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” within this context one means simply which runner could be the winner, or which would 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 associated with any other sport.

Today the situation is a great online football deal different. Walk past the now more inviting frontage of any bookmaker’s and also you will be brazenly invited to predict the score of the next major soccer game and also 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 available for soccer punters as the small slips are for the better traditional horse racing enthusiasts.

Of course by far the biggest transformation in 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 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 will be in company of the large US-facing offshore sportsbooks such as Pinnacle, and of some much smaller and many 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, and may also even where necessary lay their selections at one of 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 prior to the Internet intervened, although the range 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 and maybe a couple of other big sports in the event the occasion arose, customers of the on-line sportsbooks can select from between a really 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 recognized sports as trotting, bandy and innebandy.

And not simply is there such a selection of sports to choose from, but there are also all sorts of alternatives within each selection. So with a soccer match, for instance, for several bet not only on the winner of the fixture but in addition on the range of goals scored, the name of the first scorer, the total range of goals, the time of the first goal, the total range of corners taken as well as the range of bookings to name but several.

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