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The decade of the 1990’s marked the start of a radical shift in how gamblers would be able to bet on sports. Las Vegas had been known as the sports betting capital world for years, but unless you were actually on the strip at one of the many casinos with a licensed and regulated
sportsbook, your only recourse to bet on the games was to turn to the local bookie in town or one of their runners.
The main force behind this change was the World Wide Web, which in now simply referred to as the Internet. Heading into the mid-90’s in offshore countries such as Antigua, Venezuela and Costa Rica a new type of sportsbook started to emerge. These sports betting pioneers took the computer software that casinos in Las Vegas would use to book sports bets and adapted it to an online application where a sport bettor could then create a betting account to wager on the games. The favorable government legislations in these countries also helped pave the way that
sports bets were starting to be placed.
The changeover from traditional bookies to online sportsbooks was slow at the start, but when you have upwards of eight million players looking to bet on the games, it did not take all that long with this new way of booking bets to explode. If you flash forward 20 plus years later, betting on sports online through an offshore sportsbook or independent bookmaker has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry in just the United States and Canada alone.
Legal issues still cloud the sports betting picture in the United States, but many of the government’s laws are basically unenforceable. The crux of the issue is the legality of the actual financial transactions that go into booking bets, but given today’s global technology it is pretty much business as usual for anyone who loves to bet on sports.
While the big offshore sportsbooks may have gotten a jump on things with an earlier start online, today’s sports betting picture is also filled with a number of independent bookmaking operations that conduct business with the aid of a Pay Per Head service. These PPH providers offer the technical assistance needed to process all the various sports betting transactions through the same sophisticated Internet gambling solutions that power the biggest offshore sportsbooks. That has left the industry with a wide spectrum of competitors for the betting public’s dollar.
Big global operations such as RDG Corporation have been a driving force in the widespread innovation in sports bookmaking in a number of different ways. On a large scale, RDG Corp acts as the parent company for mainstream offshore sportsbooks such as AmericasBookie.com. Which is a full-service online bookmaking company that also offers a racebook for horses and a full-service casino.
RDG Corp. also sells the proper technology needed to operate a sportsbook with the use of a white label sports betting software application to outside companies in the sports betting industry. A good example of companies fitting this mold as a “skin” operation would be offshore sportsbook sites such as Bet33 and 1Vice.
The third realm of influence that companies such as RDG Corp. has in the world of online sports betting is the Pay Per Head concept used by independent sports bookmaking agents. These types of bookmaking operations can range from a lone agent handling the betting action for a select group of players all the way to a larger organization that is run by a master agent overseeing an elaborate system of sub-agents bringing in betting action. The basic premise of this type of bookmaker is still the same; an independent operation relying on a price per head site as the day-to-day administrative arm of the company.
