Boxing Betting Strategy: The Added Value of Fighters Who Finish Fights
By Loot, Sports Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
Boxing used to be the top betting sport in the USA. Obviously, the sport has been knocked down several pegs in the minds of sports fans as a whole, in addition to the betting public. At some point, the corruption and incompetence, mostly in the form of bad decisions, turned people off to a large degree in boxing.
It's a shame. There really is nothing purer than betting on two man engaged in battle. It's the first sports betting to have ever occurred, dating back to biblical times. It doesn't have the gladiator element it used to have, but it's as close as you can get. There is only one athlete to bet on--there are no teams, no replacements, no timeouts, and unlike a basketball team up by 35 in the 4th quarter, it's never over until it's over.
It's understandable why the bad decisions have left such a bad taste in everyone's mouth. A person can only bet on a fighter who deserves to win and ends up losing so many times before becoming permanently turned off by it. Unfortunately, in boxing betting, the bum decisions are a part of doing business.
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One thing we can do is bet more on fights that at least figure to be decided by the fighters. In other words, look for fighters and fights where the result will be decided inside the scheduled distance of rounds. When able to do this, we might not necessarily win a ton more bets, but at least we can try to bypass the harder sting of losing a fight by virtue of a bad decision. Sometimes, you'd prefer to just have the guy you bet on get knocked out than to get robbed by judges.
Most sports have cleaned house in regards to monkey business, but boxing is still stuck in the stone ages to some degree. There is no real oversight, no commission, and apparently no accountability. Judges can hand in a slew of ridiculous scorecards and then pop up again in a big fight. If it were the NFL or NBA, that official would be working intramural games.
It really raises the issue of which kinds of fights we should bet on. When looking at a fight, we can try to determine which ones have a better chance of ending early and which ones just have "distance fight" written all over them. If we fall into the pattern of betting on a majority of fights that seem destined to last the full route, we increasingly subject ourselves to the rampant human error that plagues the sport.
What we should be doing is looking for winners. And some of them are going to be fighters who sometimes go the distance. In other words, there is no real way to totally circumvent the judges. If we are going to bet on boxing, we have to just suck it up and resign ourselves to the fact that we're going to get hosed from time to time. Then again, we should theoretically have bad decisions favor us, as well. We might remember the times we came out on the wrong side of a bad decision more, but some will also fall our way too.
It's just that most of us should bet more on fighters who are able to end a fight organically, on their own accord. Over time, it will allow us to notch a few more wins than we would have by betting on fighters who constantly need judges to decide matters. If we see two fighters with the same odds and one is more of a finish-fighter, we should be a bit more inclined to bet on him. We don't want to get carried away and attach a ton more value on fighters who score a lot of knockouts. A lot of this is accounted for already in the odds and we don't want to give a fighter double-credit. It's just that when a fighter spares us the drama of the scorecards, he is a better investment than the fighter who makes it so we have to rely on judges.
We've all seen countless fights where a fighter we bet on was winning and stopped the opponent late. Then we find out he was somehow behind on the cards and if he didn't score that stoppage, we would have lost the bet. Happens all the time. Sometimes, having a fighter capable of producing a direct result is the difference between winning and losing.
