Indian Premier League Makes a Good Bet

The Indian Premier League will offer some great betting opportunities for those who know enough about the game to make it pay. This Cricket Premier League, which starts on 18 April, 2008, boasts eight teams with players being bought and sold in a similar way to English Premiership football players. A recent auction of top cricketers resulted in India’s one-day captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni being bought for the Chennai team for a staggering $1.5 million. When you consider that his base price was a much more modest $400,000 you quickly get a sense of how competitive this league will be.

Cricket betting has always been popular, but the Indian Premier League (which is a Twenty20 competition) is likely to attract a lot more attention than the game has come to expect. Sony Television has snapped up the rights to broadcast games, and because this cost the company more than $1 billion, we can expect some very serious promotion of the event.

Whilst we will have to wait to find out just how wide the range of bets will be on the Indian Premier League, we can be almost certain that it will include the following:

• IPL Winner – This market will allow us to bet on the team we think is most likely to win the Indian Premier League overall. The competition comprises 59 games played over 44 days, so the odds will inevitably expand and contract according to how teams perform at each stage. An each way bet should give us some consolation if our selected team gets beat into second place.

• Match Bets – We should be able to bet on the outcome of each of the 59 games individually, just as we can bet on Premiership football teams every time they play. This presents us with a good opportunity to pick a team we think will win and follow it match by match, hopefully picking up some profits along the way.

• In Running Markets – These will be available on betting exchanges such as Betfair and may also be available from traditional bookmakers such as Paddy Power. The advantage of in running markets is that they allow us to close our position before the event itself finishes, and this can be a good way of locking in profits or limiting losses.

The first Indian Premier League competition will undoubtedly be a learning experience for those of us who like to bet on cricket, but if we exercise caution and make our judgements based on form and the merit of each team, we shouldn’t have too many nasty surprises. What we will have is 44 glorious days of cricket action unlike anything we’ve seen in the past.

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