If you’ve ever visited an online sportsbook, you will likely have seen options for pre-match betting and others for live sports betting. The latter of these allows you to place wagers on games that are in-play. It can provide a much more in-the-moment experience to enjoy, featuring quick-changing odds, live betting tools and exciting, novel markets as the games play out.

Yet if you haven’t placed bets on live sports events before, it may look a little confusing at first. That’s why we have put together another online betting guide for you to follow on this. Through this guidance, you can start betting on sporting events in real time.

What Is Live Betting?

In many cases, sports bettors will seek to place stakes on sports events before they start. These bets are known as pre-match wagers. Yet there are many online sportsbooks in South Africa that also provide live betting odds. They work in the same way, in general, with you wagering on the possibility of something happening during the game.

It’s just that you can use the information of what has already occurred to predict what may happen in the remainder of the match. Placing a stake on such an outcome is what is known as live betting or sometimes in-play betting.

How to Place an In-Play Wager

The first time that in-play betting became available was towards the end of the 1990s. At this point, some bookmakers opted to take bets over the telephone whilst an event was taking place. It is from this that today’s live betting options have evolved from. Through it, the number of markets that sports betting operators can offer have also grown, with bettors able to wager on many more in-game activities.

To engage in this, you need to visit your chosen sportsbook while a match is happening. Login and then use the navigation bar to locate the live betting options. Then, you can click on the event you want to bet on to find the various markets and their associated odds. Click on the odds you’re interested in and enter a stake before placing the wager. This process remains quite the same as placing a pre-match bet. There is a key difference between them, though.

The odds for live betting markets will change a lot quicker and in a lot more of a dramatic way in comparison to pre-match markets. That’s why you always need to be on the ball with what is happening within a match. Just a couple of seconds can be the difference between you scoring a nice profit and not getting much from a live wager.

In-Play Betting Tools Can Help

The best online sportsbooks for South African players, such as the Betway platform orthe Bet365 site, come with in-play tools that you can use when live betting. They can provide extra assistance when it comes to being successful with such.

The first of these tools is the cash out function. If you can use this tool, you can take a profit early if you see that your bet is coming in, or on the other hand, get some of your stake back if you see that the bet is going against you. This is possible before the game itself is over. Cash out offers are also sometimes provided by the online sportsbook in real time on some current bets held by a player.

It is also the case that some sites offer an Edit My Acca option. Through this, gamblers can remove selections from their accumulator wager after it has been placed. In some circumstances, this can occur after the event in question has begun. The betting slip then goes through a revision to feature the amended selections and a new possible return amount.

The other tool that is sometimes accessible is known as the Edit My Bet possibility. Through this, bettors can “unsettle” their straight accumulators prior to matches beginning or while they are in action. It can also be utilised to swap single bets for new bets, and the player is then given a new bet selection valued at the bookmaker’s cash out price. That reflects the live market odds for the original wager.