What a week in sport. The World Cup started in a more or less predictable fashion, aside from the anti FIFA protests, and of course, a rampant Dutch attack taking Spain to the cleaners 5-1 (to be discussed). Martin Kaymer, at dizzyingly long odds, became the first player from continental Europe to win the US Open, and the Spurs grabbed the NBA championship, turning one of the best leveraged bets of the season, into one of the best bets full stop. Add to that plenty of cricket, rugby, and the Catalunya MotoGP and it was a bit of an overwhelming week for odds trading.

Yes we are very close to getting the platform up but will be doing a bit of internal testing before we release Version 1 to the public. Shoot me an email at jake.list@levbet.net to be involved in pre-testing. We will send everyone a mail a couple of days before starting the tournament in preparation. Lastly, remember to tell anyone interested to sign up at levbet.net before the tournament in order to double their starting funds!

According to odds markets, immediately following Spain’s defeat at the hands of the Dutch, Spain were perceived to be approximately half the team they were before the start of the match. That is some pretty deep presumed mental scarring. Conversely, the Netherlands are now twice the team they were before the start of that match. Is the reaction justified or are there some trading opportunities here? Remember Spain actually lost their first encounter against Switzerland in 2010 and went on to win the entire tournament (against the Netherlands no less). Below we have odds of Spain to win the Cup (left) and the Netherlands (right).

What is also interesting is that Spain’s most awkward hurdle now should be beating a strong Chilean outfit in order to advance past the group stage and the odds of Spain to win that much have actually been coming down.

After the San Antonio Spurs routed the Miami Heat in game 4 of the NBA finals the Heat started at particularly long odds to win game 5 at 3.10. This could easily be seen as an over exuberant negative reaction against the Heat and we often see the odds trend to a more efficient level with much increased liquidity in the 30 minutes preceding the start of the match. This transpired here and you could have backed at 3.10 and closed out at 2.84 just before the start of the match netting a handy 9% return on investment or a 27% return boosted by 3-1 leverage with LevBet! (Note that the Heat did in fact go on to experience another heavy defeat).

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Get ready for plenty more of the World Cup, racing at Royal Ascot, the 2nd Test between England and Sri Lanka and the Austrian Grand Prix just to name a few.

Despite England losing 2-1 to Italy last week, at £550m, they had almost 3 times the insurable value of their opposition according to research by Lloyds.

Happy punting,

LevBet team