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Horse racing in North America
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
Monmouth Racetrack in New Jersey in May 2005.
In the United States, races can occur on flat surfaces of either dirt or grass, generally thoroughbred racing; other tracks offer quarter horse racing and harness racing, or combinations of these three types of racing. Racing with other breeds, such as Arabian horse racing, [...] -
Prediction market
Friday, February 20th, 2009
Prediction markets are speculative (i.e., betting) markets created for the purpose of making predictions. Assets are created whose final cash value is tied to a particular event (e.g., will the next US president be a Republican) or parameter (e.g., total sales next quarter). The current market prices can then be interpreted [...]
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Soft lines
Friday, January 30th, 2009
Soft lines is a betting terminology representing betting odds that have been poorly researched by sportsbooks.Handicappers commonly use this term to emphasize the value of their play. Since handicappers can focus on a smaller subset of all the possible games, they have the chance to identify soft lines. Soft lines usually [...]
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Martingale
Monday, January 26th, 2009
Originally, martingale referred to a class of betting strategies popular in 18th century France. The simplest of these strategies was designed for a game in which the gambler wins his stake if a coin comes up heads and loses it if the coin comes up tails. The strategy had the gambler double [...]
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Betting scandals
Sunday, January 25th, 2009
Historically, sports betting has been associated with a number of unsavory characters, which has a lot to do with its desultory legal treatment throughout the world. Organized crime notoriously has relied upon sports betting for money laundering or funding purposes. The corruption or threat of a boxer to take a dive [...]
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SP bookmaking
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Starting price or SP bookmaking literally refers to taking bets at fixed odds, i.e. a fixed starting price, as opposed to the totalisator model of betting. This form of gambling was only legal in Australia for bookmakers operating on the course or racetrack, and so a large telephone based SP bookmaking [...]
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Types of bets
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
Aside from simple wagers–betting a friend that one’s favorite baseball team will win its division, for instance, or buying a football “square” for the Super Bowl–sports betting is commonly done through a bookmaker. Legal sports bookmakers exist throughout the world (perhaps most notably in Las Vegas). In areas where sports betting [...]
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Sportsbook
Thursday, November 13th, 2008
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 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 [...]
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Sports betting systems
Thursday, November 6th, 2008
Sports betting systems refers to a set of events that when combined for a particular game for a particular sport represents a profitable betting scenario. Since sports betting involves humans, there is no deterministic edge to the house or the gambler. Systems allow the gambler to have an edge.Sportsbooks use systems [...]
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Parimutuel betting
Thursday, October 30th, 2008
Parimutuel betting (from the French language: pari mutuel, mutual betting) is a betting system in which all bets of a particular type are placed together in a pool; taxes and a house take are removed, and payoff odds are calculated by sharing the pool among all placed bets.The parimutuel system is [...]
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Fixed-odds gambling
Sunday, October 19th, 2008
Fixed-odds gambling is a form of gambling against odds offered by a bookmaker, an individual, or on a bet exchange.
Calculating fixed odds
It is customary with fixed-odds gambling to know the expected odds at the time of the placement of the wager (the “live price”), however this category also accommodates wagers whose price [...] -
Betting strategy
Saturday, October 4th, 2008
Betting strategies or betting systems are approaches to gambling intended to increase the odds of winning.
Independent Events
The following betting strategies have been recorded as being applied to games which operate on independent events. For such games, the odds of a particular outcome are identical for every bet played. No such strategy can [...] -
Betting exchanges
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
A betting exchange is a p2p gambling website acting as a broker between parties for the placement of bets. The concept is similar to that of a stock exchange or a futures exchange, where in this case the commodity being traded is a bet, rather than a stock or futures contract. Most [...]