Football Betting: A Quick and Dirty History

In years past, if a gambler wanted to bet on football he or she would place a wager with the neighborhood bookie. In the nineteen-sixties, in an effort to control what had become an enormous underground industry, the Federal Government legalized sports betting within the state of Nevada, and made it illegal everywhere else in the U.S. With the rise of the world เว็บแทงบอลออนไลน์  web, online football betting has become an internet commonplace and online sportsbooks take in billions of bets each year. This didn't all happen overnight. Football betting has been around longer than many of the more traditional sports bettors care to remember. Originally, football betting took place in a back alley or a local pub and the local bookie was the person who cashed in on the wagers placed on football. The only choice many people had for gambling on games was through the local bookie. Back then, bookies had an image of being the tough guy. They flashed the money they made, and when credit came due and a bettor couldn't pay, bookies often resorted to violence. It was this image and violence that led to their eventual downfall. The Federal Government isn't fond of underground, untaxed, and lawless economies. And that's exactly what football betting was. In addition, whether true or not, the feds were convinced that many of these neighborhood bookies had mob ties. In order to stop control and regulate football betting and all other betting on sports, the Federal Government outlawed betting in all states but Nevada. The only legal way to bet on football at that point was to do it in Vegas. However, many industries have been outlawed in the history of the United States, some recently, some not so recently, and none of them successfully. So even after Las Vegas sportsbooks were legalized football bettors still tended to use the neighborhood bookie, and the business thrived. This was true for many reasons, but especially financial ones: it's neither easy nor profitable to hop a plane to Las Vegas to place a $100 wager. Despite this success, the neighborhood bookies weren't by any means free from the attempts of the police to shut them down. Legal issues were an unwelcome nuisance for the business, and police raids were costly and frightened off business. What bookmakers really needed was a way to get out from underneath the long arm of the United States' law. They found it in the late '90s on the internet. Online football betting was born in the late 1990's when a number of neighborhood bookmakers realized there was a way to reach larger audiences as well as to escape the legal issues that had become a hindrance to their business. The increasing ubiquity of the internet allowed football betting to become more secure, more accessible, and lastly but not leastly, more fun.