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Betting on Sports

Introduction

 Sports betting remains to be a popular pastime for sports fans around the world. Even despite the prolonged economic downturn, people still tend to resort to betting on sports for a number of reasons. According to statistics, it is the most notoriously popular form of gambling amongst the youth today. (CNBC News, 2011) Based on the NCP Betting fact sheet, in the year 2008, 3% of male athletes and approximately 0.4% of the female athletes were said to have a gambling problem or to be at-risk of having a gambling problem.(NCP Gambling, 2012)

Betting on sports can be explained as the process of making predictions of the outcomes of any single or selected number of sporting events through the practice of wagering. Today some of the most popular sporting events in terms of betting include motor racing, foot ball, basket ball, cricket, boxing, horse racing, base ball, golf and even rugby. (Davies, Richard. 2001)

Discussion

The extent to which the betting on a particular sport tends to legalized varies from country to country. Moreover, even in countries which regulate a legalized means of sports betting there seems to be a huge parallel underground betting environment that tends to prevail. Additionally, nowadays there also seems to be a wide array of online sports bookers and betting exchanges that although are licensed in an off shore jurisdiction yet tends to facilitate additional avenues for sports betting while at the same time allowing them to compete against state operators. (Finley, Peter. 2008) Many of the supporters of the legalized sports betting tend to argue that betting is merely just a flutter on the sporting activities as a whole and is indeed relatively quite harmless. (Abbott, M.W. 1999)

Thus as said by Mark Twain, A dollar that is picked up from the road tends to provide more satisfaction as compared to the 99 that one has to work for. Moreover, these people also tend to suggest that the revenues that are generated from the legalized betting in sports can be utilized as a means of injecting back into funding the development of these significant sport and sporting events. (Abbott, M.W. & Volberg, R.A. 2000)

Betting on sports can be depicted as a general cause of concern for the society on the whole and has in turn left a negative mark on the world of sports globally for some time. On one hand where ...