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If you love cricket, you probably look forward to the Cricket World Cup scheduled to take place from 30 May to 14 July 2019 in England and Wales. Officially called ICC Cricket World Cup 2019, it is the twelfth edition of the Cricket World Cup this year. The event is organized every four years by the International Cricket Council (ICC), which is the governing body of this sport. As a rule, there are preliminary qualification rounds before a finals tournament. The Cricket World Cup is expected to be highly popular and viewed by millions of sport lovers.

The Cricket World Cup betting is also predicted to be intense this year. For cricket is a game that, no less than football or basketball, inspires people to wager money on its outcome. According to the latest statistics, around £420 million is bet on cricket in Bombay alone, where betting is illegal but, as these whooping numbers amply demonstrate, well-liked. The bookmaking industry in the United Kingdom takes less during one season. In comparison to the amount annually invested in football – £7, 97 billion, £100,000 bet on cricket during one season seems indeed low. But if we consider that cricket has much fewer matches than football, this sum of money starts looking equally staggering. Bets of million dollars on tennis and hundreds of thousands on football, races, and cricket have become common practice in Australia, too. Australian punters are expected to wager enormous amounts of money during the Cricket World Cup this year, with the biggest of them investing up to $200,000 on a game. A possibility to place bets online through mobiles, tablets, laptops, or computers makes sports betting even more attractive and will surely turn the upcoming Cricket World Cup into a memorable, financially rewarding event.

People who want to make money on cricket should prepare themselves before placing an actual bet. Like hockey, cricket is a sport about which it is notoriously difficult to make predictions. In both, outcomes depend less on professional expertise and talents of players than on luck. Indeed, sport analysts are now wont to divide sports into those where players’ skills influence a game’s progression and outcome and those where luck holds sway. Individual sports, where two players compete against each other, depend more on their skills. Tennis, boxing, or bowling are, therefore, classified as predictable sports. Team sports, where players are gifted to different extents and where a game’s unfolding and results hinge on their interaction with each other, are subject to chance. Contingent on luck, team sports thus almost defy predictions.

Among all existing team sports, cricket is considered the most unpredictable due to its structure and rules. There are also outside forces that increase its unpredictability. The most surprising and seemingly trivial factor that significantly influences games in this sport is weather. In football, players can run in heavy rain and wind without damaging the quality of the game. Bad weather in cricket means that the game may be cancelled. Or it may determine the nature of the entire match. Under a cloudy sky, swing bowlers have a decided advantage, more easily succeeding in making the cricket ball to deviate sideways. When there is sunshine above the cricket field, bowlers can pass the advantage to the batsman, since, in sunny weather, they receive less help. But also note that the scorching heat of the sun may break up the pitch and thus put spinners in a favorable position. Dew can also serve as an impediment to the game. Once the cricket ball becomes wet, soaked either in rain or dew, spinners experience difficulty in gripping and turning it.

When rainy or windy weather negatively affects the number of overs, reducing them in one-day matches, battling totals get reset. To calculate the target score for the team batting second, sport authorities use a mathematical formula called the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method (DLS). At present, the DLS is thought to be the most precise method of setting the target score. Studying weather forecast is thus a must before you a bet on the cricket game. If you read that England is expecting hail and rain during the Cricket World Cup, draw necessary conclusions from the weather forecast and update your prediction of the game’s outcome. You must also adjust your expectations of the game’s development if meteorologists foresee sunshine above England and Wales. Yet remember that nothing is more unpredictable than weather. Its forecasts may eventually prove incorrect and thwart your plans to win money in sports betting.

Even more unusual factor influencing the cricket match is the toss. It is difficult to believe that the tossed-up coin has more than a nominal or ritualistic significance in any sport. But in truth, flipping the coin does carry some weight in games, though much heavier in cricket than in football. In the latter, head or tails determine which team kicks the ball first. Or they define the goal side. There is a strategic advantage for the luckier team in both cases. By kicking the ball first, the team attacks first and thus might potentially score first. Allowed to select the goal side, the team avoids facing the sunlight that might interfere with its shooting performance. And yet, in football, the team can win even bereft of these advantages. In tennis, likewise, the player might not serve first and still lead.

Wining a toss in cricket, by contrast, is nearly equivalent to winning the match. Sport lovers frequently explain the team’s victory after the game precisely by its toss advantage: Australia won the toss, batted first, and thereby defeated its opponent.  It is then of paramount importance for the cricket team to get the innings off to a good start. The early fall of wickets might psychologically affect the team, weakening their performance with the bat. Over the last several years, the win-toss ratio has been 0.5, 0.6, 0.61, 0.46, and 0.48. These numbers suggest that the toss advantage has a stronger impact on the progression of the game than the home advantage, yet another factor that people should consider when betting in cricket.

There are, of course, other nuances to take into account when wagering on your favorite cricket team. Know the team first, because its rank and the number of runs it scores have no less significant influence on the result of the game. What you should also keep in mind when placing money on a cricket game is that sheer luck has even a bigger bearing on its outcome. This is disconcerting news, but the game’s dependence on chance might make betting in cricket all the more interesting.