The world at the moment appears to be suffering from sports betting syndrome. Sports betting has become so unbelievably popular amongst sports fans, and just like online poker which has increased rapidly in recently years, sports betting seems to be heading in the same direction.
To put the growth of online sports betting in context bookmakers such as Betfair and Bet365 now have over 4 million users with active accounts each. The most impetuous sports bettors will deposit and place bets worth up to £1,000 each without even thinking about it. If you watch any Premier League game in the UK nowadays you will be thrown into a world of sports betting advertisements and marketing. Betfair’s Fan V Fan betting was almost on every single Man Utd that I watched last season, and Betfair even offer their own in-house service in the Man Utd restaurants and boxes which I visited. Real Madrid, arguably the world’s most successful European football club with 9 Champions League titles to their name has been sponsored by Bwin for a while now. Watching the likes of Ronaldo, Di Maria, Kaka and Casillas sporting their logo is big business.
Real Madrid actually has the highest revenue out of any football club in the world after signing a 400 million euro deal with major European bookmaker Bwin for shirt sponsorship rights. Even Valencia FC are sponsored by Norway’s largest independant bookmaker UniBet. Up until the summer transfer window they were donning the likes of David Silva and Villa upfront on their kits.
The reason for the growth of online poker in recent years is largely put down to the MoneyMaker effect. This was when Chris Moneymaker managed to win the 2003 WSOP after qualifying a seat to the event through a $40 PokerStars satellite. Moneymaker, who has since signed up to become a PokerStars pro and even released his own book, basically spread the publicity of poker and the idea that you can make millions out of nothing. He qualified from a $40 satellite and went on to make over $7 million in the WSOP Main Event.
The games that the online casinos provide to the players are a good source of making money for the people. They help in increasing pengeluaran china hari ini at the right time. Even the players can shift to another game at the time they feel like they wish to.
The growth of sports betting has been a lot different though. I think that it’s fair to say bookmakers and “sports betting” has always had a place in UK sports – particularly football. However, since around 2000 when a number of major bookmakers took their services online including Ladbrokes and William Hill they managed to garner a much greater audience. Online bookmakers made sports betting more accessible. Features such as in-play betting, live odds, live TV streaming and such also made sports betting more exciting.
Sky Sports Super 6 type promotions where if you guess the right weekend scores you can win £100,000 have all added to the appeal of sports betting. I also think that in many ways sports betting requires a certain amount of arrogance and belief in your own ideas. Every wish washy football fan in the UK loves to talk about tactics, about how Gerrard should play further up the field for England, how Defoe needs bigger strike partners to lay on balls to him etc. All of this culminates in the sporting hubris that eventually leads you to think that you can beat the system and make money from your knowledge.
