[Tommy]

At last the NCAA Basketball regular season has concluded and the teams are finalized for the main ‘March Madness’ event. This year proves to be as open as ever with many teams capable of going all the way. If this weeks action is any indication to us here at www.betcris.com, then the ‘Bracket’ matches will be a record betting event with many new customers signing up and ‘Betting their opinions’. Betting at halftime of the games seems to be growing at a rapid rate with the advantage of having already seeing your team perform in the first half, yet still being able to place a bet on the outcome of just the second half.

While it was a good week for us, it wasn’t without a few big winners. The biggest of all was a gentleman who placed a $1500 6 team parlay to win $99,000 as well as a $2200 6 team parlay to win $100,000. The common last winner needed was Kansas to win in one parlay, and Kansas +3.5 in the other parlay, playing against Texas on Sunday. When we graded Kansas the winner 80-66, our jaws dropped very quickly and we had to pay our player $199,000 in one hit.

NBA was thankfully better than last week, with a few results going our way. NBA totals though were a big hit with our customers especially those who were on the right side of the big swings with a few game totals falling in the middle of the numbers posted.

Luke Donald from England broke through for his first PGA Tour victory of the year this week to win the Honda Classic. Donald was a decent 12/1 and outlasted the tournament favorite of David Toms at 7/1. With the tournament lacking the big name players like Woods, Mickelson, Els etc betting was far from brisk with many customers deciding to concentrate on the US Masters event in two weeks time.

Jimmie Johnson came through and won the UAW Daimler Chrysler 400 but surprisingly lacked the support from the betting public. Johnson was odds of +650 at the start of the race but had little support with many of our players opting to bet Greg Biffle 5/1, Kasey Kahne 9/1 and Mark Martin 16/1.

The World Baseball Classic has entered the second round and thankfully for us at least we have started to do a little better at it. I think maybe the results have helped us a lot more than anything though with games like Canada beating the USA especially unpredictable. Teams like Cuba and Korea have also provided some big upsets so the finals should prove to be very entertaining and unpredictable.

Until next week,

Shane Catford
www.betcris.com