Bookmakers employ odds compilers to live, eat, sleep and drink sports so that they can predict with a good degree of certainty the probability of certain events happening. Win, lose, draw, goals, corners, trys, sets, and the list goes on… and on.

Now with certain sports the odds compilers are not prepared. One such sport is rugby. In particular Six Nations Rugby.

Name a time you’ve had Rugby headlining in the bookies marketing efforts? Even on Betfair, the betting exchange where you are not betting against the bookmaker but other Betfair members, the rugby section is hidden at the bottom of the general sports section.

The Rugby World Cup is only every 4 years and the Heineken Cup is once a year.

The Six Nations is a massively popular event, as such, the bookmakers would be stupid not to have this be centre stage.

Every match is played on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, every match is live on terrestrial TV (BBC), and every match generates a hugh amount of interest from the betting public.

As you might the bookies must price up lots of markets for the Six Nations Rugby or they’d lose out to the competition.

One of the few sources of information for odds compilers to price odds for Six Nations Matches is club rugby. But, international rugby is of a much higher grade than club rugby and the two can’t really be compared. Imagine trying to predict how many penalties or conversion kicks there will be with only club rugby to go by. Very difficult.

The end result of all this is some great qaulity bets to be had with lots of value. Value is basically where the odds offered do not represent the true liklihood that something will happen.

When home side advantage is not accounted you have a good opportunity for match and tournament winning bets. And because the ‘specialist’ markets like Total Number of Tries…Total Number of Points Scored… Total Number of Wides Kicked…
Number of Yellow Cards, etc attract less attention from the general betting public, they never get studied closely enough by the odds compilers.

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