Boxing Betting

It is probably fair to say that boxing is one of the harder sports for casual punters to get a handle on.

Sure, there is plenty of information out there, but there is no substitute for first-hand knowledge of fighters and their styles. The problem is that despite the efforts of TV companies like Sky, a big chunk of bouts that British bookmakers ask you to bet on will feature a boxer you have never heard of before, let alone seen. So, like it or not, second-hand info becomes king.

It is the same for bookmakers, of course, which leads to hope that the punter prepared to put the work in can get an edge, but those few firms who price up lower-profile contests tend to use extremely defensive profit margins, thus doing their best to ensure ricks are at a minimum, while squeezing any value out of the market at the same time.

Victor Chandler's Ivan Stojanovic highlights the problem for all concerned, saying: "Boxing is undoubtedly very, very difficult. A lot of the time all you have to go on is stats. Most of the time you won't have seen one of the boxers and sometimes you won't have seen either. There are magazines you can go to get archive footage, but even they are only the key fighters who you have probably seen anyway. Unless you know both fighters well it is impossible to make an opinion on your own."

Boxing may once have been the noble art, but it lost the right to boast such a tag long ago and for many years the game has been about who you know and not what you can do in the ring.

Politics, not talent, dictates champions and there are very few genuine best-against-best title fights in any one year. The rest feature a long odds-on belt-holder against a challenger who has been on the rent-a-bum circuit beating up stiffs unlikely to hold their own with your local nightclub bouncer.