A betting site is an online website that offers their users to wager money on various outcomes on sporting events.
The first betting site ever was create by Gregory Hill in Leeds, England, where he took is grandfathers brand to the world wide web in 1995. Williamhill.co.uk was born.
There is almost infinite amount of games to bet on, but here is a short list:
Online betting sites makes money by offering odds on specific events to occur, most often in sports, and then slightly skew the odds to ensure no matter the outcome, the betting sites makes a bit of money off the top. This is called the theoretical hold .
Example of this could be a bet on who wins the coin flip before cricket match. The expected outcome of a coin flip is 50% chance of getting heads and 50% chance of getting tails.
The odds you would be offered on such a bet, would not be 2.00, but usually something like 1.85 to 1.97. Here you can see that the total return if you would bet on both outcomes would not add up to the total sum that you placed in bets, and this sum is the theoretical hold that the betting sites take and is how they make money over time.
The most common way for betting sites to operate is through linemaking. That means that they are buying the odds from a third party provider, then update the odds as new information comes to light, but also based on the volume of bets that they see over time.
These betting sites are not overly concerned with balancing the action and are ok to take somewhat sides on bets as they rely on their pool of players to over time be negative expected value players.
Given that they are open to taking a side and not aggressively change the odds, this means that there can arise opportunities for odds that are set too far from what the theoretically correct line is and allow sharp bettors to place bets at favorable odds more readily.
To counteract this, the betting sites employ a "no winners" clause in their terms and conditions where they will reduce the betting limits of sharp bettors accounts to very low sums, which in practice is basically banning them from placing bets.
Although this is not something the betting sites are explicit about doing, it is fairly common practice among online betting sites that they limit winners fast if they can spot someone that regularly find positive expected value bets.
Examples of betting sites that employ linemaking are Bet365, Betway, 1xBet and so on.
An alternative approach that some betting sites take is that they only move the odds on betting volumes and try to aggressively balance action. These betting sites welcome high volume betting players and market themselves as never banning players, even if you are a big winner.
Examples of betting sites that try to balance action are Pinnacle, SBO Bet and so on.
You can also find betting sites - or betting exchanges - where you are not placing bets directly with the betting site, but rather offer your own bets or accept other players bets directly.
Instead of charging a theoretical hold, the betting exchange rather charge a commission on the winning bets placed.
Examples of betting exchanges are Betfair.
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