There are plenty of different things that we consider when making our BBL tips. Below, we take a deep dive into some of the most significant among them.
Team Form
No matter what sport you're betting on, team form is always a crucial factor when trying to predict the outcome. Trends both short-term and long-term trends are important. While a team's overall quality plays a significant role in their performance, it's also wise to consider how each side has been performing in the past week or two. Recent form can offer valuable insights into how they might fare in their upcoming matchup.
Player Form
Cricket is a game in which form can be really important. Batters, for example, go through periods where they are seeing it like a beach ball, and on the other side of the coin, when they can’t score a run to save themselves. These same form swings impact bowlers just as much. Of course, stats aren’t everything and there are times when, for example, a batter is seeing it well but has had a run of bad luck, but recent form is nonetheless a pivotal consideration prior to placing BBL bets.
These obviously influence the game outcome – if all of a team’s best players are in dreadful form, that doesn’t bode particularly well for their performance. If that’s the case then we will clearly factor that in to the BBL tips that we are providing. But it’s not just in things like moneyline that we would consider player form.
Taking a deep dive into this sort of stuff can also help enable us to better look at player props, which broadens our scope in terms of what bets we can place. Big betting sites will offer over/under markets on lots of players in terms of how many runs they might score or wickets they might take, and by analysing their form line in detail we can get get some good insights that help us to provide informed BBL tips.
Player Availability
Player availability is massively important when it comes to the Big Bash League. Of course, it is in any sport, but the BBL in particular is a league in which you have to be really aware of who is playing. The reason? Teams personnel can change drastically throughout the course of the season.
While most players will make themselves available for the entirety of the BBL season, generally most teams have players who are only going to be available for a certain period of the year – and often this is their star internationals. Generally this is because they have other duties, often international – for example, a team might secure the services of a star English player, but he may only be able to play the first four games before he has to head home to represent England.
Clearly, this can have a massive impact on the quality of that team, so it’s important to be aware of who is playing before you place your bet. Maybe a team has won three games in the row but they have done so on the back of an international star who is now halfway back to the United Kingdom. That will clearly influence the odds, and if you’re not aware of it you might be a little too hasty to bet on that team given they will appear to be a little over the odds. We always make sure we are well aware of who is playing before providing our BBL match predictions to ensure that we avoid this problem.
Game Importance
This factor tends to come into play at specific times of the season – generally later in the year. Obviously it is usually reflected in the odds, but nonetheless it’s something we always take into account. There are instances in every season where a game will carry far more weight for one team than the other, and this can be tough for betting sites to fully assess.
As an example, later in the season, one team might have already accepted that they won’t be making the finals, while the other is battling to secure a spot in the postseason. On the flip side, a higher-ranked team might be comfortably entrenched in their position, and if an individual game later in the season is not going to change their situation they might rest a couple of stars, or simply struggle to have the same level of motivation as they would otherwise. These are things we will always factor in when making our BBL betting predictions.