Sports Betting - Overview
Back in the dark ages before the Internet was available in every house, betting on a sport was restricted to the limited offerings of the big bookmakers.
Today the Internet combined with TV has shrunk the globe and created worldwide interest in football, athletics, golf and motor racing amongst many other sports. This interest has been the driver for a myriad company’s offering to lay bets, all available for a few key strokes or a brief telephone call.
Even the old smoke filled bookmakers betting shops have had a 21st century refurbishment to make it a more interesting place to while away the hours.
It is the Internet that has really powered sports betting along, developing alternative types of betting e.g. spread betting, to the conventional bookmakers.
In addition to the traditional straight win, lose or draw bets, spread betting on sports has developed from the pioneer companies like IG Index (who first introduced financial spread betting) and Sporting Index.
With sports spread betting the bookmaker will make a prediction on various aspects of sporting or topical events. You can then decide if the prediction was pitched too high or too low.
The predictions are given in the form of two prices, this is a range known as the ‘spread’ and you bet low (sell) on the first price or high (buy) on the second price.
Here is where spread betting differs from conventional bookies offering odds. If you decide to bet high and are correct then your stake is multiplied by the number of points the price moves up. Conversely if you get it wrong then you can lose many times your stake!
Don’t worry unduly, there is an established method of limiting your losses by the use of stop orders, detailed elsewhere in the site.
Unlike betting on horses or other events where multiple outcomes are possible, with spread betting there are only two outcomes, win or lose!
The gearing effect of the stake being multiplied by the number of points it rises is very powerful and can have a dramatic effect on your betting bank, much more so than is possible with conventional bookmakers.
Another development on the Internet is the rise of the betting exchanges such as Betfair, where players with opposing views are matched against each other. With this type of site it is possible to get much better odds than with a bookmaker, also it is possible to play the bookmaker yourself by offering to ‘lay’ odds yourself, effectively profiting from losing horses in the same way that he does.
Thanks to the Internet we now have a wide range of sports and different types
of betting within each sport available for us to bet on. There is also a variety
of different methods of betting open for us to use.