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 possibly a greyhound race. By "outcome" in this context one means simply which runner would 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 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 good soccer online game and also the name of the first or even the last player to score a goal. Costs 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 just do all the traditional high street bookmakers for example Ladbrokes, William Hill, Coral and Paddy Power all have a significant online presence, nevertheless they are within 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 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 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 case ahead of the Internet intervened, though the array 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 and maybe a couple of other big sports when the occasion arose, customers of the on-line sportsbooks can select from between a very 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 provide prices on such enormously well-known sports as trotting, bandy and innebandy.

And not just is there such a selection of sports available, but additionally there are all kinds of possibilities within each selection. So with a soccer match, by way of example, it's possible to bet not only on the winner of the fixture but additionally on the number of goals scored, the name of the 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 couple of.