Pinnacle Pulse 73 (Part l): Premiership & Bundesliga Futures
The Inside Line from the Pinnacle Sports book by Hobbes
Ah, the start of the new season! Optimism reigns supreme, with everything to play for. This weekend sees the start of the German Bundesliga and the English Premier League, and although there has been little movement in the Premiership futures market, the ‘Bayern to Win’ line got hammered down to 1.54 by mostly public money before it received any resistance. Looking at specific games for this weekend, here are the hot ones according to the players:
English Premier League
Aston Villa vs. Liverpool
This game opened at -1/4 for Liverpool back in June, but it wasn’t until this week that the handicap finally switched to 1/2 a goal. This means there was probably a lot of value in the early lines (and also that punters now approve of Benitez’s £40m summer shopping spree). Since the move to a half, we’ve seen mostly two-sided action with many of our larger Asian punters backing Villa, which pushed the Reds’ side of this line up to 2.09 at one point. The Asian handicap is now -½ 2.05 on Liverpool, though you have to balance the Scousers’ clearly superior squad against the fact that Martin O’Neill’s men lost just 4 games at home last season, and the Pool scored fewer away goals than Fulham and Wigan (18).
Arsenal vs. Fulham
The Gunners’ line opened at -1½ 2.04 at home, but bettors took that number and ran through any resistance in July, finally prompting the move to -1¼. That said, the new handicap sparked a ton of Arsenal action which has continued throughout the week. By midweek, the Gunners were at 1.90 and it will be interesting to see where the line settles by kick-off on Sunday.
Totals trading on this game has been almost exclusively on the over.
Manchester United vs. Reading
United opened this game at -1½ 1.88, which sparked some early Reading action. Then late July, witnessed heavy trading on United with maximum limit bets pushing the line all the way down to 1.72. It has settled back slightly to 1.77, but with a 2:1 bet count as well as continued sharp action on Man U, we would expect the price to keep dropping, even though in four meetings last season United failed to cover the -1½ handicap.
Bundesliga
VFL Wolfsburg vs. Arminia Bielefeld
Strangely, the Bundesliga game with the most volume this week is the one between relegation candidates Wolfsburg and Arminia Bielefeld. The line started at -½ flat for home side Wolfsburg, and despite considerable two-way action, Bielefeld’s line has deteriorated by weight of money alone. We’re still waiting for any real sharp action to show on the game, so the odds likely won’t settle until later in the week.
Eintracht Frankfurt vs. Hertha Berlin
Much like the Wolfsburg game, this encounter between two of last year’s bottom-half-of-the-table teams has also attracted early volume. The line started out as 0 “pick’em” and was heavily skewed in Frankfurt’s favour. The price has jumped around a little, but with action on both sides from all over the world, the line offered now seems to be market correct. If you see heavily skewed action at another bookmaker without a market correction from the rest of the world, figure one side likely has considerable value.
–Hobbes
Baseball Sharp Plays
OVER on Boston Red Sox games:
The lines for Red Sox games have been bet over by our sharps continuously for a long time now. At one point it got so heavy that we would artificially raise the line earlier in the day, assuming the bets were coming even though the action we respect tends to come later on. It doesn’t happen every day, and it’s more likely to happen at Fenway than it is elsewhere, but it seems hard to go wrong with these bets.
UNDER and AGAINST the New York Yankees games:
This is the big one, especially the betting against the Yankees. For the entire year, the Yankees have been treated as the best team in the game even when they looked like nothing of the kind. Now that they are performing, the public enthusiasm has reached epic proportions. Yankee games are consistently the highest action game of the day, and the public money almost never goes against them. That’s why the sharps almost always oppose, betting into what are almost certainly inflated numbers. If you shop around and use the best available metrics, this is the greatest opportunity in MLB this season. The under is a far less extreme case, but it comes from the same public exuberance surrounding the Yankees’ lineup.
–Locke
Click next to read Pinnacle Pulse 73 (Part II) - Baseball Betting Strategy - Team Totals
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