Where you might have to wait a few days for the next Premier League encounter to take place – international break anyone? – or it’s the NBA off-season, or the horse racing calendar is over for another year, well the virtual sports calendar never stops day or night,” reads BetVictor’s site. “The best bit is where it differs from the real thing.

“Not only are the races every couple of minutes, but the beauty of virtual racing is – unlike the live action –there’s no non-runners, no worrying over weather conditions or anything else from affecting your selections,” reads some sparky Betfred copy online. As a potential gag could go: The virtual horse racing’s over… but not furlong! The bookmakers revel in the fact that you can play these games every minute. See, unlike the seaside games, virtual sports are always on. Online sports betting has been around for donkey's years, of course, but there’s something distinctively dystopian about spending money on sports fixtures that are fixed and don’t exist. Like all good things in life, you can bet on it. Each competitor is weighted based on their imagined form and a Random Number Generator (RNG) is used to spice things up and create a sense of chance, so that the phoney pony that’s 2-1, say, doesn’t always win. Think of it as a randomly-generated video game where every player, car or horse is controlled by a CPU and you’re a spectator. If you’ve not stumbled across them (and even a lot of regular gamblers haven’t), virtual sports are computer-generated animations showing simulated football games, tennis matches, F1 races or whatever you decide to click on. Welcome to the world of virtual sports betting, where nothing exists, except for the cash you’re shredding. It’s also completely, entirely, totally, absolutely, definitively not real.

Horse racing gambling game online