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Sports betting has been around
for as long as there have been bookmakers to take bets and well before that in
private wagers. Betting on camel racing is mentioned in the Koran and historic
records of wagers go back through Roman times and into
ancient Greek history. Betting on sports and increased and
widened its scope through the ages but the information age has allowed it to
mushroom and envelope the world. There are now few people on planet earth who
do not understand the concept of a wager or what it means in terms of sports
and everything else.
Betting on sports in truly big business now, you
can't turn on the Channel 4 or Channel 5 in the UK without seeing an
advertisement for a bookmaker of some sort, whether traditional betting,
exchange betting or spread betting. And this whilst there are countless
scandals in the news about the corruption of a sporting event by insider
trading, people within the sport using their knowledge to bet on particular
matches or events within. Cricket spot fixing, Tennis matches, Snooker frame
betting and
Football match fixing are never far away from a news channel
and it not about to stop despite all the governing body
announcements.
This sort of insider information betting is however
trivial compared to the grey market. There are facilitators that will match up
big punters money with their own bookmaking operation or simply with other
serious players and they only get interested when its a six-figure sum. Bets on
cricket and premier league football are commonly in seven figures, numbers that
the traditional companies are not just scared to take on, but simply don't have
the ability to do so.
Bookmakers not being able to take large bets
means they have to resort to taking volumes of small bets which leads to
limited to liability and limited real bookmaking. Consequently there is no
difference between bookmakers online as many use the same software and
therefore are offering the same markets. The only real difference is what they
are prepared to offer you in free bets and to be able to seek the best offers
you'll need a service like https://bestbetsuk.co.uk/. The very least you can do is to
get the bookie to sweeten your arrival.
So bookies are appealing to
everyone when once it was horseracing and greyhound fans. Every personality
contest on TV, political battle, “will it snow at Christmas”, what
colour hat the Queen will be wearing at Ascot and and name of the next Royal
baby is a battle ground for bookies versus punters. These were once novelty
bets but now they are a serious way for bookies to lure new types of customers
into their virtual satchels.
One serious new contender in the world of
sports betting is eSports. Not existing as a professional sport only five years
ago there are now in excess of 80 million competitors worldwide, growing at a
phenomenal rate, and supporting professional teams around the world in a number
of professional leagues. End of season championships have multi-million dollar
prize funds and the viewing public pay to watch these team battles in their
millions online. The most recent League of Legends championship finals in
Berlin was won by a South Korean team, where eSports is now the national game,
and was watched by 36 million people with a peak of 14 million at any one time.
The previous year in Seoul
40,000 fans
watched the finals in the World Cup football stadium.
Over in the
USA another new phenom is Daily Fantasy Sports, or DFS. This is a fast growing
of-shoot of fantasy sports. Fantasy Sports involves players building teams of
sportsmen and in a particular league and they compete based on their
performances and statistics. In DFS the competition is accelerated to conclude
in one day, competing players paying entry money into a prize pool and the best
performers take a share of pool with the operators taking a cut for running the
competition. This is now a multi-billion dollar industry but there is now a
serious problem in certain states. New York State attorney general and the FBI
have poked their noses in and are attempting to declare DFS as illegal
gambling. The
battle is currently raging in the courts with an Appeals Court
Judge granting a suspension to an injunction which would have halted all
participation.
So sports betting could never be livelier than it is now.
There's no predicting where we are headed now but I can't wait to see what it
is.
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