Sportsbook at Wynn Las Vegas, during Super Bowl XLII, February 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Point shaving, in organized sports, is a type of match fixing where the perpetrators try to prevent a team from covering a published point spread. Unlike other forms of match fixing, sports betting invariably motivates point shaving. A point shaving scheme generally involves a sports gambler and one or more players [...]

An Asian Handicap is a sports betting term used to describe spread betting in football (soccer). Described as Asian because of its Eastern origins, the phrase has little else to do with the region. This form of soccer betting has gained increased popularity over the last few years and is now offered [...]

In horse racing terminology, a trifecta is a parimutuel bet in which the bettor must predict which horses will finish first, second, and third in exact order. The word comes from the related betting term, “perfecta.”
The term has been extended to the realm of politics, where it is used to describe a [...]

A tote board is a large, numeric or alphanumeric display used to convey information, typically at a race track (to display the odds or payoffs for each horse) or at a telethon (to display the total amount donated to the charitable organization sponsoring the event).
The first tote boards were manufactured for [...]

A totalisator or totalizator (tote board in common parlance) is the name for the computerised system which runs parimutuel betting, calculating payoff odds, displaying them, and producing tickets based on incoming bets.
The first totalisator was an entirely mechanical system invented by the Australian George Julius of Julius Poole & Gibson Pty [...]

Tic-tac (also tick-tack and non-hyphenated variants) is a traditional method of sign language used by bookmakers to communicate the odds of certain horses. It is still used in on-course betting in the UK. A tic-tac man will usually wear bright white gloves to allow their hand movements to be easily seen.
A few [...]

Spread betting is a form of gambling on the outcome of any event where the more accurate the gamble, the more is won and conversely the less accurate the more is lost. A bet is made against a ’spread’ (or index), on whether the outcome will be above or below the spread. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Football pools, often referred to as “The Pools”, are competitions based on predicting the outcome of association football matches set to take place in the coming week.
British Pools
Several different companies such as Littlewoods, Vernons, Zetters and Brittens have organised similar games, the most famous of which was historically known as Treble [...]

(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 used in [...]

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 [...]

Most people believe that bookmakers attempt to “balance” their action, by adjusting their prices so that they get the same amount of money on both sides of a game. Theoretically, the bookmaker’s only financial interest in the bets it accepts is the vigorish it takes from losing wagers, and it simply wants [...]

Sports betting is the general activity of predicting sports results by making a wager on the outcome of a sporting event. Perhaps more so than other forms of gambling, the legality and general acceptance of sports betting varies from nation to nation. In North America, for example, sports gambling is generally [...]