World Cup Betting Tips

As the World Cup finally got underway this weekend, the built-up anticipation of millions of soccer (football) fans can finally be let loose into full-blown hooliganism, or even better, rampant gambling. For a North American such as myself who has always been more interested in soccer highlights than actual soccer games, the betting element is what truly drives me to invest time in watching the sport.

Sporting Life Fanzine offers a nice combination of wise, obvious and silly tips for World Cup betting.

Some of the good advice centers on determining if your chosen bookie is actually giving the best odds and on spreading bets around to many games so that the entertainment generated by your gambling dollars goes a longer way.

More obvious points include keeping track of injuries to players and keeping track of your own bets.

Some of the more complex tips strike me as fairly useless:

Note the teams who do well in penalty shootouts...So DO back Argentina and Germany (they both have a 3-0 record) and DON'T back England (0-2) and Italy (0-3).

The fact that England has lost two shootouts is a terrible indicator of future success. To begin with, shootouts are determined largely by luck. At this level of the game, most shooters can put the ball on net and it's left to the goalkeeper to guess which way to commit. But the real issue is that a sample size of two games is just too small to provide any real indication of future performance. If England was 0-17 in shootouts, I would agree that there was a clear pattern, but two or three shootout losses does not a loser make.

But my real concern is who to root for with Cameroon nowhere to be found in this year's draw. Go Togo!

WORLD CUP BETTING DOS AND DON'TS [SportingLife.com]

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