Opportunities to play and win online have certainly attracted increasing attention and wagers. Among these, sport betting was one of the very first and is still extremely popular.
The earliest online “sportsbooks” were simply an extension of off-track betting shops. New York’s Capital OTB, for example, began using a “virtual tote board” to post race track odds on in 1996. In the beginning, bettors still had to use telephones to place their wagers, but the Internet did make it possible to disseminate betting information and to broadcast races far beyond state borders.
Led by Jay Cohen’s World Sports Exchange, no fewer than two dozen web sites were taking bets in Antigua as fully operational online sportsbooks by early 1998. Promotional efforts soon followed, as operators began advertising in sports magazines and offering bonus cash for newly registered players and to those who referred them, a practice still common today.
Aggressive marketing may have been partly responsible for the backlash in the United States, where bricks and mortar sportsbooks were experiencing a loss of business. By 2000, Cryptologic reported that more than 680,000 customers had used its electronic payment system for online betting. In early 2001, a survey published in PRNewswire claimed that 8 million people had already gambled online with real money.
From horse racing, online sports betting spread to cover every type of event wager imaginable. The Big Three—American football, baseball and basketball—were quickly joined by individual sports, such as tennis and golf, and team sports that ran the gamut from ice hockey to cricket and rugby. Exotic wagers, including bets on the outcomes of political elections and the winners of reality television shows, were introduced, too.
Sportsbooks are especially well suited to online gambling. The method of placing a bet—whether in person or via telephone, telegraph or the Internet—has no influence on the odds offered or the results. In recent years, the entry of major betting shops, such as Ladbrokes and Littlewoods, to the mix of online services has made Internet sportsbooks even more competitive, while adding to the integrity of the medium.
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