Handball isn’t the most popular sport in the world. Sure, it has a fairly rich heritage and is played in a number of countries around the globe, but the fact is, from a punting perspective, there are plenty of bigger sports.
You might think I’m trying to talk you out of betting on it, but in reality, betting on a smaller sport like handball can have it’s benefits.
To start with, handball news generally isn’t as quick to spread as other more major sports. Imagine Cristiano Ronaldo rolls his ankle at training; within seconds it’s all over various news outlets, social media, and everybody knows about it. The same isn’t true for handball. A key player might be under an injury cloud, have an illness, or whatever it may be, and there’s a fair chance it won’t be reported in any news outlets – which means there’s a fair chance the bookmakers aren’t aware of it.
This gives you a chance to get a head start on the odds if you do the research. Scour the most highly regarded forums where the most ardent handball supporters spend a lot of time, and this sort of information will soon become readily available to you, before the odds change. Say a key player goes down with an injury at training, you’ll likely be able to read about it and subsequently make an informed bet before the odds change.
Another way to bet on handball intelligently is to follow the friendly matches, rather than the bigger, national ones. This might sound counterintuitive, as generally, the higher profile games will be more predictable. In handball, however, there are often friendly matches in which one side is heavily, heavily favoured to win. We’re talking a +30 point line. In this scenario, often the weaker team will be able to cover this line. Likely they won’t win, but that doesn’t bother you – you just need them to lose by less than 30 points.
The reason this is so often the case is that the stronger team often won’t bring their best performance to these types of games. Handball is a game built on defence, and the best teams generally excel in this area of the game. When a team is a 30 point favourite to win it’s probably because they are exactly that sort of team, but in a relatively unimportant, friendly match, they simply won’t lock in as much as they would for a bigger game. This will leave gaps in their defence, opportunities for the opposition to score a little more than expected, and a good chance that the favourite won’t be able to cover the line.
In a nutshell: to bet intelligently on handball, focus on digging up all the information you can, and look for friendly matches with big lines. The former is the most reliable method, and particularly for punters who aren’t as well versed in handball as they are in other sports, it can be a way to give you a great chance to profit in the long run. The latter is far from a flawless plan, and further research should still be done before placing large sums of money on the weaker team to cover the line. If combined together, however, these two broad betting concepts can help you to bet handball intelligently.
