Having lived and worked in Costa Rica in the offshore gambling Industry and since I was involved in the production and launch of the first Internet Sportsbook (1996) in the country of Curacao, Netherlands Antilles, or Dutch West Indies as I prefer to call the Island Nations of Curacao, Aruba and Bonaire, it's possible for me to believe how big offshore sports betting has grown.
In the beginning I was skeptical because I really didn't understand how mature offshore sports betting was before the Internet revolutionized the business but back in 1996 I witnessed a few small rooms, managed by a few bookmakers with less than 100 telephone operators handle over $75 Million in football bets during a Thanksgiving weekend. I was convinced there was a need for the Internet.
While installing the first Internet sportsbook in a facility that housed about a half dozen existing telephone betting operations, one by one the managers and bookmakers stopped by our much smaller office and looked at the large servers we were installing, asking "how many bets at a time can the system handle?" to which I would jokingly answer "you really don't want to know". Years later I was consulting for a group that sent me to San Jose, Costa Rica to manage aspects of their operation and had the great pleasure of working inside a modern day 600 man operation that had audited results of grossing $800 Million the previous year. Oh what a long way the Industry had evolved, mostly due to the Internet but obviously because there is a huge demand in the USA to make bets of sports.
Here's a quote from a press release today on Yahoo Finance, talking about how March Madness, NCAA Basketball betting is 10 times bigger than NFL Superbowl betting.
The Men's NCAA basketball tournament has become the most widely bet annual sporting event in America as office pools and sports betting gain more popularity and acceptance. Last year an NCAA survey estimated that over 10 percent of Americans participated in a "March Madness" pool, demonstrating that millions have a vested betting interest in the tournament. Now that the Internet has become the preferred means to wager on sports.
