Cricket Betting Strategy: Ante-Post Betting

Cricket is becoming an important sport for the bookmakers, despite only a handful of countries regularly participating on the international stage. As a result, an increasing number of cricket markets are being offered, providing more chances for the smart punter to find the value bets to profit from their cricket betting.

Ante-post cricket betting on test and one-day series can often prove a source of profit. As well as the obvious series winner markets, there are generally correct score, top batsman and bowler markets, and sometimes even handicap and double chance markets.

Teams

The key is to analyse the two teams that are participating in the series, as well as the venues that will be used and the expected weather conditions. Armed with this information, it is often possible to find some good bets to begin the series with.

Conditions

The conditions can often play an important role, particularly when looking at the correct score markets. While organisers tend to try and avoid playing series during poor weather conditions in a country, sometimes it is difficult to avoid in a busy calendar. For example, in June and July 2012, Pakistan played a three-match test series in Sri Lanka. However, this happened to coincide with the monsoon season in Sri Lanka. Knowing this, we can take a closer look at some of the possible outcomes in the correct score market.

It would be safe to assume that, in this situation, at least one of the matches would be drawn due to the weather. Therefore, we can immediately rule out 3-0 both ways, as well as both 2-1 results. Taking these results out, we leave ourselves with far fewer choices at bigger odds. As it happened, two of the matches were drawn, predominantly due to the weather, and Sri Lanka won the series 1-0 at initial odds of 22/1 – a real boost for ante-post cricket betting.

Venues

Analysing the venues can give us an idea on where the value may lie in the top batsman and bowler markets. The obvious first thing is whether the venues suit pace or spin bowlers. Traditionally, subcontinent pitches favour the spinners, while English, Australian and South African conditions favour the pace bowlers. Generally, the bookmakers will have taken this into account, but if we look a little deeper, we can often find good pointers for our cricket betting.

Some batsmen perform significantly better at home compared with abroad, which may not have been taken into account. Take Sri Lanka’s hugely gifted batsman Mahela Jayawardene. He averages 63.5 runs per innings when he is playing in Sri Lanka, but just 40.1 when playing abroad. If this is not picked up on, it means that we might look at Jayawardene being a good value bet for top batsman in Sri Lanka, and taking up too much of the book away from home, leading to value elsewhere.

There are a number of batsmen that have similar discrepancies, while others are very consistent both home and away. There are even the occasional players that perform better abroad.