Betting on sports has slowly, through the years, made the transition from transactions with local bookies taking bets from clients on the street corners and barrooms to the World Wide Web.
A brief background, for the uninitiated:
Online betting on sporting events started to grow in the mid-1990s in several countries in Central America and the Caribbean. Antigua, Venezuela (its Margarita Island, in particular), Aruba, Curacao, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and Belize were the hot spots for many years. The sports betting business really exploded in 2001 when research showed that there were more than 8 million players placing bets online.
With sports betting becoming so mainstream, dozens of bookmakers have moved there operation offshore. One example is the AmericasBookie brand. It is an independent bookmaking operation that is owned by the RDG Corporation. Others operators own a “skin” or “white label” operation, which they purchase from companies like RDG Corp., as is the case with 1vice and Bet33.
Other gaming solutions that have cropped up, alongside the online sportsbook operations, is in the field of the bookie service industry. Local bookmakers can now move their clients offshore and provide them with the many more betting options. They can plug their players in at a preferred sportsbook by renting account-for-bookie software providers like real bookies or 247pph. At that point, the only obligation for the local bookie is to pay and collect from his customers back home.
This a pay-as-you-go solution, where local bookies pay a fee per head to the software provider in exchange for the ability to use their front-end (what the players see in terms of lines) and back-end (what the bookies see in terms of figures for the clients) infrastructure.
The future is here in 2016, and there probably won’t be many changes going forward in terms of how the local bookies do business. The professionals in some of the aforementioned offices in Central America have been doing this for years and have the ability to handle dozens of agents and thousands of betting customers.
