The Nations League returns this weekend with some terrific action that will take place between some of the best countries in European International football.
Hostilities are renewed between rivals from the 2018 World Cup, while other major nations face banana skins they could easily slip up against. Where should your money be at? Let’s take a look at the form.
Saturday 14th November
Portugal vs. France (7.45pm GMT kick-off)
Odds courtesy of OddsShark.com
UFC 255 is on November 21, but there’s a solid warm-up card this Saturday from the organization’s Apex facility in Las Vegas as a bout between lightweights Paul Felder and Rafael Dos Anjos highlights a Fight Night event. The main card begins at 7 p.m. and is available on ESPN+.
Being honest, this matchup is a huge downgrade from the originally scheduled fight between Islam Makhachev, who is the 12th-ranked lightweight in the UFC rankings, and Dos Anjos, who is No. 12 in the welterweight division.
Originally, those two were to fight at UFC 254 at Fight Island in Abu Dhabi, but Dos Anjos tested positive for COVID-19 and it was postponed. Dos Anjos left his home in California to train in his native Brazil for that fight, and that country is being ravaged by the virus. Makhachev on social media wrote that he wanted to stay on the card because his good buddy UFC lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov was on it, but the UFC said no.
Horse Racing has always been known as the ‘Sport of Kings’. Once the great betting experience for the noble and the affluent, however, horse racing today exists as a sport anyone can access within a few seconds via their smartphone.
Despite this fact, many of the processes and experiences around horse racing has been overtaken by other sports. From in-play betting on elite soccer in Europe to spreadbetting and Fantasy Sports on the NFL, in some senses, horse racing has been passed on the inside straight.
That is, until now – and 1/ST Bet.
1/ST Bet is a fully integrated mobile application and website that help sportsbettors weigh up horse racing statistics with real-time data to make a more informed decision on their investments. But they’re so much more than that, too. They’re a link to horse racing’s glorious past but also act as a conduit to its future, modernizing and revolutionizing the sport for new bettors, whether those are at the racetrack or not.
The end of an era… or the start of a new one? PokerStars ‘EPT Retro’ re-commentaries were invented initially as a way of entertaining poker fans during the early lockdown period of Coronavirus. They may just be remembered for reminding us of the enduring charm of two players who never even sit at the felt.
Since mid-March, the EPT Retro broadcasts have been a real feather in the cap for PokerStars, a site which may retain the largest market share in business terms, but it would be fair to say has contributed less and less for the fans over recent years.
It was never just the amount of content or the huge prizepools that PokerStars offered at their best, it was the level of entertainment. The stars being present was a guarantee just as much as the money, and players such as Jason Mercier and Victoria Coren offered not only great value for money for fans who were playing along while they watched, but an originality in almost every Team PokerStars Pro roster position. These were genuine superstars of the game, but they were also very different people from varied walks of life.
Just those two examples prove the point, Mercier the Christian Floridian with the basketball court swagger and winsome grin. Coren, now Coren-Mitchell of course, the whip-smart journalist and writer, likely to be fanning her tea with a broadsheet at a side-table during play at a final table.
Odds courtesy of OddsShark.com
It was a no-brainer for the Cincinnati Bengals to pick LSU quarterback Joe Burrow with the No. 1 overall selection in the 2020 NFL Draft after Burrow had a record-setting Heisman Trophy-winning season last year. Who was the second-best quarterback prospect in the draft? Some scouts preferred Alabama’s Tua Tagovailoa and others Oregon’s Justin Herbert.
With the No. 5 overall pick, the Miami Dolphins took Tagovailoa even though he had some injury red flags over Herbert, who was considered the more prototypical NFL signal-caller but also raw. Herbert went with the next pick to the Los Angeles Chargers. On Sunday at 4:05 p.m. ET, Tua and the Fins host Herbert and the Bolts in what could be the beginning of a terrific rivalry. Tua and Herbert never faced off in college. Miami is a 3-point favorite and has won 20 of its past 24 at home against west coast teams.
The San Francisco 49ers are missing almost an unprecedented number of players due to injury so they will not be repeating as NFC champions or likely even make the playoffs. The Niners partially earned the NFC’s top seed last year with a wild 48-46 victory in New Orleans in Week 14 of the regular season. That proved a crucial tiebreaker for San Francisco, which is back in the Big Easy on Sunday at 4:25 p.m. ET. The Saints are -9.5 but 2-7 ATS in their past nine at home.
The NBA is anxious to get things going as quickly as possible in order to continue recovering revenue lost due to the COVID-19 fiasco that forced last season to take an extended break. They were pushing for a December start, while players, on the other hand, initially wanted to have more time between seasons and were trying to convince the league to hold off until January. The NBA and the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) have now reached an agreement to get things running again, and the news will most likely make basketball fans, as well as sports gambling fans, happy.
The 75th season of the NBA will see its first games on December 22. This is two months later than an NBA season would normally start but, since the previous season only wrapped up on October 12, there was no chance of seeing things get going on a normal schedule. The upcoming season will also see 72 games played, as opposed to the normal 82.
Part of the reason the players agreed to start sooner, instead of holding out for January, is because of the Olympics. The Summer Olympics were already delayed from this year to next, and getting pro basketball going in December will allow the season to end around the middle of July. This gives NBA players a chance to participate in the Olympics, and several have already indicated that they are planning on going.
Being able to appear in the Olympics is a big deal for some athletes, but the NBA had to make a couple of concessions in order to get basketball players to agree to the earlier launch. Most notably, team owners didn’t get their way as they tried to convince players to put 25% of their salaries in escrow, suggested as a way to mitigate any further COVID-19 outbreaks, and had to settle for the usual 10%. That money, if the situation arises, would be taken across next season and the following two seasons, but players won’t ever have to give up more than 20%, which would only be considered in a worst-case scenario.
PFL Teams with Flagship Group Solutions to Deliver Transformative Experiences Using IBM Cloud and Watson Technologies
NEW YORK (November 10, 2020) – The Professional Fighters League (PFL), the fastest growing and most innovative sports league in the world, today announced it will be leveraging Flagship’s capabilities to deliver IBM’s suite of advanced cloud and AI products to enhance the league’s delivery of next-gen SmartCage data and analytics, both live in-broadcast and via the league’s OTT platform, Fight Central.
Flagship Solutions Group, an IBM Gold Business Partner and recognized provider of IBM solutions, managed services, and cloud solutions worldwide, will partner with the PFL to manage, design, and deliver the experience leveraging IBM’s technology solutions. PFL and Flagship Solutions Group will also work closely with the IBM Garage’s unique framework for enabling innovation at speed and scale through a team of leading technologies and multidisciplinary experts, to turn big ideas into tangible results.
PFL’s proprietary SmartCage measures real-time MMA fighter performance analytics along with biometric and positional data providing fans with an elevated viewing experience. Moving forward, SmartCage fight data, called Cagenomics, will be enhanced with Watson machine learning to scour data points and uncover new insights for MMA fans, bringing them inside the cage like never before.
The Autumn Nations Cup is set to kick-off for the first time as the Northern Hemisphere tournament replaces tours by Australia and New Zealand due to COVID restrictions.
The eight-team tournament could become a permanent fixture on the international calendar, with crowd restrictions to continue as the U.K. faces another lockdown. The eight teams, split into two groups, includes traditional Six Nations teams, as well as newcomers Georgia and Fiji,
Check out our match tips for the opening round fixtures below.
England vs Georgia
A full schedule of Premier League action has given us some great drama on the brink of the International break. With massive victories for Chelsea, Leicester and Manchester United, the top half of the Premier League table is starting to resemble something like a division with the stronger clubs at the top and the lower-ranked sides near the bottom.
After eight weeks of the Premier League season, there are some surprise names still in and around the top of the table. With what equates to 21% of the Premier League campaign gone for most teams, could there be a surprise winner of the Premier League for the first time in five years? Let’s take a look.
The Surprise Front Runners
While there have only been eight games played, the top two aren’t just a surprise, but a genuine shock for some. Leicester City should perhaps be more expected to lead at this stage, purely because they were so strong in the first half of last season, going into 2020 in 2nd place albeit behind a rampant Liverpool side.
The Foxes have 18 points after eight games, three more than they had at the corresponding stage of their title-winning season. At 28/1, they represent good bet-to-cash out value around Christmas time.
Cricket ball resting on a cricket bat on green grass of cricket pitch
The Indian Premier League (IPL) defending champions, the Mumbai Indians, are set to face the Delhi Capitals to decide the 2020 title. The Capitals head into the clash as underdogs against the form side of the IPL competition.
The Capitals were able to scrape into the final thanks to the heroics of Australian all-rounder Marcus Stoinis, in a thrilling win over the Sunrisers Hyderabad. Delhi will be making their first appearance in the final for the first time in 13 years. Stoinis was the man of the match, claiming three wickets, including the crucial wicket of New Zealand captain Kane Williamson.
Earlier the Australian had helped the Capitals off to a flying start, Stoinis combined with Indian opener Shikhar Dhawan as the pair put on 86 for the first wicket before Stoinis was dismissed for 38.
At Calvin Ayre, we love a thrilling league to bet on, and we know a lot of you do, too. While we often give you some advice on which teams to bet on, we largely focus on the Premier League, but this isn’t only because it’s most popular league in the world.
If we were to include The EFL (English Football League) Championship in our tips, the nest league down, we’d struggle to pick a winner in terms of singles, goalscorers and future markets too. That’s because the Championship is a legendarily difficult division to predict and has made fools of wiser pundits than ourselves.
One pro who knows all about it, however, is The Secret Coach. We spoke to TSC this week on the brink of another round of Championship fixtures this coming weekend. The action in midweek was as unpredictable as ever, with the 97th-minute winner at the City Ground in Nottingham just one example of how impossible The Championship is to predict.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2N4OqUeS3QVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Highlights: Forest 2-1 Coventry (04.11.20) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2N4OqUeS3Q)
As expected, we still don’t know for sure who has won the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. As several states continue to count their votes, and both candidates consider their legal options, we have updated odds from Bodog to consider who has the best shot to win.
When we last considered the race, it was the end of election night, and the odds were erratic as we had no idea who really had a clear path to victory. Things have settled down now, and we’re left with a couple of different clear outcomes.
Outcome #1: Joe Biden holds on to narrowly win
After a very slow count, several states now appear to be leaning in former Vice President Joe Biden’s direction. Battleground states like Wisconsin and Michigan have now gone into his column, and unless Trump makes a comeback, it appears winning Nevada and Arizona will give him barely enough to win the presidency. He could also potentially pick up Pennsylvania, where Philadelphia continues to give him fresh votes, and Georgia, where a slow count in the Atlanta area seems to be getting him closer to winning there as well.
Odds courtesy of OddsShark.com
We’ve essentially reached the halfway point of this very unusual NFL season with Week 9 on tap. The last big player movement date was Tuesday as that was the trade deadline and not much happened. On the bye this week are Cincinnati, Cleveland, the Los Angeles Rams and Philadelphia. Three of those could be playoff teams (i.e. all but the Bengals).
The marquee matchup is clearly the Sunday night game as Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints visit Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It could be the last time those two future Hall of Famers will ever face off and in fact most likely will be unless they meet in the playoffs this winter. Brady will be back in 2021, but Brees is not expected to be.
It’s also huge in the NFC South as the Saints look for the season sweep and potential tiebreaker. In Week 1, Brees threw for two scores and didn’t turn the ball over in a fairly easy 34-23 victory. Brady’s Bucs debut wasn’t great as he was picked off twice, one returned for a score. What will make Sunday’s game even more intriguing is that it’s expected to be the Tampa Bay debut of former All-Pro receiver Antonio Brown. The Bucs are -5, and they are 0-4 SU and against the spread in the past four in the series.
Election night 2020 has turned out to be a nail biter. Hopes of a Biden landslide are out the window, and wagering odds have been all over the place as we start to understand what an election during the Covid-19 pandemic looks like.
As it stands right now, the race is too close to call. But the odds have shifted a lot from when we looked at them yesterday. Let’s look at the timeline of what happened:
7:00 pm ET: Polls close and Biden is heavily favored
As the results started to come in, the conventional wisdom was the results wouldn’t be too far off the mark, and we might see a Biden landslide. Early strong results in Georgia, North Carolina, and later Texas kept his odds strong.
Some of Europe’s finest may have missed out on the Champions League last year, but they are taking part in the Europa League and so far, that’s been to the benefit of European football’s second choice club competition.
The Europa League has already enjoyed a solid if not spectacular start to the campaign, with some big wins and a few goals. There have been a plethora of great saves, too, as this highlights package can show you.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYkvYUZr1kc?feature=oembed&w=640&h=360]
This week’s fixtures feature all three English teams, and each of them have sportsbetting opportunities you can back.
The five books that will produce the 2020 William Hill Sports Book of the Year have been announced. With tough competition this year, the five chosen books will battle to become the 32nd annual Sports Book of the Year.
Announced every year by William Hill, there is a real prestige in becoming the Sports Book of the Year and the announcement of the shortlist to become the winner was announced earlier this week right here.
William Hill were only too happy to share the news on Twitter:
Here is the shortlist for the @WilliamHill Sports Book of the Year Award 2020!
The end of this election cycle is in sight, and the candidate are in a frenzy to get out every vote they can. With the polls closing tomorrow, President Donald Trump and Vice President Joe Biden hit up as many swing states as they could as the election continues to look like it will lean blue.
Pennsylvania, which is expected to be the tipping point state that decides the 2020 election, was visited by Trump on Saturday. He warned that we may be waiting weeks to find out who has won the presidency. “So you’re going to be watching on Nov. 3. I think it’s highly likely you’re not going to have a decision, because Pennsylvania’s very big. We’re going to be waiting. Nov. 3 is going to come and go, and we’re not going to know. And you’re going to have bedlam in our country.”
Trump then visited Michigan on Sunday, a state he looks like he might lose after having barely won it in 2016. He warned voters: “This election is a choice between the Biden depression or you can have the greatest economic boom in the history of our country.”
Biden, joined by Former President and Barrack Obama, did the opposite, visiting Michigan on Saturday, followed by Pennsylvania on Sunday. Biden called Trump’s handling of the pandemic criminal, laying out his own plans to put in a national strategy, if elected.
Australia will be desperate to avoid a clean-sweep as they take on the All Blacks in the fourth Bledisloe Cup match in Brisbane. With the All Blacks claiming the Bledisloe Cup for another year, following their win in Sydney, Australia will be playing for pride.
After a promising display in the First Test Match in Wellington, the wheels have well and truly come off for the Wallabies. The home side were horrendous in their first outing at home this season. The match and series were effectively over by half-time, with the All Blacks piling on four times to nil.
Australian coach David Rennie was shell-shocked by the nature of the defeat; the 37-point margin was the largest in the 117-year history of the Bledisloe Cup.
The Wallabies are set to re-introduce experienced fly-half James O’Connor back into the side for the fourth match in Brisbane. O’Connor was a late withdrawal through injury for the match in Sydney, opening the door for Brumbies play-maker Noah Lolesio. Lolesio is inline for a bench spot after showing glimpses of his potential, scoring the Wallabies only try.
If you’re following the U.S. election from afar or paying close attention, you’ve probably heard one common refrain: “I don’t believe these polls.” You’ll hear it from cable news anchors and late night comedians alike. And it could mean that betting odds really are the better indicator of who’s going to win this election.
In recently released polls, Former Vice President Joe Biden leads Presidential Donald Trump by as much as 5% in Florida. The fivethirtyeight.com average has him ahead by 2.2% with a 65% chance to win the state. Such a win would likely mean he beats Trump by a landslide on election night.
The problem is, nobody, and I mean nobody, believes this is going to happen. Even those that want Biden to win don’t expect him to win by that much:
Another Florida poll today, this one with Biden up 5. Pollsters badly botched the Sunshine State two years ago, so I remain skeptical that Biden could ever win by more than 1% in a state Republicans have owned this century. https://t.co/ZWftGCbJlU