Effects of Sports Gambling
Sports Gambling is increasing rapidly in all countries and now the biggest concern in sports betting is the integrity of the game. Running up huge debts for general public and sports athletes is one of the major issues. In western countries, almost in every major college there is one bookie taking bets within college premises. This could be a serious problem for student athletes, as there is a risk of public humiliation for the athletes themselves and for their families also.
Talking on a larger scale, bookmakers are the only people benefiting from illegal sports gambling. Organized groups of criminals who take billions of dollars from the white money of an economy and then they spend it on their criminal activities. Illegal bookmaking cases reported in the media range from multi-million dollar enterprises to small operations run by one person.
Now with the help of the internet, sports betting are now a global phenomenon, where thousands of people place their bets online on a single match. It is not only about placing money on win, lose or draw. Bets range across every aspect of a game like the points spread in basketball, the time of the first score in soccer, the number of yellow cards, the number of runs that an individual batsman will score in a game of cricket etc.
Almost any eventuality can be gambled on in any sport. In addition, most of the times, it becomes impossible to prove beyond doubt that the outcome was rigged. How can someone challenge that a player in cricket has deliberately missed a catch? Or a tennis player chose to lose the second set? The online sports betting market is estimated to be worth about €35bn, and is rising fast as more and more countries open their markets
One senior official explained the threat to the country's most popular spectator events, saying: "Football, rugby and cricket don't have a doping problem, but they know they have serious gambling problems."
Audit trails cannot eliminate match-fixing problems. The sports organizations can play a major role in maintaining the integrity of their team and game. There is an urgent need for a uniform approach from all sports, to the problems posed by the online market, especially where billions of dollars are being given to the criminals.
The Gambling Commission of British Sport told that in just 17 months, it received 47 notifications of betting patterns that were sufficiently irregular. It may lead the commission to consider voiding a bet and of those, 35 involved betting firms notifying governing bodies of irregularities. The other 12 were a mix of governing bodies asking bookmakers to look at incidents, or the commission asking bookmakers to act on independent "intelligence” and said that horse racing, football and snooker accounted for most of the match- fixing allegations, but it was widely accepted that cricket and tennis are among the other susceptible disciplines.
On the other hand, some games like horse racing are famous for betting and betting is legal in it. People come from all over the world to horse racing matches and place their bets. Horse race betting is one of life's most interesting challenges, but betting horse racing is a hard mistress. Many hours are spent on handicapping the races and betting the horses. There are numerous methods of horse betting methods and everyone has a different approach of betting the horse racing.
The odds in horse race betting are based on a pari-mutuel system; this is the first thing one should know before betting. Unlike casino gambling, the bettors are playing against each other, not the "house". Before the advent of pari-mutuel wagering, horse race betting was done with bookmakers, or "Bookies".
Sports’ betting is becoming a serious problem for the governments, as this practice pulls out billions of dollars from an economy without any documentation and it will affect the economies in a more serious way in near future. On the other hand, legal and organized betting’s like horse racing, can be a good business opportunity for investors at the same time. It all depends on the regulations of government.
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