Boxing Betting Strategy
The sweet science used to be one of the biggest and most popular sports in the world, both for spectators and gamblers. However, the last few decades have seen a dramatic drop in interest, in large part due to the fears of fight fixing and the rise of MMA competition.
Nowadays, boxing is a well-regulated sport with hundreds of fights happening each week in a wide variety of weight classes. While only the very biggest fights get mainstream attention, there’s no shortage of opportunities to bet on boxing. Even better, there’s no season; boxing goes on year round, so if you become a successful boxing bettor, you’ll always have action no matter when you want it.
Types of Boxing Bets
Normally, there is only one kind of bet to make in boxing: a money line bet on who will win the fight, with or without the option to bet on a draw included. However, some high profile fights may offer more complex prop bets. These include betting on how the fight will end, the number of rounds, or who will win in what round. However, the most common bet is just picking the winner of the fight, and offer money lines that will be familiar to anyone who has gambled on other team sports. These odds are usually presented like this:
Julio Cesar Chavez -250
John Duddy +200
Draw +2800
This means that if you bet $250 on Chavez, you’d win $100, as he is the favorite. A $100 bet on Duddy would return $200 if he should win, and a $100 bet on a draw would earn you $2,800.
Boxing Betting Tips
Luckily for gamblers, there is a ton of information available on fighters from around the world that can be used to help handicap fights. Of course, the simplest information you can find is the record of each boxer, along with the number of fights they’ve won by knockout.
However, that information can be very misleading. Fighters often build up impressive records against weak competition, especially when they first start their careers. It’s not entirely their fault, of course; they need to beat these kinds of fighters to prove they can hack it against stronger competition. But it does make it difficult to judge a fighter based on record alone. Similarly, a fighter with a couple losses earlier in their career isn’t necessarily bad; they may have either improved later on, or just fought a couple of other promising fighters early in their career and got the worst of it at the time.
Instead, take a look at a boxer’s recent form – how they’ve fought against their last 3-5 opponents. Take into account not only the result of the fights, but the specifics; find out if it was a dominating win, or a split decision squeaker. Make sure you also take into account the quality of those opponents. Unlike with many other sports, you may need to rely on the judgments of experts to tell you how good a fighter looked or how worthy his opponent was. However, the more data you can collect, from opinions to statistics, the better you’ll be able to pin down a boxer’s true level and gauge his chances in his next fight.
Boxing is not an easy sport to bet on, but there are so many fights each week that there are still frequent opportunities to bet with an edge. Keep an eye out for the times when the bookmakers have set a bad line, and you’ll find yourself making plenty of money by betting on boxing.
