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IPL Betting: It pays to back the team batting second

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After 14 matches, four centuries and just short of 10,000 runs, Ed Hawkins think it's time to start finding some patterns in the IPL matches to help us with our betting

AFTER two weeks, 14 matches, 9,048 runs, four centuries and countless sixes - come on, I don't have the time to add them all up, you know - the India Premier League is halfway to finding its first winner, and bettors too should be closer to a successful formula.

It has not been an armchair ride for punters, who should have come to terms with the fact that the only thing we should expect, is the unexpected. It is a surprise to see Shane Warne's unfashionable Rajasthan Royals, the outsiders before the tournament began, riding high in second place before Monday's matches and the Deccan Chargers, hotter favourites than the temperatures out there, struggling so badly.

Okay, they got their first win yesterday beating another desperately depressing outfit, the Mumbai Indians, but surely a team boasting such hitting talent as Adam Gilchrist, Andrew Symonds, Shahid Afridi and Scott Styris should have won more than once?

Indeed, there we have our first lesson. In a format where the course of a match can turn on one delivery, it makes betting sense to always be on the bigger priced outfit. Especially when trading in-running.

However, that is pretty basic stuff so we have trawled through the stats and scorecards - have a look at the official site for the tournament here www.iplt20.com - to attempt to come up with a better punting strategy and the best we've come up with is a tried and tested favourite: back the side batting second.

In the matches so far only four have won batting first which suggests the best players in the world are at the top of the tree not just for talent, but their ability to handle the pressure of a chase.

Also, in a game of risk, it is much easier for batters second up to know how much they can push the envelope. For example, Graeme Smith, in Rajasthan's win over the Chargers, would try to take one boundary an over and then push singles knowing that would be enough. A batsman in the first innings can never be sure what will suffice so keeps trying for the big shots. Inevitably, he makes a mistake.

That is perhaps one reason why the top runscorer market has been so tough to call. Normally you would blindly back the openers for success but they have disappointed. In the 28 innings so far, Nos 1 and 2 have top-scored only nine times between them.

Delve further and you discover that the No 1 position has managed only two of those. The next most profitable position is No 4 with six efforts but the No 5 and 6 batsmen have contributed four each.

What could be an easier market to call is the team totals. The average first innings score in the tournament is 169, which is a useful in-running stat on its own. But if you work out the average score after the first ten overs, value is added.

So far the average is 72. This means that teams are scoring just shy of 100 runs in the last ten overs, allowing the punter to have a reasonable idea of what the team batting first will end up with 50 per cent of their innings to go.

From here on in then you could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about Twenty20 and why it is such a tough version to predict. Oh, but do bear in mind that the teams will now change beyond recognition with the Australia, West Indies and New Zealand Test players - that's 15 in total - all leaving for international duty.

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