Betting on cricket

The game of cricket offers a wide range of betting opportunities and thousands of matches every year on which to lay bets. However, the smart cricket punter will develop a winning system for one or two types of wagers before adding more types. Here are the most common types of bets available and an explanation of exactly what the ones to start with mean.

By far the most common bet on a cricket match is a money line wager and it is the one you should start with if you are not an experienced bettor. A money line bet is one where you pick which team will win the match. It doesn’t matter what the score ends up being, as long as you choose which team wins. Here is a recent money line found at an actual bookmaker.

In this example, Australia is favoured and South Africa is the underdog. Any cricket team with a + sign is the underdog and any team with a – sign is the favourite. On a money line wager when you bet on the favourite you have to wager the amount following the minus sign to win 100. In this example, you would bet 195 to win 100. When you bet on the underdog in cricket, you bet 100 to win the amount following the plus sign. In this example, you would wager 100 to win 168. You also receive your original wager back if you win. Of course, you don’t have to bet in units of 100. Your cricket betting site can and will take fractions of bets or multiples. In the above example, you could bet 50 to win 84 on South Africa or 390 to win 200 on Australia. Once you learn how to pick consistent money line winners and are showing a profit you can look at some of the other choices.

Money line bets are also usually available for large events with multiple teams like the ICC Cricket World Cup, showing a range of teams with different odds. Usually, all of the teams are listed with plus odds unless there is a strongly dominant cricket team. The following is an example for an ICC Cricket World Cup with listed betting odds for the top several teams.

Other common cricket bets that can be placed, depending on what your bookmaker offers, include match scores, top bowler, series scores, odd or even run scores, total runs and session runs. While it may be tempting to lay a bet on some of these more exotic wagers, you should not even think about it unless your study and research give you a solid reason to think you have found a valuable pick. Learn more about how to prepare yourself for a winning cricket betting career in the next part of the guide.

To win consistently while betting on cricket you need to develop a solid strategy backed up by hard work and profitable wagering systems. The first thing you must do is track as much information as you possibly can about the cricket teams you will be betting on or against. While it is easy to look up information on the internet it is always better to perform research by yourself and make own judgment before placing bets. There are even places online that will predict the outcomes of cricket matches and give gambling advice, but you will be much better off in the long run by developing your own systems. After all, if the people giving you the picks (Yes, this includes our site) were so good at picking winners they would be making so much money they wouldn’t have time to tell other people about their winning picks online.

The most reliable way to start your tracking system is to choose the teams you will track and create a folder, either a real one or one on your computer, for each cricket team. Start putting every single thing, including statistics, personal news stories about players and the team and other information, in those folders. You also need to track wins, losses, home, away, scores, weather, key injuries, who played and who didn’t, time of the cricket matches, how far each team travelled to the match and every other stat you can compile. The more things you track the better chance you have of finding a winning cricket betting system.

It helps if you know how to use a spreadsheet program to keep all of the statistics because you can quickly find the cricket related information you are looking for and set up comparisons. Most people who place cricket bets look at the home and away teams and may consider how a team scores on the road versus at home, but you need to know how they play after travelling over two hours away when the weather is below a certain temperature and with the 5th top player hungover. While this may seem funny at first, if you want to find a winning cricket system this is the kind of thing you have to find the answer to. The top gamblers in the world may only win 6 out of 10 games, so it is important to find every possible edge. A single piece of information that you have access to that is not widely known or tracked may be the single difference between you being a long term winning or losing bettor.