BOXING

A Comprehensive Guide to Betting on Boxing

You can’t begin an earnest dissection of the popularity of boxing betting in the sports betting industry without first looking at the history that brought us here. We all know that sport is a popular activity for people of all ages. However, we often forget that sport hasn’t always been available in the form that it is today.

No doubt, it has always been a popular endeavour. Yet, the industry that we see today is at the pinnacle of its evolution. Of course, people of the past would have thought so too, so we assume plenty more to come from this industry.

TOP #3 Sports Betting Sites to Bet on Boxing

Many popular sports arose as either aristocratic pastimes or working-class inventions. Certainly, in the early days, the sport was not a piece of entertainment for others. Well, that isn’t entirely true. It was entertainment, but the size of the audience was much smaller.

When we say much smaller, we mean much smaller. Think about a small fraction of the global audience for sports today. Why was this the case? The simple answer is that people didn’t really have the time and access needed to regularly follow their favourite sport.

The selection was rather limited too, and most sports weren’t as formalized as they are today. As society moved forward, sports remained in the backdrop, slowly growing in stature and popularity. Its popularity received several boosts along the way.

When many sports were divided into professional and amateur divisions, following them became easier. The radio definitely helped to increase the access to the various sports out there. The selection was still rather limited, though.

Then came the television. Even with the invention of the television, it wasn’t as if sport’s popularity rose overnight. Slowly, more and more sports and matches began being broadcasted around the world. This was an important development. 

Before this, the sport had been a regional or local activity. You supported the teams in your neighborhood, and that was that. Thanks to television broadcasting, the barriers to viewing most sports began to come down. People now had some time in the evening as well, and watching sport as entertainment finally became the regular activity we know it to be today.

This wasn’t the end of course. We know that suddenly sports became an international phenomenon. People from various countries began following some of the most popular sports out there. While their popularity certainly received a bump, it wasn’t until the advent of the internet and social media that they began to attract a truly global fan base.

Thanks to social media, fans could now interact with their favorite sport and teams in real-time. This was an unprecedented development and changed the face of the industry as everyone knew it at the time. This is the status quo these days, so it won’t strike a lot of the younger readers as anything special obviously.

Those who lived through those times know exactly what we mean, though. With the growth in the popularity of almost every major sport came an increase in revenues thanks to broadcasting revenue. Since there were fans all over the world now, teams began to utilize the commercial potential of these fans.

This led to a boost in adjacent industries. One of these was the sports betting industry, and we’ll talk about that in more detail today. Specifically, this guide will focus on betting on boxing. So read on to understand how you can bet on boxing.

How to Bet on Boxing

Boxing is one of the oldest sports known to us. Critics of the sport often claim that it isn’t a sport at all.

Yet, it is one of the oldest and one of the most celebrated sports around. It is also a classic sport in terms of betting. Before the internet catapulted almost every sport into mainstream media consumption, there was boxing.

Due to the lack of other sports, people would flock to boxing matches to seek the thrill and exhilaration that only sports viewing can provide. These individuals often discovered that you could increase the fun by betting on boxing. Predicting the outcome of the match up became a very popular “side-activity”.

Today, once again, boxing is in vogue. As a result, people are looking around to learn how to place boxing bets and maximize their fun. We’re here to accommodate this need. We’ll tell you everything you need to know to be able to bet on boxing matches with confidence.

We have tried to provide high-quality information as always and hope that all your confusion is cleared up by the end of this guide. Before we can learn how to bet on boxing, we must return to our history lesson. Through that, we will be able to transition to modern times and explain exactly how you can place boxing bets. 

Back when the sport wasn’t available across the world via television and online live streams, you had to physically go to the arena to watch and bet on boxing fights. The bookie would carry something known as the sportsbook. This sportsbook was a ledger containing all the odds, wagers, match ups, and boxing bets available to the viewers that day. You could consult the bookie and make a payment. This process has moved online now in the form of virtual sportsbooks.

We will now discuss the first step in our process.

Step 1: Choose a Suitable Sportsbook

A sportsbook is your gateway to the betting world. That’s not entirely true, to be honest, the gateway is the sports betting platform, but we’ll say sportsbook because that’s the whole reason you joined the platform in the first place.

Now, we’ve already explained what a sportsbook is, so the reason that this is the first step should be abundantly clear by now. In the past, you would have one, maybe two places you could go to place your bet. They would almost always be some back alley location with lots of shady looking individuals.

As the popularity of sports rose, so did the number of online sportsbooks. This has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you have many options, so all the sportsbooks try to offer you the best service possible. On the other hand, there are almost too many options, meaning that if you’re new to the whole betting scene, you may not know how to choose a sportsbook.

We can’t drive out the excess sportsbooks, but we can help you pick out the best ones from the bunch. We have an in-house team of experts who specialize in analyzing sportsbooks. This team regularly posts and updates reviews of the best offshore sportsbook out there.

In doing so, we hope to reduce some of the burdens on you when trying to select a sportsbook. You would know that this is the first and most important step in your betting journey. You want to not only go through the best boxing sites but those that offer a whole host of other features like bonuses and bet type variety.

Once you’ve gone through our reviews and chosen a sportsbook you like, you can move on to the next step.

Step 2: Deposit Money into your Account

You can’t bet if you’re broke; in the same vein, you can’t bet if you don’t add any money to your account. This is a relatively simple and straightforward process, but you should definitely look up the deposit options that you’ve been provided with.

Ideally, you would have read our review of the sportsbook of your choice, and hence would already be quite familiar with these options. The deposit options are an important consideration because you will need to use them time and time again.

If your preferred method is not available on the platform, you would have to jump through several hoops each time you want to make a transaction. This is because not all methods are made equal. Some will carry additional charges as credit cards do. Some will take longer to process as bank transfers do. Each option has its own pros and cons.

We normally recommend all our readers to use cryptocurrency because it is highly secure and has the fastest transaction speeds out of all the options. For the same reasons, most platforms prefer cryptocurrencies, so they normally offer incentives such as bonuses for using crypto. When betting on boxing, it may just be worth it to choose cryptocurrency as your deposit method.

Step 3: Place a Bet

We’ve arrived at the main objective that we set out to achieve, and yet we are only halfway there. We’ll explain what we mean. Suppose you’ve completed the previous two steps and are now ready to bet. You navigate to the boxing bets section of the sportsbook and begin to see all the available wagers.

Something’s wrong, isn’t it? You don’t understand a word that’s written there, do you? Worry not! We’ve prepared for this eventuality. First, we’ll take you through all the words by explaining the various types of boxing bets. Then we’ll deal with the numbers by teaching you how to read boxing odds.

Let’s start with the types of boxing bets.

Step 4: Understanding the Types of Boxing Bets

There are several types of bets available for you to bet on during a fight. Here are some of the most popular ones.

To-Win Bets

Let’s start with the most simple type first, eh? To-win bets are pretty self-explanatory, to be honest. The wager is right there in the name. You’re essentially betting on which boxer will ultimately win the match. These are the simplest type of bets in any sport because they don’t require an immense amount of technical knowledge to understand.

Don’t get us wrong; it is still difficult to get it right, especially for someone who is new to the betting world. What we mean is that the concept is simple to understand. The sports betting world is often filled with complicated jargon, so to-win bets are a refreshing change of pace for the casual bettor.

Their name explains everything you’d ever need to know about them. In other sports, these are also referred to as moneyline bets. The name moneyline bet needs an explanation, but that is not the case with to-win bets.

In order to place a to-win bet, all you have to do is go through the matchups on any given day. See which two boxers are involved and then bet on one of them to win. That’s the entirety of the process. Unlike other bets, you don’t need to open a dictionary to understand the wager, and you also don’t need a calculator to figure out what the numbers are doing.

Of course, the more information you have, the likelier it is that your bet will be successful. The best bettors have a deep connection with the sport they’re betting on and can leverage minute details to their advantage.

No guide on the planet can address that issue for you, though. It’s something that comes with regular practice. We will now look at a few boxing bets that follow the same idea.

Fight Timing Bets

These are also pretty easy to understand. Each boxing fight has a limited number of rounds. The fight goes on until one of the boxers is unable or unwilling to continue. The fight can end at any point, so sportsbooks provide three types of fight timing bets.

The first is go-the-distance bets. These simply mean that the fight will go on to the final round. If both boxers are still standing at the end of the fight, the decision falls to the judge. Boxing bets like go-the-distance are so popular that they don’t ask you to predict the winner.

It doesn’t matter who wins as long as both contestants are still standing at the final bell. Our next type is the over/under bet. These bets are hallmarks of almost all sports betting. They simply try to predict whether a certain important number will be over or under a threshold during a game. When betting on boxing, over/under bets deal with the number of rounds.

A sportsbook may offer you odds on several variations of this bet. One may say over/under 7.5 rounds, while the other may say over/under 9.5 rounds. Specificity helps in this case because it increases your payout. The problem with being specific is that you actually have to have a very good idea of what you’re doing. This is why over/under bets are one of the more complicated boxing bets out there.

The next type is group-round bets. Bookmakers routinely divide bouts into three stages – the beginning, the middle and the end. So, in a 12-round bout, you may have three stages like rounds 1-4, 5-9, and 9-12. One of the safer boxing bets out there, these reduce the risk on you considerably. 

This is because not only do you not have to make any claims as to who the eventual winner will be, but you also don’t have to be highly specific about when the fight will end. Of course, this means that the potential returns from this bet won’t be very high.

The final type of bet in this category is the round-specific bet. Just as you can be as vague as possible, you can also go in the opposite direction and be as specific as possible. The returns on these bets are understandably quite high, but it is merely a reflection of how difficult they are to pull off successfully. In this bet, you are essentially picking out the exact round that the fight will end in.

A lot of thought goes into making this kind of bet, but the mental effort is worth the potential earnings if you ask us. It is also important to note again that it doesn’t matter who wins the fight as long as it ends in the round you said it would.

Method of Victory Bets

Another boxing bet that is pretty self-explanatory. In any fight, a boxer can win in three ways. A knockout is the most straightforward method. Then you have technical knockouts wherein the opponent isn’t unconscious but dazed enough that they are unable to continue. Finally, you have disqualification of the opponent, which is down to following the rules of the game as implied.

When placing a method of victory bet, you need to be intimately familiar with the fighting styles of each boxer and their ability to take a beating. It isn’t as simple as betting on the guy with the bigger arms to win by knockout because many boxers choose to take hits early on and then pounce when the opponent is tired of throwing punches.

As with the previous types of boxing betting, you do not predict a winner in this bet. All you have to tell the sportsbook is how the eventual winner will achieve their victory.

Double Chance Bets

This is where we combine the previously discussed types of bets and predict which fighter will win and by what method. So these essentially combine to-win bets with the method of victory bets. Sounds simple enough, but the more elements you add to your bet, the harder it is to win when it comes to any kind of betting.

Bettors still use these types of bets because the promised returns are much higher than making those two bets individually. Double chance bets are an excellent way to test out your knowledge while betting on boxing matches to make some money on the side.

There are more boxing bets out there, like boxing betting prop bets, but these cover the most important ones that you’ll come along in the beginning. Let’s now take a look at the next and final step – how to read boxing odds.

Step 5: Learn How to Read boxing betting Odds

Boxing odds follow the same principle as the odds for any other sport. You have two participants facing off, and each has a number attached to their name in the sportsbook. One will have a negative number attached, while the other will carry a positive sign with the number.

In the betting world, negative means good. That means the boxer with the negative number for odds is considered the favorite in the given matchup. Conversely, the boxer with the positive number is the underdog. Since there is more risk associated with betting on the underdog, the returns for making a bet on them are much higher than when betting on the favorite.

This makes perfect sense because everyone would want to bet on the likely winner. Here’s an example of boxing odds to illustrate our point.

Fighter A (+180) vs. Fighter B (-150)

In this example, fighter B is the favorite. So if you bet on them to win, you’d have to bet $150 to win $100. On the other hand, if you wish to bet on the underdog, you’ll win $180 when betting $100.

The final step in the process will be to make your bet finally.

Final Word

This has been our comprehensive guide to boxing betting. We hope that you learnt the answers to all your questions. If you have any other boxing betting or general queries, feel free to consult our wonderful guides on all things related to sports betting.

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