by charles jay
Canelo Alvarez is consistently a favorite for his Saturday night fight against Gennady Golovkin (GGG). That is not a secret. But there is some disparity when it comes to the odds at which you can bet on either.
It is not Boxing Insider’s policy to endorse or endorse any individual sportsbook, but we can take note of where the best stuff, the worst stuff and the variety are.
We did a little survey, as we often do before big fights, and while the consensus is that you’d have to bet 5-1 (-500) on Alvarez, you can get better prices if you do your research. One of the “licensed” books, for example (and there aren’t that many) has it at -450, while at an offshore bookmaker we’ve found -440. So if you really love Canelo here, that’s valuable to you.
But do you like the underdog? GGG has a certain price range, the best of which is +430, which is found in a licensed book. You can generally get anything between +350 and +395 on him. That kind of number will be favorable, IF you don’t think you’ve gotten too old to compete at this level.
Obviously the first two fights had some controversy about it. Most people, at least most people, felt that GGG did more than enough to win the first fight, which ended in a draw. In the second fight, you could have made an argument either way.
As for total rounds, there are sites you can go to where you can bet against any number of different round levels (with different prices of course). For the purposes of this article, we will use 10.5 rounds as the base.
If you like this fight to last a few rounds, you can put a price as low as -200 on the “envelope” at 10.5. Most places we looked at were -210 to -230. If you like the “low”, you will probably see +170 or +175 as the best odds out there.
There are also outright bets you can make on whether the fight will go the full 12 round distance. We didn’t do much research on this, but an international sportsbook showed -150 on the “Yes” proposition. As for the “No” part, the most attractive price we saw was +130.
Do you want to test which exact round it ends in? And who will be the winner in that instance? If you want to do this kind of thing, just for fun, you’d be looking at, for example, a price of +8000 (80-1) on Canelo and +10000 (100-1) on GGG to finish the fight. in the first round.
There are also “groups” of rounds. Sometimes it’s two rounds, sometimes it’s three or even six. In a well-known offshore book, you’ll get a +650 payout for Canelo to win between rounds one and six, while Golovkin is +1400 to emerge victorious in rounds 7 and 12.
One of the best ways to bet on a fight (although this story is for informational purposes only) is to select the “exact score.” And what this means is that it will not only choose the winner, but also the method by which victory is achieved. So we’ll use an example for the Canelo-GGG fight:
Álvarez by Decision or Technical Decision +110 Álvarez by KO, TKO or DQ +170 Golovkin by Decision or Technical Decision +600 Golovkin by KO, TKO or DQ +925 Draw or Technical Draw +1
At those prices, I’m going with Álvarez by Decision.
Good luck tonight.
