Cricket has come a long way in the past few decades. It is now being played in different countries around the world. India, a country where cricket is treated as a religion and players as Gods, has made betting on online cricket tough.
That makes offline cricket betting a thriving market that has almost become a parallel economy with its own payment system and rules.
Before diving more into online cricket betting, it is important to understand the gambling situation in India. According to the Information Technology Act 2000, any activity the government views as corruptible to its people is prohibited. This could come with fines of up to 100,000 Rupees and/or 5 years in prison.
Even then online betting on sports is possible. We have not heard of any action taken by the government against online bettors (yet).
Case in point, online sports betting in India is undefined.
Indians can place bet on cricket using offshore sportsbooks and casinos. Bet365 and 888sports are to name a few. But there is a catch. You can also start off with free betting
In the mid 2000s, Bet365 use to accept credit cards from a few selected Indian banks. However, now no foreign betting site accepts any cards from India and other countries where betting is illegal. Indian laws don’t apply to Bet365 as they operate under the laws of United Kingdom where online betting is legal. There is not much the Indian government can do to stop people from betting on such sites.
There are plenty of online betting sites to choose from, but we are going to keep it simple here.
We highly recommend that you choose one of these betting sites:
- Betway
- Betrally India
- Spin Palace
- Dafabet
- Bet365
- 1xBet
All of these are excellent options, but if you are unsure which to choose then go with Betway. You can always try another site if you want to later.
The next step is to put money in your betting account so that you can start betting. Depending on where you are from, this is easier said than done. If you are from India for example, there are limited options available.
You need to deposit funds beforeyou can place bets, it is not possible to bet on credit with online betting sites.
There are many different deposit options for betting sites, and here are a couple of the most popular ones:
- Debit cards
- Credit cards
- ecoPayz
- Neteller
- Skrill
- Entropay
- Astropay
- Neosurf
The simplest way to deposit is to use debit or credit cards, but they are a bit hit and miss if they even work, but I would suggest just trying them out to see if they work. The worst that could happen is that they are declined.
The alternative to card payments is to use either ewallets or pre-paid cards. Both of these options are a bit harder to setup, but once you have them up and running, they are way more reliable.
When you have created an account, funded it and have navigated yourself to a bet you like, then you might be staring at something like this:
Here you see information on the upcoming IPL 2017 game between the Gujarat Lions and Kolkata Knight Riders.
In addition you see two columns next to this information which say ‘1.72’ and ‘2.10’ respectively. These are the betting odds for this match and each team. The odds under the ‘1’ tab is the odds you get if you bet on the home team to win, in this case, Gujarat Lions. ‘2’ is thus the odds you get when you bet on the away team, Kolkata Knight Riders.
HOW BETTING ODDS WORK
When we talk about the odds you get, this means how much you stand to win if the bet you place wins.
For instance, if you place a $10 bet on Gujarat Lions to beat Kolkata Knight Riders, at 1.72 odds, you will get back $17.20 if they win, where $10 is your original bet and $7.20 is your winnings.
If you bet $10 on Kolkata Knight Riders with 2.10 odds to win, and they win, you will get back $21.00, $10 which is your original bet and $11.00 which is your winnings.
If you should lose either of the bets, you simply lose the $10 that you paid for the bet, regardless of the odds you placed it at.
So what you simply do determine how much you stand to win is to multiply how much you wish to wager, on the betting odds you get. We will show some more example in the table beneath: