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Aussie
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Centrebet Capers
CRICKET Tonight the Ashes gets under way with the first Test at Lords and this series is already shaping as the biggest ever cricket series as far as betting goes. Australia's one day form (or lack of it) when they first landed in the ‘Old Dart’ sparked plenty of interest in England winning back the Ashes but now that several of the Aussies appear to have hit their straps, we are seeing money come in from all directions and across all betting options. As far as the series goes, several weeks ago we took two big bets for England (one $10,000 at 4.50 then $8000 at 4.25). The Poms got as short as 3.50 but are back out to 4.50 now. We have taken some money for a 'drawn series', including two separate bets of £1000 at 7.00 but the big stuff has been for the Aussies. After touching 1.55, Australia is back into 1.37 now with the big bets including $50,000 at 1.45 and $20,000 at 1.42. The first Test has seen Australia firm from 2.00 into 1.95 with most of the support coming from our side of the globe. Already, four separate bets of $10,000 have been placed on Australia and we are expecting more to come today. One of our astute Indian clients has placed $60,000 on the draw at $2.80. We’ve also seen two other bets of $USD5000 from India for the draw at that price. The long term weather maps on the internet say that there is a strong chance of rain on the last three days so we are happy to keep on the safe side of the draw. England are out to 5.25, a price that looks appealing to our British clients judging by the long list of transactions but the biggest bet has only been £100. The odds to win the test will be updated at the end of each break with 'next man out' betting available throughout the match as well as method of dismissal. AUSTRALIAN RULES The pendulum has swung well and truly in favour of punters over the past few weeks of AFL betting and while Collingwood got punters off on the wrong foot last Friday night when 26 point losers to Essendon, six of the next seven favourites won with all covering their handicaps. The Magpies have had a poor season but there was plenty of money to say they would beat Essendon. We took bets of $30,000 at 1.55 and $20,000 conceding 11½ point-start. Essendon did have their admirers though, including one bet of $15,000 (1.90) with the 11 point-start. Geelong landed possibly the biggest legitimate plunge of the year on Saturday when thrashing Port Adelaide by 69 points. As much as 2.30 was given for Geelong and we were keen on them so didn't join in until the hours leading up to the game. Even at that stage, punters would take anything with bets of $25,000 (1.70) and $24,000 (1.65) amongst the bigger ones which saw the Cats turn from a winner to a loser in our book. We did take three separate bets of $10,000 for Port with 6 ½ point-start but it was nowhere near enough. The 'game of the year' turned into a fizzer when the West Coast came out with all guns blazing to put Brisbane out of contention in the first quarter. Rumours that Chris Judd would be out saw a splurge of money for Brisbane early Saturday, which saw us take two big bets, those being $20,000 with 10½ point-start and $16,000 to win at 2.25. Once the rumours were quashed, Eagles punters moved into overdrive and they firmed from 1.70 into 1.55 with the biggest bet being $30,000 at 1.65. This week we have five nearly unbackable favourites and three games where the betting could go either way. Just when we all wrote the Swans off they have turned the corner and now they are involved in this week’s 'game of the year' against the West Coast. The Eagles have staggered over the line a few times this year away from home and this does look a match tailor made for them to lose. We posted both sides at 1.90, taking early bets of $5000 and $3000 for the Swans but late last night we did take two separate bets of $10,000 for the Eagles so it's 'game on'. The Kangaroos and the Crows have been the big surprises in season 2005 and they line up against each other in Melbourne on Sunday. Again we couldn't split the two and have opened the prices at 1.90 apiece. The punters can sort it out. The Eagles now have a firm grip on premiership favourtism at 2.75 but there is money for all sides in contention. This week we have taken two bets of $1000 for the Kangaroos at 21.00 and also a bet of $2000 for Brisbane at 7.00. RUGBY LEAGUE While their AFL counterparts have been basking in glory with a solid run of favourites winning, rugby league followers have been less fortunate. Last week only three of seven favourites managed to find the line (one of those in extra time) and only one was able to cover the handicap No doubt the biggest shock was the win by Souths over North Queensland. The Cowboys were $1.12 and aside from win bets of $40,000 and $20,000 at that quote, there were also three bets totaling $57,000 for the Cowboys to win by more than 17 points. It has been impossible to work Souths out this year but they have been good to us over the past month. New Zealand came from nowhere to possibly end the season of the Roosters when 24-22 winners on Saturday. The Roosters were 1.45 and not only carried some heavy betting to win the game but also to cover a six point spread. The Bulldogs host Brisbane tomorrow night and it is a terrific betting game. The Doggies opened slight outsiders at 2.00 with five early bets totaling $26,000 coming for them but now we are seeing money for the Broncos at 1.80. We can't predict what will happen but will probably end up looking for another Brisbane win. Steve Price is back for New Zealand and Simon Woolford is gone for Canberra. That should be enough to see the Warriors beat Canberra and cover the 8 point handicap on Saturday. We have taken a few small bets for the Raiders with the 8 point start but it's a game we won't be getting too involved in. GOLF Tiger Woods captured his second major of the year with an emphatic five shot victory in last week’s British Open. The win was Tiger's second Open making him only the second player behind Jack Nicklaus to win all four majors twice and the 29 year old did it two years quicker than his mentor. It was also Nicklaus' final appearance at the British Open. St Andrews was a fitting place for the greatest player of the modern era to make an emotional farewell. It was a great event for legends of the game. Woods joining the immortals with a win, while Colin Montgomerie, Fred Couples, Bernhard Langer and Jose Maria Olazabal all had top five finishes. It was a poor result for us with Woods backed to take out over $250,000 while Couples, Montgomerie and Olazabal were all backed to win more than $50,000 to finish in the top five. The tour returns to normality this week for the U.S Bank Championship of Milwaukee. Defending champion is Carlos Franco at 41.00, however, Kenny Perry, a winner at Bay Hill earlier in the season is favourite at 8.00. He carries one wager of $4,000 at that quote while Ben Crane (41.00) and Heath Slocum (51.00) have been best backed to beat him. After the frenetic betting of last week’s British Open this week's event comes as a pleasant change. The European tour continues this week with the Deutsche Bank Players Championship at Gurt Kaden in Germany. Defending Champion Trevor Immelman is a 26.00 chance to retain his title but he must face a myriad of inform players coming off last week’s Open including Retief Goosen who has been installed 8.50 favourite ahead of Padraig Harrington at 11.00. U.S Open champ Michael Campbell (16.00) and Angel Cabrera and Jose Maria Olazabal (17.00) will lead the challenge in what has been an evenly supported event. RUGBY UNION The Wallabies travel to Johannesburg to play the Springboks in the return match of the Mandela Plate. With an abysmal record against the home nation (two victories since 1992) this would look to be a good opportunity to turn this trend around. Jake White has stated that his priorities are focussed on retaining the Tri-Nations and that the Mandela Plate will be used to assess his squad with an eye on 2007. Whilst Eddie Jones may have a similar outlook, a victory at altitude in the Republic is a prize that he wants to take home. The Wallabies opened marginal favourites at 1.77 and giving 1½ start at 1.90 but it’s the Springboks that have attracted all the interest. Our first bet over $10,000 was on the Boks at $2.05, shortly followed by another $8,000 on them at the $1.90 with the handicap. Should this betting trend continue the South Africans will start favourites come Saturday night. With the completion of the Northern Hemisphere tours, the Six Nations Championship book for 2006 has been opened. France have opened favourites at 2.50 with England on the second line at 3.25. Last year’s Grand Slam winner Wales are currently offered at 3.85, the Irish are posted at 6.50 and Scotland and Italy have been given virtually no hope at all at 201 and 1,001 respectively. FORMULA ONE Kimi Raikkonen goes into the German Grand Prix trying to close the 26 point gap between himself and leader Fernando Alonso in the World Drivers Championship. Raikkonen's title hopes haven't been helped by successive engine failures which have seen him demoted ten places down the starting grid, relegating him to 12th and 13th on the last two grids. Despite all of that, Raikkonen's pace has seen him salvage third and second spot respectively so if his team can have the engine on song this week, we would expect Raikkonen to justify his short quote of 2.10. Championship leader Alonso is second elect to win this week at 3.75 with two early bets of $800 placed on him but it is the next two in the betting who have attracted most of the early betting. Juan Pablo Montoya and Michael Schumacher share the third line at 6.00 with Montoya backed to win close to $20,000. He did win his last start in Britain but that was only his fifth win and he hasn't really lived up to the promise he showed early in his career. Schumacher will be back on his home soil so it isn't really surprising to see money coming for him, most of it from Germany. Schumacher won his home GP last year but the defending world champion has only one victory to his name this year and that was in the farce that was the US Grand Prix. V8 SUPERCARS This weekend is round seven of the V8 Supercar series to be held at Queensland Raceway. The track is just over 3 km long and there is only one race which will be held on Sunday. That is far removed from the way the series has been conducted so far with multiple short races held over weekends so tactics will differ for this weeks race. All the big names will be going around trying to make ground on championship leader, Marcos Ambrose. Ambrose has a terrific record in Queensland. He has had pole position every year from 2001 finishing second in 2003 and winning the event in 2004. He has to be the favourite and has been installed at 3.25. Mark Skaife (4.00) will be looking to improve on his 2003 and 2004 performances at this track where he failed to finish after securing great positions on the grid. Todd Kelly is on the third line of betting at 4.50 and will be chasing his third 'round' victory in a row after wins in Shanghai and Darwin. The practice rounds start tomorrow with another round on Saturday followed by the 'Top Ten Shootout'. Betting will re-open as soon as possible after the times are collated. MOTOR BIKES The MotoGP returns to Europe this week after the last race was held in the USA. For only the second time this season, Valentino Rossi failed to make it to the prime position on the podium, with that honour going to American Nicky Hayden. It may pay to ignore the form line from that race as Rossi and others had been critical of the track after qualifying and it was pretty clear that the Italian wasn't going to be taking any risks. He still managed to increase his lead in the title and is hot favourite at 1.50 to win at Donnington. Sete Gibernau is second choice at 4.50 ahead of Max Biaggi at 9.00. One of the first bets we took when betting opened was $6000 for Rossi to win and there has been little or no interest shown in most of the other main contenders. BOXING Bernard Hopkins' ten year reign as middleweight champion of the world ended at the weekend when the well supported Jermain Taylor defeated him in a split decision points victory. Two of the judges awarded the fight to Taylor by two points, with the other awarding it to Hopkins by four points. The loss by the 40 year old Hopkins to Taylor, fourteen years his junior, also saw an end to the third longest reign in boxing history. Hopkins was favourite all the way through betting and after opening at 1.50, close to $12,000 in bets saw his price change to 1.47. Recently we have signed up numerous new American account holders who only bet on boxing and a few of these, including one with $USD4000 and another with half of that amount, took the 2.55 for Taylor. On the day of the fight, betting settled at 1.60 for Hopkins and 2.30 for Taylor with money coming both ways. There was also action both ways in the 'how will the fight end' book, with Hopkins attracting two bets of $4000 to win on points at 2.25 while both fighters were backed to win by KO at 5.00. The option of Taylor by decision was the least attractive to punters (3.75) and allowed us to stagger out of the fight with a small profit. Taylor remains undefeated after 26 bouts and the loss suffered by Hopkins was his first since 1993. BIG BROTHER It’s been another interesting week in the big brother household with one of the twins shown the door and a double eviction due on Sunday. After several weeks of being nominated Dean was finally evicted from the house last weekend. We did see strong support for him to go but his quote drifted from 1.16 to 1.40 as the big money came for Rita. Bets of $2000, $1500 and $1000 came for Rita in the lead up to the eviction which forced her price in from 4.50 into 2.25. We can understand why her fellow housemates don’t like her much because with her constant talking she’d give a panadol a headache! The Logans have been separated following David’s surprise eviction last night. Being the more vocal of the twins he was always going to find it difficult to stay when it came down to a choice between him and his brother Greg. Sunday night’s double eviction should also add some interest to the series. While not many want to take the 1.03 about Rita, they are quite keen on Christie. While her departure is sure to disappoint viewers of the un-cut program Christie is at 1.30 to join Rita on the eviction couch. Tim remains a solid 2.10 favourite to win the series ahead of Greg and Vesna at 3.75. Kate is on the next line of betting at 6.00. In past 24 hours since the twin eviction we have seen a stack of money come for the remaining Logan (Greg) including bets of $500 at 5.00 and $400 at 4.00. The last few weeks of the series should prove to be very interesting from a betting perspective. WORLD SERIES OF POKER By now, most of the world would be aware of the exploits of Melbourne chiropractor Joe Hachem after he won the WSOP title at Binions Casino on the weekend. The likeable Hachem outlasted another debutante, American Steven Dannenmann to win pokers biggest pot and although this was Centrebet's first foray into betting to win the title, we will definitely be doing it again as it proved hugely popular. We decided to bet on who would make the final table of nine from the original start list. There were over 5000 starters who were each prepared to part with $USD10, 000 for the right to play and we took at least one bet on over 350 participants. The 'name' players that we see on television all the time were the ones that punters lumped on to (Ives, Negreanu, Lederer etc) as well as actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. When the final nine were known we had layed only one, American Mike Matusow, who had $7 placed on him at 100/1. When the field was cut to 85 we posted a new market with Phil Ives the favourite at $5 as he had a healthy stack at that stage. Most players were backed (excluding Hachem) and it was at this time that two American clients backed Dannenmann to win $20,000 between them at 150/1. Dannenmann was at the bottom end of the chip count then so he did a marvellous job to make it to the final two. Unfortunately, the Centrebetpoker.com rep failed to make it past the first day but rest assured we will be sending some more next year as first time winner Joe Hachem has given us all hope! Until next week, good punting For
further information contact Gerard Daffy at Centrebet on 02 9206 8715 or
centrebet@centrebet.com
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