Wow — are we really going to try to explain everything about online sportsbetting on one page? We are. So hang on tightly…

If you’ve never made a bet before, it’s something that people do for fun and/or money. The simplest bet is two people who have different predictions; the one who is right take the other one’s money.

Sportsbetting can be like that, but more often there’s a third party involved: the book. The book figures out how likely it is that something will happen, and offers bets that reflect that likelihood. So if a team is the favorite to win, it costs a bettor less money and risk to bet for them, but the rewards are less too. On the other hand, if the team is an underdog, they’re not likely to win — so the book can offer a bigger reward if that happens.

The book takes care of the money stuff, too. That way you don’t end up with all of the fights and hard feelings that can and will come out of a two-person bet.

A fair amount of countries and cultures responded to all of those hard feelings by deciding that betting was a bad thing. Plus, plenty of people were (and are) deeply offended by the idea that something good could happen to you without you having to suffer and struggle for it (unless it happens to them, in which case it’s a wonderful miracle, and proof that good things happen to good people, or something like that).

So anyways, gambling was frowned upon in many places, and tended to be found in more disreputable places (a chicken-or-the-egg situation if I’ve ever heard one!). So when this thing called the Internet came around, ultimately letting people make bets any time, from pretty much anywhere, it was a big hit (plus you had online casino USA offering online slots and all sorts of other good things that we don’t really have the time to go into now!).

Whew. How’d we do? That kinda sums it up, I think…