.

Today the matter is a great deal different. Walk past the now more inviting frontage of any 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 perhaps the last player to score a goal. Costs are offered on many sports and “long list” coupons are every bit as freely available for good soccer online punters as the small slips are for the greater traditional horse racing enthusiasts.

Of-course by far the largest transformation within the culture of betting accompanied the arrival of the web as the means through which we now spend most of our time communicating with the outside world. Not just do all of the traditional high street bookmakers such as Ladbrokes, William Hill, Coral and Paddy Power all have a major online presence, but they will be in company of the large US-facing offshore sportsbooks such as Pinnacle, and also of some much smaller and a lot more obscure outfits whose budgets had never stretched to a chain of shops but who all 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 one of 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, but 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 perhaps 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), as well as current affairs, politics, stage and film awards and reality TV. Several of the continental books also offer 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 additionally, there are all sorts of choices available within each selection. So with a soccer match, one example is for various 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 very first goal, the total range of corners taken and also the range of bookings to name but a couple of.