football
football, football odds, boxing, free picks, NCAA, college football picks, betting tips, football stats, cricket, coral, ante post, ryder cup, american sport, snooker, compare odds, nfl odds, Lines, gaming, the majors, football betting guide, nfl lines, matchups, sportsbetting, betfair, pro football, football betting online, super bowl betting, college basketball betting, nfl betting online, grand national, free baseball picks, hockey stats, MLB, Free, gambling online, internet gambling, racing
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Gambling, wagering of money or other items of value on an uncertain event, dependent either wholly or in part on chance. Gambling appeals to the human desire for gain and the thrill of uncertainty or risk. Gambling has been practiced throughout human history and continues to thrive around the world, both legally and illegally, as a lucrative industry and popular entertainment activity.
Modern gambling, sometimes called gaming, has increased rapidly in scope in recent decades. In the United States, where legal gambling generates more than $60 billion annually, many cities and states have authorized casinos and other forms of gambling. In particular, many Native American tribes have taken advantage of newly acquired legal rights to open casinos on reservations and have continued to expand their operations.
The gambling industry provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers and is an important source of tax revenue where it flourishes. Some community and religious groups oppose gambling because of concerns that it leads to crime, corruption, and other social ills. Legal gambling is subject to strict government regulation in much of the world, including minimum age requirements and—in some cases—the odds of winning in specific games or machines.
II Forms of Gambling
Print this sectionThere are many different types of legal and illegal gambling. Legal forms are run directly by government agencies, for-profit companies, and charitable organizations. Illegal types include bets placed with individuals (known as bookmakers) or underground gambling services (including Internet gambling sites), as well as informal gambling among friends, such as poker games or sports pools. Complex laws dictate which types of gambling are legal in a particular city, state, or country, and these laws are subject to change. Because of varied regulations from city to city and state to state, gambling is often used by communities and vacation destinations to attract tourism.
Casinos
One of the fastest growing forms of gambling today is the casino. A casino is a gambling establishment where players bet against the casino (sometimes called the house) in games of chance. These games can include poker, blackjack, keno, dice games such as craps, and mechanical devices such as roulette wheels and slot machines. All casino games have a house edge, which means the casino has better odds than the players. In the few games where players compete against each other, such as poker, the house edge usually consists of a small percentage taken from each pot (the total amount wagered on each hand). Since the early 2000s poker has soared in popularity, mostly because of widespread television coverage of major tournaments.
Although many states and foreign countries have legalized casinos, Nevada dominates the casino market in the United States and the world. In an area known as the Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada, billion-dollar theme hotels attract millions of tourists annually with flashy entertainment, amusement parks, and huge casinos. Other cities with a high concentration of casinos include Reno, Nevada, and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Some states, including Iowa and Louisiana, have legalized floating gambling parlors known as riverboat casinos. All together, legal casinos in the United States collected about $40 billion annually in the early 2000s, with the total revenues making up nearly two-thirds of all legal gambling in America.
Native American casinos have begun to make inroads into the U.S. gambling industry. In 1988 the United States Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which allowed for the possibility that Native American tribes could open up gambling on their lands, partly to help stimulate the depressed economies of many reservations. By the early 2000s more than half of the states had licensed some form of Native American gaming. A number of these casino resorts, such as the giant Foxwoods complex in Connecticut, have been phenomenally successful. This trend has increased the pressure in many states to expand legalized gambling so that other outlets can compete with Native American casinos.
B Sports Betting
Betting on sporting events is a common form of gambling around the world, involving billions of dollars annually. Large events such as the Super Bowl or the World Series alone can generate wagers totaling billions of dollars. In addition to legal sports betting, such as wagers made in casinos, illegal sports gambling flourishes globally. Rigid enforcement of sports gambling laws remains difficult because much of the betting is placed with private individuals or with companies located in countries where such wagering is legal. Internet gambling sites, which can be based anywhere in the world, are a growing source of sports gambling.
Legal in many other parts of the world, betting on individual sporting events in the United States is allowed only in Nevada (with some exceptions, such as the sport of jai alai, which is open to gambling in a few places, mostly in Florida). In part this is because of the potential for events to be fixed, or illegally influenced (usually with bribes or other compensation). There have been a number of high-profile sports gambling scandals in history, including the fixing of the 1919 World Series by Chicago White Sox players, who were paid by gamblers to lose the series. Another scandal involved professional baseball player and manager Pete Rose, who was banned from the sport and barred from entering the Baseball Hall of Fame because of his gambling. Most sports leagues and associations have strict rules against players betting on sports or associating with gamblers.
Sports betting typically involves odds or point spreads that affect the bet or the payout. A bet with odds of five-to-one means that a winning bettor will collect five dollars for every dollar bet. With a point spread, one team is favored by a certain amount of points (the amount is set separately by each gambling outlet). For example, if a bettor decides to wager on a team favored by 12 points, then he or she wins only if that team wins the game by more than 12 points. If there are no odds or point spread given, then the wager is known as an even-money bet (betting five dollars to win five dollars). There are many other types of sports wagers, including combination bets, depending on the sport and the specific regulations that apply to it.
Horse racing has long been one of the most common types of legal sports gambling. Many large cities have tracks dedicated to horse racing. More than 150 racetracks were operating in the early 2000s in the United States. Gambling at these tracks is governed by the pari-mutuel betting system (French for mutual stake). Under this system all money bet on a race is placed in a pool and split between winning bettors, minus a percentage that goes to the track. The odds are determined by how much money is bet on each horse, with the more money bet, the lower the odds (and the lower the payout). By the beginning of the 21st century pari-mutuel betting on horse racing in the United States—including wagers allowed away from the track, know as off-track betting—totaled more than $16 billion annually. See also Harness Racing.
Dog racing, which also uses the pari-mutuel system, is legal in some states but is not as widespread as horse racing. Betting on animal fights, such as cockfighting or bullfighting, has become even more limited because of animal cruelty laws that outlaw these sports. Animal fighting is an example of a type of gambling that has been banned in the United States but is still legal in some other countries, which have different cultural traditions and often less stringent gambling laws. It is also operated illegally in many places.
Friday, September 22, 2006
Football
Football Games available in most casinos are commonly called casino games. In a casino game, the players gamble casino chips on various possible random outcomes or combinations of outcomes. Casino games are available in online casinos, where permitted by law. Casino games can also be played outside of casinos for entertainment purposes, some on machines that simulate gambling. House advantage or edge Casino games generally provide a predictable long-term advantage to the casino, or "house", while offering the player the possibility of a large short-term payout. Casino games often include an illusion of control, in which the player must make choices. However, in most cases it is not mathematically possible for a player to eliminate his or her inherent long-term disadvantage (the house advantage or house edge) in a casino game. The player's disadvantage is a result of the casino not paying winning wagers according to the game's "true odds", which are the payouts that would be expected considering the odds of a wager either winning or losing. For example, if a game is played by wagering on the number that would result from the roll of one die, true odds would be 6 times the amount wagered since there is a 1 in 6 chance of any single number appearing. However, the casino may only pay 5 times the amount wagered for a winning wager. Categories of casino games There are three general categories of casino games: Table games Table games are played on a large table covered with a printed felt layout and may contain seating locations for players, with a dealer and other casino employees located on one side of the table (known as the "pit") and players located on the opposite side. Table games may be played with cards, dice, or other gaming equipment. Gaming machines Gaming machines, such as slot machines, are usually played by one player at a time and do not require the involvement of casino employees to play. Random number games Random number games are based upon the selection of random numbers, either from a computerized random number generator or from other gaming equipment. Random number games may be played at a table, such as Roulette, or through the purchase of paper tickets or cards, such as Keno or Bingo. Common table games Cards * Asian stud * Baccarat * Blackjack * Casino war * Caribbean Stud Poker * Chinese poker * Faro * Four card poker * Let It Ride * Mambo stud * Pai gow poker * Red dog * Spanish 21 * Texas Hold'em Bonus Poker * Three card poker * Two-up Dice / Tiles * Craps * Pai Gow * Sic bo * Chuck-a-luck Random numbers * Big Six wheel * Roulette Common non-table games Gaming machines * Slot machine * Video Lottery Terminal * Video poker Random numbers * Bingo * Keno http://www.enterbet.com
Thursday, September 21, 2006
football
football So you want to learn more about sports betting and sports wagering so you can start making the big bucks off of your highly polished sports knowledge? Before you dive into the adrenaline-pumping action at our sportsbooks, learn more about online sports betting and online gambling, as well as trivia questions and the history of your favorite sports at our informative directory! You can bet on almost every aspect of a contest from who is going to win to who scores first, the overall combined score, what round a boxer will knock out his opponent, and even whether the coin toss will yield heads or tails. A very generic breakdown of online sports betting and online sports wagering: sports handicapping is a system of taking two or more competing teams/individuals and providing a "level playing field" on which gamblers can bet the outcome of the event. Sports handicapping can be expressed in the form of points or odds. Odds can be defined as the odds of a team winning a game, series, championship etc. Points are the amount of points a team is going to win the game by (not just win the game, but by how many). A sportsbook (sometimes abbreviated as book) or a race and sports book is a place where a gambler can wager on various sports competitions, including golf, football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, horse racing and boxing. The method of betting varies with the sport and the type of game. The more prominent the event, the more wagering options that are made available. Winning bets are paid when the event finishes, or if not finished, when played long enough to becomes official; otherwise all bets are returned. This policy can cause some confusion since there can be a difference between what the sportsbook considers official and what the sports league consider official. Customers should carefully read the sportsbook rules before placing their bets. The betting volume at sportsbooks varies throughout the year. Bettors have more interest in certain types of sports and increase the money wagered when those sports are in season. Likewise the interest in sports varies by country since the level of interest in the various sports is not constant the world over. Some major sporting events that don't follow a specific schedule, like boxing, can create peaks of activity for the sportsbooks. Odds In the mid 1930s, Leo Hirschfield started a company in Minneapolis, Minnesota called Athletic Publications, Inc., that published and distributed odds to bookies across the country by telephone and telegraph. He had a team of handicappers analyzing the matchups who also studied newspapers across the country. The company was a major provider of odds and prices until it finally disbanded, under fear of prosecution from the Federal Wire Act of 1961. Today most sportsbooks get their opening prices from other sportsbooks as well as private companies like Las Vegas Sports Consultants. They adjust prices based on the bets coming in, news, injury, and weather information, and the price movement by other sportsbooks. Nevada sportsbooks Today there are roughly 150 licensed sportsbooks in the United States, all located in Nevada casinos. Now that many casinos share the same parent company, they offer the exact same wagering choices and odds, which is a disadvantage to the astute gambler who in the past could do more shopping for better prices. In the 1950s the first Nevada sportsbooks, called turf clubs, opened. They were independent from the casinos, and had an informal agreement with the hotels that they would stay out of the casino business as long as the hotels stayed out of the sportsbook business. The sportsbooks had to pay a 10% tax so they charged a high vigorish to gamblers, but they still brought in a lot of business. In 1974 the tax was lowered to 2%, (and in 1983 lowered to 0.25%), and in 1975 Lefty Rosenthal, who ran the Stardust Casino, convinced legislators to allow them in the casinos, and soon nearly all of the casinos added them. The turf clubs were no longer able to compete and eventually all closed. In Nevada casino sportsbooks you will find: Betting Windows Numerous big screen televisions Places to sit and watch Interactive betting stations Odds boards, usually computerized Internet sportsbooks While internet sportsbooks lack face-to-face transactions, they can handle more customers than land based sportsbooks and operate more cost effectively. They pass lower costs on to customers in the form of reduced vigorish (cheaper prices) or bonus incentives. They can also offer similar products, such as casino games, bingo, and poker to their existing clients. While Internet sportsbooks take bets online, normally they are licensed in some jurisdiction. Taxation and regulation vary greatly by country. Internet sportsbooks range from fraudulent operations with no intention of paying their customers to multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies. Internet sportsbooks range in focus, as some primarily cater to American sports, while others focus on European soccer. Some sportsbooks handle large wagers while others have low wagering limits. Some offer many exotic proposition wagers, where others have limited choices. Payment methods are not universally accepted at all sportsbooks. Costa Rica is home to a large number of offshore sportsbooks, as it caters to many of the needs of the industry with an open regulatory environment and a large, capable workforce. A number of sportsbooks are also located in Jamaica, Gibraltar, Antigua, Curaçao, Australia, and many other countries around the world. The United States Justice Department claims that wagering at offshore sportsbooks is a violation of the 1961 Federal Wire Act. Jeffrey Trauman of Harwood, North Dakota, was the first player ever to be prosecuted for online sports betting in the United States. The former car salesman, who quit his job to become a professional gambler, was cited under a North Dakota state law.
|