Showing posts with label sports betting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sports betting. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Cricket betting tips and predictions

We’re now past a time where you could only bet on football and horse racing, leaving far more options for ways to get involved in sports betting. One of the UK’s most popular sports is cricket but even the immense following from sports fans isn’t enough to prompt as much exposure in terms of bets you can place surrounding it.

Bookmakers are always pushing to provide the most cutting-edge markets as well as hoping to cover all possible sports that might interest the many punters they cater for. Cricket is up there with all other primary sports so the availability to bet on it is starting to be just as prominent. The issue then is working out where to bet on it, how to bet on it, and which markets are worth considering.

Key betting markets for cricket include:

Match Winner - As with most sports you’ll consider betting on, the basic match result option is likely to feature early on, if not at the very top of the page. This is the same with cricket, where all major and minor events will be given odds for either side to win or before you get to any of the more advanced bookmaker markets.

Other Result-Based Options - There’s more than one way of placing money on the match result in cricket, with other forms being a double chance option, which is often referred to as Two Chances To Win. You’ll also find handicap markets that indicate the winning margin. While this might not be the go-to way of predicting the result, it improves the price and they frequently feature in TeamFA’s cricket previews.

Player Markets - Building your own special cricket betting tips gives you the chance to add in any outcome and a lot of punters will consider including player markets. This is similar to in football betting where you might add in a player to score first or at any time, but with cricket, it surfaces on the most runs and individual accolades of a specific batsman or bowler.

Special Markets - After rooting through the variety of Match Specials, like the First Wicket Method, a favoured player to score a century or bookmaker price boosts, you might be tempted to bet on a selection with combined markets. These come in many forms and were made popular through SkyBet’s RequestABet feature, but there’s a lot of variations and plenty of ways to capitalise. You’ll receive a better price based on how many selections are included and what markets these selections are, so it’s possible to make a strong one if you do your research.


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Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Andrew Black and the road to Exchange Betting

One of Britain’s most profitable entrepreneurs, operating in a field that’s remained largely unchanged for several years, Andrew Black’s launch of Betfair in 2000 is a classic example of that inventive spirit that helps a small business take on the big boys and hit one for six!

Black did not come from a gambling background; his grandfather was in fact an MP who made efforts to suppress and outlaw gambling altogether. But such an attitude did not pass down to his grandson who dropped out of his second year at Exeter university due to missing so many classes. According to Andrew himself, he was at the bookies.

After a stretch as a full-time gambler, during which he remained largely solvent, Black had a brilliant idea for a site that would revolutionise how gamblers could place bets
. The only problem was that his plan involved a lot of online gambling and it was coming fresh off the Dotcom crash. It wasn’t easy to secure funding for his business in such a climate, venture capitalists wanted nothing to do with it and it was up to Black and his business partner Edward Wray to find the funds themselves from friends and family. Eventually they got the £1 million they needed together, and the two were off!

Betfair’s focus wasn’t on the traditional method bookmakers used and was instead on
exchange betting. Essentially, you took a sport like Football or Cricket, and instead of betting on a result against a bookmaker, the exchange meant you were betting against your fellow gamblers, so one would back and the other lay, which allowed the site to offer better odds. For example, if you’re betting on the ashes you could either back Australia to win or lay them to lose with the money you’d get from the result reflected in the odds. Other sites had a similar idea and launched around the same time but, crucially, Black and Wray included an element that dramatically enhanced their site. Rather than one gambler placing a wager and another accepting it, Betfair worked more like a financial exchange which increased the scope significantly but, most crucially, meant rather than one large bet being laid by one person, it could be met by multiple other gamblers and produced an exchange which was more like the Tote of horse-racing. After the acquisition of Flutter in 2001, Betfair now holds an impressive 90% market share due to its more flexible model.

As you’d expect, this approach did not sit well with some established bookmakers who were less than appreciative of their new rival. It didn’t take long for them to start making comments about how their business model was “a parasite on racing”. In a 2003 interview, Black responded simply by saying: “The bookmakers have to understand they don't own racing. They have got used to the fact that it has almost become their product because they have been the only people exploiting it. It so happens we now exploit it more efficiently”. There were also claims that the model could encourage corruption due to the anonymity of the bets but this is widely rebuked, not least because, if anything, the online model makes it harder to bet anonymously. It wasn’t long until bookmakers themselves branched into the sporting exchange market with Ladbrokes now owning Betdaq.

Nowadays, Andrew Black is worth approximately £200 million and has become something of an angel investor in UK based technology businesses. 

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