Sport is made for betting

Another big weekend of football despite atrocious weather - so stay inside and do your form, courtesy of the great blokes at Football Form Labs ... FIDENS FUND Our proprietary trading arm Fidens made a gross profit of over 26% for investors last quarter. To find out more view our prospectus here or get in touch: Fidens@footballformlabs.com - (and don't forget to mention this blog!) COLOSSUS BETS Colossus Bets offers pool betting games which allows you to bet on the results (both exact scores and outcomes) of sporting events. Their flagship bet is The £10,000,000 'Colossus'. This requires you to select the correct score in seven football matches of their choice. Below we have provided some stats relating to the seven Colossus matches for this weekend which may help give you some potential ideas for your Colossus Bet: Liverpool v Arsenal : See below for a full match preview Southampton v Stoke Stoke are winless in their 11 trips to middle-third teams since the s...

If it ever stops raining, we might have a decent race day at Newbury tomorrow. One of the features of the day is the Betfair Hurdle, and the astute Andrew Downes, @17forlife , previews the race. --------------------------- Betfair Hurdle The Betfair Hurdle is one of the most widely anticipated handicap hurdles of the entire National Hunt season and whilst this year’s race doesn’t look the greatest renewal, it is as competitive as ever. This Class 1, Grade 3 often throws up important clues for the Festival, especially in the novice ranks. The novices have a very good record in this race, often running very well in the Supreme the following month. My Tent Or Yours, last year’s facile winner of the Betfair Hurdle went on to finish a very close second. Darlan, the previous year, would probably have won had he not fallen in the Betfair before placing in the Supreme. There are several more examples therefore looking at the novices is often a good place to start. The current secon...

It's Superbowl time! After a highly successful run in last year's big game , NFL tragic (and sports writer) Ian Steven, @deevo82 , is back with his preview - focusing on the plethora of prop bets on offer, rather than the actual match result itself. -------------------------- Superbowl XLVIII Preview The world’s attention turns Stateside this evening as sport’s second most violent game – behind only shinty – stages its showpiece event which is part sport and part showbiz (and part paying your energy bills after last year) gets under way in the Big Apple. The Superbowl transcends the barrier of fanaticism to connect more with the layman tentatively dipping a toe into the gridiron world in a bid to absorb some of the magic of the big day. More snack foods are consumed in the USA on Superbowl Sunday than any other day of the year – and if you have seen the girth of the average Texan then that truly is an extraordinary statistic! There are some Yanks who don’t even give a ...

After two quality games to start this year's tournament, James Jack, @materialista27 , steps up to preview the last match of the round. ------------------------- Ireland v Scotland The final game to get underway this weekend is Scotland's visit to a new look Ireland. After last season's disaster, Ireland gave Declan Kidney the bullet and the pudding has been replaced by former Leinster supremo Joe Schmidt. Schmidt has chosen to retain many of last season's key players and will hope for better luck with injuries than his predecessor. Ireland started well last year with a win over Champions Wales at the Millennium Stadium, however that was the highlight of Ireland's campaign as injuries to key players like Jonny Sexton, Simon Zebo meant they were subjected to defeats by England, Scotland and Italy as well as drawing with Wooden Spooners France. Ireland's form in the Autumn Internationals was not particularly inspiring either as they opened with a 40-9 victory...

It's Six Nations' time when the cream of European rugby do battle (without the threat of being hammered by southern hemisphere opponents :). The non-football media in England will hit fever pitch in the next 48 hours before England step out onto the Stade de France to launch their campaign. Will eternal optimism be sustained or crushed back into doom and gloom on Saturday night? Step in rugby expert Russ Petty, @rpetty80 , and his detailed pre-game analysis of the first round's headline match. You can read more of his sterling work, including previews of this weekend's other matches via his blog . ---------------------------- France vs England There is a trend that the French do well in the tournament straight after a Lions tour – they won in 1998, 2002, 2006 and 2010, with Grand Slams in three of them. They did only win two of their 11 games in 2013 though and the problems concerning fitness, and number of ‘foreigners’ in key playing positions in the Top 14 rema...

The Ballarat Cup is one of the jewels of Australasian harness racing yet puzzlingly (or is that politically), it is not a Grand Circuit event. This time of year is as good as it gets in Victoria, and signing in on the blog for the first time is Jay Wilkins, @TearitallaJay . --------------------------- 2014 Ballarat Cup Next week's Hunter Cup creates a couple of interesting sub-plots for the top fancies in this year's Ballarat Cup. The Ballarat Trotting Club has assembled a very competitive line-up for their Cup, despite the focus of many stables being drawn to Victoria’s showpiece standing start (SS) classic on 1 Feb. The impact began when Shepparton Cup winner The Gold Ace was deemed to have galloped away from the SS, basically ending his chances of gaining a Hunter Cup place. Hunter Cup qualifying rules state: A condition of the Hunter Cup is that “a horse must have contested and began safely in a minimum of one standing start race in the 12 months prior.” This rul...

Following on from my popular post What shits me about match-fixing 'journalism' , there is another prime case of media reporting on an industry they have zero clue about.... but because they once bet two bucks on the Melbourne Cup, they consider themselves an expert on it... It started from this - a police statement about a nonsensical arrest at the Australian Open. Police have arrested and charged a man at the Australian Open for ‘courtsiding’, a form of court side betting that involves placing bets on point outcomes throughout a match. Fault 1 - no it doesn't. It involves placing bets on the match outcome. There's no advantage in betting on points, bookies will NOT let you bet on the next point because they know about broadcast delays. They will bet you on the point after the next point - eg at 15-all, they will offer a market on the fourth point of the game. Fault 2 - this guy would not have been placing the bets, he would only have passing on the data to someo...

Less rain, lots of wind this week means we might get some decent racing this weekend in Britain! Warwick hosts one of its best meetings of the year, and taking up the challenge of the preview is @tenembassy . For weekly previews and reviews, and a monthly Eyecatchers service from him, send an email to tenembassy@gmail.com for more details. ------------------------------ Betfred Classic – Warwick 11th January Hot on the heels of the Welsh National comes another staying chase with good prizemoney, with over 34k to the winner here. Looks like conditions will be stamina sapping, with the course getting another 11mm Wednesday night into Thursday, but it looks set fair from here to Saturday which might well result in that sticky heavy rather than the heavy that we got at Cheltenham last week, where it just constantly rained and horses got through it easily. It’s a race that’s twice been won by Alan King and Paul Nicholls in the last ten years but for various reasons, neither has a runner...

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