sportsbooks betting

Just getting interested in offshore sportsbetting and offshore sportsbooks? Wondering where it all began? Grab a cold drink, sit back, and learn a little piece of history.
Of course, sportsbetting has been around a gazillion years. Heck, they used to bet on the outcome of events a the Coliseum in Rome in the days when they used to fight the lions!
Whenever you have a demand, in this case, for betting, someone steps in to fill that demand. In this case, the bookie. For years, most wagering on sporting events was done via the local bookie. In many instances, depending on location, these operations were controlled by organized crime and with that, a host of other problems. Such as getting paid when you win!
In the 1970's, sportsbetting took off in Las Vegas. Vegas became THE place to wager on sports. At first, independent sports books were the rage. But gradually, the major hotel and casino corporations took over and eventually created the Vegas Sportsbook as we know it today. Huge sportsbooks, with giant screens all over the walls broadcasting games from across the country. An odds board flashing the latest lines on all the games and so on.
Vegas was king until the late 1990's, when the offshore sports book started it's rise to the top.
Offshore sportsbetting, didn't really start offshore at all. Well, unless you consider England to be an offshore location.
Offshore sportsbooks and offshore sportsbetting did not start with the internet. Back in 1985, a gentleman named Gary Bowman opened a business in the UK named American Football Pools. The concept was simple. Sell parlay cards to the American sportsbetting marketplace. The catch was, the business was located in England, where sportsbetting was perfectly legal.
The idea, of course, took off and was a huge success. So much so, that Gary Bowman saw the need to expand the business. To eventually, make it just like Vegas, and allow customers to wager on sports, not just parlays, but straight bets, teasers and so on, from the comfort of their own homes. American Football Pools would eventually become Bowman International.
Not long after that, roughly 1987 or 1988, a bookmaker from the United States with a large clientele, decided to open a call center in the Dominican Republic. His idea, was to accept bets offshore in the Dominican, out of reach of the US authorities. They took out ads in a few sports publications to build their business even further. His mistake, however, was that part of that business was still conducted in the US. Customers were paid off with the use of runners and agents at local bars and clubs. A big no no. Of course going on 60 minutes and being called the biggest bookmaker in the United States didn't help much either.
Or did it?
That company is still around today and is doing just fine. That company is known as CRIS Sports.
Remember, this is still the late 1980's. The internet is still not even a word in the dictionary!
So for the next few years, a few other companies, American bookmakers from various parts of the US, operated out of the Dominican Republic and then, Antigua.
It was around 1994 when the online boom started to take off mostly via services like prodigy and AOL. It was then that you started to hear whispers about this thing called the internet. Ohhhhhh. The internet. What is it? How do I get on it? Is it safe?
If you have only been on the net a few years, you wouldn't recognize the early internet. It was made up of sites that were mostly all text. There were no fancy websites with flash and so on. Just plain text links. Oh, and there was no such thing as a domain name. All the websites has these really long addresses that made no sense whatsoever.