The Twilight of the Bookies: How Online Betting Made Bookies Redundant

There’s a terrific, albeit rose-tinted image of middle aged men (I suppose there were some women too but, lets be honest, it was mostly men) at the races with a ticket in their hand and a shot of adrenaline in their hearts as they cheered on the horse they bet a few hundred of their hard-earned dollars on, all waiting to find out whether they can head back to the bookies with their heads held high to claim what is rightfully theirs. The enjoyment of spending a day at the races or even gathering with a few friends to watch the latest race or match at a bar certainly still remains but what has happened to those poor bookies?

The answer, quite simply, is that they were replaced with the internet. Online gambling is a huge industry that shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon, as can be seen at a site like canadascasinos.ca, which lists some of the biggest online casinos out there.

If online sports betting didn’t threaten the the continued existence of your local, real-world bookie when they first hit the Net, it certainly has by now. You can already find all the information you need about your favorite passion at a racing news site that offers podcasts, the latest news and handicapping products so why not do all your actual betting (and winning) online as well.

Online sports betting at sites like Online-Casinos-Canada.ca/sportingbet just makes it so much easier to place bets and collect your winning that there’s simply no way that brick and mortar bookies could ever hope to compete with their online counterparts. Why rely on a middle man when you could do it all yourself, with none of the cost and none of the hassle. There was even a recent episode of the hilarious show, Brooklyn Nine Nine, that makes this point as a cop who had been undercover for years and tries to place a bet gets mocked by his own college-age bookie for not simply doing it himself online.

If sitcoms are pretty freely calling something obsolete, it probably is obsolete and considering that real-world bookies simply don’t offer the accessibility, security and ease of use of online betting, it’s really not that hard to see why. Sure, there are some betting sites that are decidedly untrustworthy but any good one would have the kind of security that is usually employed by your average bank, which, lets be honest, is usually way safer than getting heaps of cash from a real-world bookie.

Some may well end up missing the old fashioned bookie but, sadly for them, there’s just no getting ast it: they have been replaced by something far, far better: self autonomy.