Betting Online Guide

Go to tutorial section

Betting exchange About Sports Betting - Types and ways of sports betting Forms of betting Multiple bets Bet types ABC of the sports betting Sports Trade Betting Betting and analysing bookmakers Handicaps

Forms of betting

First of all, before you place a bet you come up with a choice of what ever form of betting you would like to play. You have few options, some very popular and easy to understand and others more complicated and hard to find or understand. The most popular form of betting is Fixed-odds or Spread Betting offers by the most of the online bookmakers. The odds are compiled by the bookmaker and the odds are calculated after the match not before. Read our article to gain a little more knowledge about the forms of betting focusing on your interests.

Fixed odds betting
Parimutuel betting
Spread betting

Fixed odds bettingto top

Fixed-odds betting is by far the most popular form of sports betting. The odds are compiled by the bookmaker, so that the punter knows precisely how much he can win.

Win/Draw/Win (1X2) – bookmaker offers his odds for all the possible outcomes of a sport event win of the home team, draw if possible and win of the away team. Bookmaker can use a number of different bets: a.) on full time result, b.) on half time result c.) both on half-time and full-time result in a single bet d.) double chance (you can pick two outcomes of an event e.g. "1X," "2X" or "12"

Outright bets – predicting long-term results of sports events such as winner of the overall classification/league/tournament.
Other bets – almost all betting propositions use fixed-odds, e.g correct score bets, and a number of other discipline-specific bets

Parimutuel bettingto top

Parimutuel betting is another very popular betting system which differs from the fixed-odds betting in that the odds are calculated not before, but after the outcome of an event/events becomes known. First, all the bets are placed in the pool, and after the event is finished a mechanical device called totalizator calculates the payout odds for all the winning bets.

Parimutuel betting on horses. The only bookmaker in Britain which is authorized by the Horserace Totalisator Board to offer parimutuel bets on horses is Totesport. Totesport offers different "totepool" bets such as: a.) toteplacepot, b) totesuper7, c) totejackpot, d) toteexacta, e) toteplace f) totewin, and more.

Parimutuel betting on greyhounds. In Britain, for instance, each greyhound track offers its own mutuel bets on dogs.
Football pools (in the UK) & Totos (Continental Europe). predicting the outcome of top football league matches which take place in the coming week. The list of these matches is usually provided by the bookmaker. The most famous football pool in England was Treble Chance, and most well-known toto in Central Europe was based on Intertoto Cup matches.

Spread bettingto top

Spread betting is an increasingly popular form of betting. Whereas fixed-odds betting and parimutuel betting is usually concerned with the 'win or lose' outcome, the keyword for spread betting is accuracy.
It is the task of a bookmaker to assess the form of the two competing teams and on this basis compile 'a spread' which is an advantage for the weaker team expressed in the form of points or goals (depending on the discipline) with which the underdog would, theoretically, have the same chances of winning as the favorite.

Asian Handicaps. A special variation of football spread betting.

Over / Under bets using point spread. You have to predict whether the number of goals/points/rebounds/corners in the game will be less or more than the number provided by the bookmaker. It is the bookmaker's aim to provide such a number that the chances of guessing it right as close to 50% as possible.
Non-sport spread betting. As a truly worldwide phenomenon, spread betting is increasingly gaining popularity outside the sports context as it allows to speculate on the movement of stocks and shares without using a stockbroker, which means you don't have to pay commission or fees. In practice, a spread betting company (for instance tradefair.com or worldspreads.com) makes a spread around the live, underlying market price (for instance financial market, or property market) and you can place a bet on the market rising (a buy order) or falling (a sell order).

Print this page