Top Cycling Betting Sites
Cycling as a sport has existed since the 19th century with more than two billion people estimated to own bicycles in the world today. Majority of that population use bicycles for transportation while others ride for fun as a means of nature exploration. Goal-oriented and stronger riders, however, make careers out of cycling by participating in professional races usually under the umbrella of a team. If you already love the sport and are looking for information on the side fun activities that you can do besides riding, cycling betting is a great starting point.
While it’s yet to gain the kind of popularity seen in sports like football and basketball, cycling betting is slowly finding its way into the mainstream gambling markets. Initially, the focus was on major events such as Tour De France, Giro D Italia, and Tour of Flanders but nowadays less prestigious races too are getting significant attention.
Like betting in other sports, it’s important for you to first understand the entails of professional races before you can commit your money to wagers. You’ll find a lot of valuable information on Betopin to help you get started in this betting market. While at it, try to learn the specific events that offer the best opportunities for winning, top riders and their performance histories, how odds are settled upon by bookies, and everything else you’ll need to succeed here.
To begin, check out the best cycling betting sites as reviewed by our expert cyclists and reviewers here at Betopin.
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How to: The Essential Betting Guide to Cycling
Here at Betopin, we are committed to ensuring that all sports lovers have detailed information about their favourite sports. We provide players with information on how to bet and get some profits out of betting. If you love cycling and you are looking to earn from it, then this is the right place for you. Here, you will get a detailed betting guide to cycling.
Our experts follow all the major cycling events across the world accumulating knowledge on how to place bets on cycling. We always ensure that our guide is suitable for both every day and beginner bettors across the world since we make it as simple and easy as possible. In this guide, we will cover the following sections:
- How to get started with cycling betting
- The go-to cycling sites
- Most popular cycling markets
- Cycling for beginners
The Betting Rules
- If you want to place your bets and win, you must understand these simple rules:
- Always look for the best sportsbook around.
- Do the research and identify top teams and top riders per team.
- Understand all the basics of cycling, including the types of stages, races, sprints, and climbs before placing your bet.
- Always place your bets on major events.
- Do not bet more than you should.
- The Game Rules
If you want to take part in cycling, you must understand these simple rules:
- In any race, all cyclists have a specific place to stock up.
- Refueling is only allowed at specific places
- A cyclist is not allowed to make a sudden change of direction to cover the opponent’s path.
- All players must know the route to avoid falls in dangerous places.
- Players must always have protective gear.
Disciplines
The main and popular cycling disciplines include:
- Track cycling
- Triathlon
- Mountain bike racing
- Sprint
- Pursuit
- Madison
- Time trial
How to Get Started with Cycling Betting
We know that cycling is not popular as football, baseball or basketball. However, unlike those sports where placing a bet is a little bit complicated, cycling betting is easier, even for beginner bettors. To make the process of betting as easier as possible, we will take you through various useful steps that will make you enjoy your cycling betting journey.
You will get a chance to know the best sites to join and place your bets and all the markets available as well as the rules, basics, and winning strategies.
Major Cycling Fixtures and Events
One of the key ways of becoming a successful punter in cycling betting is by understanding the popular fixtures available for betting during certain months or seasons around the world. This is the reason we decided to dedicate this section to covering top tournaments you should be following going forward.
Tour De France
This highly popular Tour De France event takes place annually in the month of June and features 21 stages. Usually, the cyclists tour different regions in France with the finish line of one race being the start of another in some stages. Each stage features diverse terrains ranging from flats, to small hills, and tough mountainous terrains. With the different experiences that come with cycling across the different terrains, riders are bound to make numerous mistakes and show inconsistent performances. As you can imagine, bookies love this kind of unpredictability while some punters also enjoy following the performance of their preferred cyclist or team.
Vuelta a Espana
Held in Spain, this race happens every year in September. Just like Tour De France, it features 21 stages and goes for 23 days with two being resting days. Due to its popularity, Vuelta a Espana features teams sponsored by various companies across the globe looking to market their brands. It is also a great catch for bookmakers that are interested in the ever-changing dynamics of the race. The favorite stages for punters are those that go up the steep slopes of the Pyrenees since most often they determine the overall race winner.
Giro d’Italia
This race happens in Italy between May and June and features 21 stages traversing from Bologna to Verona. The route entails first going through flat terrains before proceeding to the mountainous regions of the Alps and Dolomites. The outstanding characteristic of Giro d’italia is the unpredictable weather patterns which sometimes force riders to endure rain and snowy roads. This means you should expect interesting outcomes any time you bet on this competition. The wet conditions and the fluctuating temperatures trigger different reactions on favorite riders; in fact, it’s not uncommon to see unexpected performance coming from a little-known cyclist here.
Tour of Flanders
This race is held in early April in Belgium just in time for the spring season. It’s an equally popular tournament that has been around for more than 100 years just like the rest of fixtures featured above. The interesting bit about this race is that in some stages, it goes through cobbled terrains and also attracts women participants. The cobbled sections often affect the performance of cyclists hugely and is a serious point of consideration by bookmakers. There’s also the Flemish Ardennes where teams have often made unpredictable developments due to the narrowness of roads up the climbs. If you’re eyeing this race as your betting event, it helps to understand the history of various routes that Tour of Flanders takes.
Paris Roubaix
Also known as the “Hell of the North”, this race is classified as a monumental event. It’s held in a single day in April starting from Compiegne all the way to Roubaix Velodrome. Originally, the starting point was in Paris but it has since moved to Compiegne after becoming a professional event. As a bettor, the important happenings to pay attention to are the weather conditions anticipated for the day. It’s also important to remember that the race hits more than 20 sections of cobbles therefore the bets on cyclists have the most attention by bookmakers.
Betting Platforms
After reviewing the main cycling events you can bet on, the next important part is the betting platforms to consider based on your betting strategy. Here, we introduce you to different web places where cycling bookmakers and fellow punters can be found.
Betting Exchanges
These platforms allow gamblers to bet against one another by making the loss of one the gain of the other. In short, players pose as the bookmakers offering odds for each occurrence in an event. In return of facilitating this exchange, platforms involved in these betting models take a pre-set commission from the winner’s account.
If you’d like to learn more about betting exchanges, we have a page dedicated for it here.
Sportsbooks
This is an establishment that comes up with odds on sporting events and pays players who make correct predictions. Here, you’ll bet against the house or the owner of the website. Usually, a sportsbook doesn’t charge a commission on your winnings as is the case with betting exchanges. The value of the odds is also lower. Go to this sportsbook page for more details on how they operate and also find the best sportsbooks to consider today.
Spread Betting
Platforms offering spread betting have no fixed prices of odds as they rely on speculating the behavior of bet markets. Betopin has a page with lots of information about spread betting which you can read by clicking here.
Sports Trading
Websites that offer sports trading simply place two wagers against each other anticipating a profit. This betting model works in a similar fashion as the stock exchange with the only major difference being the bets involved here. This sports trading page has more.
Matched Betting
Platforms offering matched betting allow players to vote for and against an outcome, therefore, guaranteeing a win regardless. If a gambling platform you intend to join offers free bets, it most likely has matched betting as a market. Follow this link for more details on this concept.
The Most Popular Cycling Betting Markets
In this section, we explain the different markets available to you as a punter on cycling competitions. But before we get there, how is cycling won?
For starters, the battle is not just to win the entire race but also to claim specific jerseys. There are riders that will shine during sprints, others in long climbs, others will sustain long solo breakaways, among other small wins within the event.
Read on to discover various betting markets for cycling:
Outright Win
This betting market rewards a gambler that correctly predicts the winner across the various stages of an event. Usually, a bookmaker will specify whether the bet is each way or not. Each way bet is where you earn whether your overall winner prediction finishes first or top three.
Points Classification
In a race, points are issued to cyclists that win intermediate and final sprints in addition to a green jersey. Bookmakers offer this market to give a chance to the gambler to predict who takes the green jersey for the day. The cyclist doesn’t have to be an outright winner for you to win points classification bet.
King of the mountains (KOM)
This award is reserved to the best climber throughout the entire competition who receives a polka jersey as a result. In addition, the cyclist receives points which are mostly based on the climbing difficulty of the mountain. Bookies will usually offer this market for you to predict the rider that takes the title in a particular professional event.
KOM match-up
Here, the bookmaker chooses two riders that are good climbers and tasks you with the challenge to predict who takes the most KOM points. The riders don’t have to win the KOM title of the entire competition since the bookies pre-determine them. Generally, this is bet is based on a head to head contest.
Points classification match-up
For this betting market, the catch is on which of the two pre-chosen riders will top a head-to-head sprint.
Match-ups
This market allows you to choose the overall leader between two riders that closely follow one another in points classification. Since there are only a few stipulations governing this market, it remains to be an open ground for most gamblers to play around with various available options.
Top Three Finish
Bookies offer this market on the each-way bets allowing you to predict the rider that makes way into top three at the end of the competition. The odds for favorite riders are usually lower than those of the less known cyclists in this market.
Top 10 Finish
To be successful in top 10 finish market, you have to predict whether or not your chosen rider will make it in the top 10 leaderboard. It’s a lucrative market for gamblers that believe a less fancied rider stands a higher chance of joining the leaderboard. This is because the favorites have extremely low odds as far top 10 finish is concerned.
Number of Finishers
This market gives a guideline number from which you can predict whether the number of finishers will be under or over that. Last year’s Tour De France had 160 as the guideline number so you could determine whether cyclists that finished each stage were over or under that number.
Stage Wins
For races with lots of stages like Tour De France, favorite riders have higher chances of stage wins. Therefore, this market requires gamblers to back an over/under mark which a cyclist has to winning various stages.
Bet on Winner
This is most widespread type of bet and is highly popular among newbie gamblers. It simply involves rooting for the winner of the race using prior knowledge of the participating riders. Most bookmakers will offer you a chance to bet on the nationality of the triumphant. For instance, if Chris Froome was to the take the win of the season, bettors of the UK as the triumphant nationality would win the bet.
Bet on Cyclist
This kind of bet requires a deep understanding of the cyclists and the terrains at all stages. It allows you to make prediction on the winner of each stage which can be rewarding long before the season is over. Most bookmakers place race favorites in a low-money category since their performance can easily be predicted. The best shot here is usually betting on a cyclist that didn’t make it to the favorites lists yet he has the qualities to stage a surprise. In 2017’s Tour De France, Geraint Thomas won the first stage featuring Time Trial. Not many people saw that coming since he had not yet made it to the favorites list on most betting platforms.
Head to Head Bet (H2H)
This kind of bet is 3-way in nature as it involves a third option in the prediction. Usually, a bookmaker will pair a rider with another and task punters with the role to predict who finishes first. The position of the riders in the race is not an issue for this kind of bet.
To put it into perspective, consider a mountain stage race where Chris Froome and Nairo Quintana are racing. A bookmaker can pair the two riders in H2H bet needing you to predict who crosses the finish line first. Whether they top the race or not, if your prediction is correct, you win the bet.
Conclusion
To this end, it’s our hope that cycling betting is now a much clearer concept to you and can now set sights on big wins and profits. Betopin compiles for you all the best betting platforms available for punters interested in cycling betting. Most of these sites offer a wide variety of the markets detailed in this guide and feature all the major cycling events from around the world.
Sign up for an account on one of the betting platforms and begin placing your bets right
