World Cup Betting / Editor / 16 February 2011 /

With 49 matches played across six weeks, one of the biggest problems facing punters at this year's Cricket World Cup will be deciding where to focus investment attention. Jack Houghton offers some valuable tips.

Betfair alone will be opening and suspending over 1,000 different markets across the Cricket World Cup, and, as often happens with any sporting bonanza, fans can get over-excited, throwing money in the direction of each-and-every novelty market their mouse sniffs out.

Ask any racing fan during Cheltenham; any football follower during the World Cup; any X Factor fanatic on final night: what happens during the big event? The wallet gets loosened; as does a punter's good sense.

It's wise then to set your parameters tightly in the lead-up to such extravaganzas. Agree with yourself the markets you will focus on - and stick to that agreement.

In the Cricket World Cup I'll be concentrating solely on the Innings Runs' markets, where punters are asked to predict the final score of any batting team. Furthermore, I'll only be betting on these markets in-play.

That's because, after a year or so of tinkering in one-day internationals, I'm convinced punters aren't especially good at pricing up these markets correctly.

Take this hypothetical example. England are 40-2 from the first ten overs. They are playing on an unremarkable wicket with a fast out-field. A simplistic approach to predicting their final score would be to assume England will maintain their current run-rate of four an over, leaving them with a likely final total of 200.

This approach, however, fails to recognise a number of crucial factors. First, that run-rates typically increase as one-day international innings proceed. And second, that changing factors - new batsmen and new bowlers - make historical averages a poor predictor of future run-rates.
In fact, in this example England is far more likely to post a figure closer to 225. How do I know this?

Well, in the last year, the much-maligned Duckworth-Lewis (D/L) Method has proved an incredibly reliable predictor of a team's final score. Unfortunately, it takes a little bit of jiggery-hocus-pocus to convert what is meant to be a way of calculating batting targets in weather-interrupted matches, to something you can use to predict a team's run total (Duckworth-Lewis-Houghton? ed). But provided you have at least a nodding acquaintance with a spreadsheet programme, you should have little difficulty.

Here's how to do it. Download one of the many free, on-line, D/L calculators. My favourite is here. Use this to find the 2002 version of the "Resources available at start of stoppage" (RA) figure, which is expressed as a percentage.

Now do the following sum: ((RA*235)/100)+1. This will return the predicted number of added runs the team should score. Add this to their existing score, and you have what you will find to be a remarkably prescient indicator of a team's final innings' total.

As you play with your new spreadsheet, you will notice it throws out scores that seem counterintuitive: provided a team has wickets remaining, the D/L method will usually predict an onslaught of late runs, far in excess of any previous run-rate.
Counterintuitive or not, though, it works.

(Note: in the calculation above, the RA figure should be entered without a percentage sign; so 65.8% is simply 65.8).

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