Introduction

Sports betting markets have experienced a golden age in the last quarter of a century, resulting in the emergence of hundreds of new markets. Sports betting companies will fight over many different components, but those that can innovate or find new betting markets have the golden ticket to success. However, this is more challenging in sports betting markets, as with the exception of virtual markets, there is a finite number.

Some sportsbooks will prioritize other areas of their platform. While they won’t neglect the importance of offering a broad range of betting markets and types, some will cite payment speeds or a strong social media presence as the elements they’re most keen to focus on.

Expert review sites like WSN.com know the importance of both, and a solid sportsbook must be able to provide a service with several impressive features such as fast payout (example in link above), rather than one standout category, while leaving other parts of their site or mobile app lacking.

In-play betting

Mobile apps have transformed the way gamblers place their bets online. Every popular sport, whether soccer, American football, tennis, basketball or horse racing, has profoundly changed because of the seismic developments in in-play betting and mobile app gambling.

In soccer, you can find markets on dozens of in-play outcomes, whether it’s the next goalscorer, the next player to get booked, which team will have the most corners or which player will get a red card.

In basketball, you can bet on individual quarters or which player will get the most points or assists, and the markets in tennis happen at an even more micro-level, where you can bet on individual rallies, whether a player will break serve or fault on their first serve.

All of these markets didn’t exist 25 years ago, which is precisely what we’re referring to in our introduction. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about combat sports or other smaller markets. While they might not have the same range of in-play markets as soccer or American football, they all play a role in ensuring that in-play betting is a multibillion-dollar, standalone part of the industry.

Conventional sports betting markets

If we rewind the clock to the days before the internet – if you’re of an age to remember what it was like back then – the sports betting markets were a lot thinner and the selection was far more limited. However, you can still find all of the markets online that you could find in land-based providers back in the 1980s or 1990s, and here are the most common:

Moneyline/straight bet

One of the most common betting types is a moneyline bet, which involves betting on one outcome of a game – such as a team winning or a match ending in a draw. It’s the most common bet you’ll find in big one-off games, such as the Super Bowl, which has an enormous betting market, as does the FA Cup final in the UK.

Accumulator betting – multi-bets/parlay

While it might have a few different names, a multi-bet or an accumulator is when you combine one or more selections. Every selection needs to be a success for your wager to payout, but many sports betting companies now offer cashout options or early payouts if a team goes up by two or more goals, or by a specified number of points.

Futures/outrights

Some bettors like to get a bit more mileage out of their bet, and a futures bet is a bet placed on the winner of a specific competition. Examples of this include a team winning the NBA Playoffs before the new season has started. In soccer, it involves a bet on a team winning the league or cup, before the campaign gets under way. Some outright markets even extend to miscellaneous markets, such as film and TV, where you can place a wager on which film could win an Oscar, for instance.

Handicap betting

Another market that is finding great success is the handicap betting market. This involves betting on a team with a pre-determined amount either deducted or added to their total. So, a -3 handicap in a soccer game means that the team has to win the game by three or more goals for the bet to succeed.

Final thoughts

There are hundreds of markets in today’s burgeoning gambling industry; we’ve covered a few today and hope to give you some insight into just how many betting markets there are. Learning about betting types focuses on two distinct elements of sports betting, at least from our perspective: in-play betting and more conventional markets.

While they do have some overlap, and bettors will often place bets in both elements, depending on where they can find the best odds, we can say with certainty that there are definitely more betting markets available now than there were a couple of decades ago.

It’s difficult to imagine where the market will go in terms of available avenues to bet; it feels like it’s getting to a bottleneck or a plateau, but there’s a wealth of knowledge to tap into if you’re looking to dissect sports betting and see what the market has in store for you.