In 1996, cellular telephones were just starting to come into popularity, with pagers or beepers still the more popular form of communication if you wanted to get in touch with someone away from their home or landline phone at the time.
At that same time, if you wanted to make a friendly wager on a sporting event, the most likely place to do so was at a street corner bar or pub with the house “bookie”. Generally speaking, the guy might be in there for an hour or two a night writing some small bets, paying and collecting with various customers to settle their weekly figure, and making himself be seen so he could eventually attract future business.
You might also have gotten lucky enough to meet a bookmaker through a family friend, or on the golf course. The guy might be sitting in an office for 2 or 3 hours per night to write all of his bets on the nightly wagering cards, with full day appearances on the weekends where football was featured from lunchtime until after dinnertime.
Fast forward 20 years: while virtually no one uses a pager or beeper anymore, the days of the bar stool and/or country club bookie have also gone largely by the wayside.
There are simply many easier ways to bet on games in 2016. Thanks to the internet, and the burgeoning sports gambling business that developed shortly before the turn of the millennium in Central America and the Caribbean, it is much simpler for customers to place their bets – and with many more betting options than ever before.
One successful operation that has moved offshore is the AmericasBookie brand; it’s an independent operation owned by the RDG Corporation. Within that umbrella are other companies 1vice and Bet33.com, each of which are “white label” operations that purchase the services of RDG Corp. to help provide the services and logistics for their businesses.
And those local bookies at the bars and golf courses? Don’t cry too much for them; most of them have figured out how to move their clients offshore and provide them with these same lines that originate in Central America and the Caribbean. These bookmakers are often only in charge of “paying-and-collecting” from their customers, while paying a small fee per customer to the software providers like RealBookie or 247pph, which collect a flat fee each week for providing their services and infrastructure.
Times do change, indeed, and this is the way things look in the current betting landscape of 2016. Are you up with the times, or are you still trying to upgrade that old Nokia flip-phone?
