Sport as an industry influences many others around it, none more so than betting.
Together with video gaming, betting provides an almost constant way to engage with sport and may well be the main catalyst for someone to watch a chosen match or even sport altogether.
While corner betting sites are a good example of just one area that has added greater interest in to that particular area of football, it’s often not as clear in other sports what game actions would suit the betting market.
In rugby, for instance, try scorer markets are common, but there aren’t ever really any relating to say penalties or scrums.
Perhaps the bookmakers decide that these are just too unpredictable to call, or maybe too random to find correlation, and so rather than risk losing significantly on them, don’t offer them as markets.
The most hockey related market are so-called pucklines, which offers modified point spreads alongside the standard moneyline betting, which basically means picking the outright winner of the game.
A quick glance at the markets available for games in the KHL at the moment, provides a variety of options, albeit all generally related to the outcome of the game, rather than specifics within it.
You can, for example, bet on how games will be positioned at the end of the first period and how many goals there might be.
There are individual player markets, enabling you to bet on first, last and anytime goalscorers, much in a similar way to football.
Multi goalscorers is another option, as is selecting if a player will score in the first period.
Betting on which team will score which goal (e.g. first, second, third etc) is an option, while there are score before and not score before markets based around the first goal of the game.
Most of the non-outcome related bets surround the first period and how that will pan out.
It’s hard to think about other markets that ice hockey could exploit, and it would of course require betting and hockey in general to become much more popular.
Face off percentages, offside calls, icing calls or even penalty in minutes could be integrated to betting markets.
Someone out there better than me might be able to provide some statistics that hint at correlation and relationships between those things – which of course will be important research for the bookmakers to be able to start pricing such markets in the future.
Do you bet on ice hockey? And if so, what leagues? Let us know in the comments below!
