Cricket Betting Offers

Cricket is traditionally a summer sport but luckily for fans of the game it is played in the northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere, and the tropics meaning matches take place most weeks of the year.

Fixtures can range from five-day tests to the short forms of the game including 50 over one-day matches, T20 and the Hundred.

Incentives will centre around big test series such as the Ashes, major tournaments like the Cricket World Cup, and the hugely popular white ball competitions such as the Indian Premier League and the Big Bash and we’ll show the best of these offers below when they are available.

Latest Cricket Betting Offers & Promotions

Please note: Most cricket promotions will be available during the main events such as the Ashes, IPL and the World Cups.

How To Bet On Cricket

Cricket has a wide range of available betting markets, these will vary slightly between the different formats but below is some information on the key areas.

Match Betting

As with the likes of football, rugby and tennis, Match Betting is about the most simplistic form of betting that you can engage in when it comes to cricket. We are going to explain the various forms of the sport in more detail elsewhere on this page, but Match Betting works the same regardless of which version of the game it is that you’re watching. In essence, you’re simply betting on which team will be the winner at the end of the match, or whether you think the game is likely to end in a draw. It might seem mad after five days of play for a Test, but draws are possible.

The good news is that cricket is one of the most globally popular sports, so there are plenty of ways that can you get information on the performances of the two nations involved in the games. You can look to see how their form is in general, as well as how they tend to perform against one another. You can also look to see if there is an important player missing from the side before the match gets underway, as well as whether weather is likely to have a big enough impact to mean that a draw is a possibility that you might need to consider, given it is generally unlikely otherwise.

Top Bowler / Batter

In cricket, the two most important roles are those of the batter and the bowler. The former is trying to rack up as many runs as they can, whilst the latter is looking to take as many wickets as possible. Both are crucial to a team’s ability to win a match, given that the winning side will need to get more runs than the the opposition and will try to take all of their wickets whilst bowling. You can place a bet on who you think will be the best bowler in a match or even just in an innings, with the wager being that they will take the most wickets during the period of time in question.

If you don’t really watch cricket all that closely then you might have noticed something that offers some confusion on this front. If a wicket is taken, it will be written along the lines of ‘Bowled: Stokes; Caught: Bairstow.’ It is the bowler that claims the wicket, rather than the person who caught the ball. If you bet on the best batter, meanwhile, this is a wager on the person who will score the most runs during their time batting. Given that runs can go into the 100s, it can be a competitive field and, as with the bowling, includes the performances of the players on both teams.

Tournament Winner

Depending on the form of cricket you’re watching, you will see a match play out between two sides and the bets that you place will usually be based on that match. A lot of the time, the match itself is part of a wider competition, just as a match between Liverpool and Manchester United is part of the overall Premier League campaign. As a result, you can bet on who you think will win the equivalent of the Premier League, which is the overall competition that the match is a part of. This is an entirely separate type of bet from the likes of the Top Bowler or Top Batter wager.

You are betting on the team that you think will win the competition overall, which means that they might lose individual matches but can still win the tournament in general. Whether you’re betting on the Ashes, the Hundred or the Cricket World Cup, the rules here are still the same. You’re simply trying to identify which team it is that you think will emerge as overall champions when every relevant competition, match or Test has been played. You can look at a huge amount of detail to make your decision, but ultimately it comes down to a judgement about which team you think will be the most consistent.

Different Forms of the Game

In one sense, you’d be forgiven for thinking that cricket is essentially just two teams going up against one another, both using bat and ball to win the match. To an extent, you’d be right in that assumption. The problem is that there are numerous different forms of the sport, all of which work in slightly different ways and need to be understood in order for your bets to be placed with the full knowledge of the possible outcomes. Here is a quick look at the various forms of the game:

Test Cricket

By Gareth Williams, flickr

Test cricket is first-class cricket that is played on the international stage. It pitches countries against one another, with the teams partaking being part of the International Cricket Council. There are four innings played across a period of five days, with each team playing two innings each. That means that they will both get two chances to bowl and two chances to bat, with the aim being to score more runs than the opposition by the time that all of the wickets have been taken. Despite international matches taking place before, Test cricket was officially recognised in the 1890s.

The term ‘Test cricket’ was first used during England’s tour of Australia at the start of the 1860s. It was used in the context of the English team testing itself against the teams from the various Australian colonies. Nowadays, Test matches are the highest form of cricket that can be played, with a standard day of Test cricket consisting of three sessions that last for two hours apiece. There is a break between the first and second session which lasts for 40 minutes and is lunch, then another break of 20 minutes between the second and third session that is 20 minutes and known as tea.

The times of the sessions can be altered if the likes of bad weather is having an impact on the Test, whilst a loss of playing time can result in the break between sessions being delayed and the final session being extended. This can be either extended for 30 minutes or for 90 or more overs, which is the bowling of six balls. Tests take place across five consecutive days, with all sorts of interesting things likely to have an impact on the outcome of the match. If all four innings are complete then the team with the most runs will win. Similarly, the team batting in the fourth innings will win if they get past the other teams run total.

T20

Twenty20 cricket, often referred to by the shortened term of T20, is a version of cricket that has been made shorter in order to provide more entertainment. In T20, both teams have a single innings apiece, with the maximum number of overs in each restricted to 20. It means that games tend to be completed in around two and a half hours, as opposed to the five days used for Test cricket. It makes it much more similar to other sports, which appeals to certain people and has helped to make cricket much more popular overall, thanks to the fast-paced nature of it.

The popularity of T20 has allowed it to spread around the world. Having starting in England in 2003, there are now major leagues like the Indian Premier League, T20 Blast, Big Bash League, the Caribbean Premier League, the Bangladesh Premier League and the Pakistan Super League that have sprung up. There are also international versions of the game, as well as both men’s and women’s Twenty20 tournaments. There is an argument that T20 is the most exciting and explosive form of the game, with the use of music and fireworks making it a thrilling watch and decidedly unlike the Test format of the game that came before it.

ODIs

By Peter Meade, flickr

One Day Internationals, commonly called ODIs, are a version of limited overs cricket that take place between two teams with international status. Each team faces a limited number of overs across the course of a day, with the two sides facing 50 overs each. That means that games can last up to nine hours each, putting them somewhere between T20 cricket and Test matches. Despite their fast-paced nature, they are still within the highest standard of cricket, with the way that they are played designed to be slightly more fun and engaging than Test cricket tends to be.

ODIs tend to see the players wearing bright coloured uniforms, with the matches being played into the night and under floodlights. The ball used is white, as opposed to the red balls used in Test cricket, with dark screens put behind the bowler rather than white ones. There are microphones in place in order to capture some of the emotion of the players, with multiple camera angles providing excellent coverage of what is taking place. It is not quite as fast-paced at Twenty20 cricket, but the bowlers are restricted to ten overs each in order to stop one player dominating.

The Hundred

In July of 2021, the England and Wales Cricket Board launched The Hundred, having trialled 100-ball cricket throughout amateur leagues across England. It was first proposed in 2016 as a way of franchising cricket in the UK, following in the footsteps of the Indian Premier League. The thought process was that cricket lags behind other sports, such as football, largely because people don’t have a team that they can get behind in the same way that the might actively support Liverpool or Brighton & Hove Albion, say. It was from this line of thinking that The Hundred was born.

It is a tournament that features eight men’s teams and the same number of women’s teams, with the games usually played back-to-back as double-headers. It was originally going to be a T20 format of the game, but over time it was decided that an entirely new version of the sport would lend itself to this team-format. It is designed as a limited-overs form of the sport, with the two participating teams playing a single innings made up of 100 balls each. As a result, games last for about two and a half hours, with the fast-paced nature lending itself to a more exciting spectacle.

The Laws of Cricket in general apply to the Hundred, with certain exceptions. An over consists of five balls rather than six, for example, meaning that there are 20 ‘overs’ for each team unless they’re bowled out before then. The entire structure of the Hundred is designed to be about moving things along quickly, so the next batter has to be ready to receive a ball within 60 seconds of the previous batter’s dismissal. If they’re not ready within 80 seconds then they will be timed out. At the time of writing, here is are the teams that play in the Hundred:

The Hundred Teams

As you can see, the teams are designed to engender a sense of rivalry within the fans, which is something that cricket is often lacking. The teams are made up of 15 players each, which is the case for both the men’s team and the women’s, with a maximum of four being able to come from overseas. They are signed using a draft system, which makes it similar to other franchise sports. Each franchise gets at least one England international, whilst there is a salary cap in place of £1 million. The tournament starts with a league format with the teams finishing at the top of the table going on to compete in the eliminators and the final to be crowned champions.

The Decision Review System

One thing it is worth mentioning when it comes to cricket is the Decision Review System. If you are a football fan then you’ll already be used to the notion of the use of technology in sport thanks to the Video Assistant Referee, but DRS came first and is done much better. Rather than being about trying to protect the referee, which is how VAR tends to be used, it is about getting the right decision and has added a sense of excitement to the games in which it is used. Each team gets a limited number of appeals, which they can use if they disagree with the decision that has been reached by the umpires.

In such an instance, technology is used to track the likes of whether or not the bat has touched the ball when a player is given out by leg-before-wicket, or whether it has touched the bat or the glove when a player is caught. Ball-tracking is used to decide whether the ball was likely to hit the wickets in order to ensure the correct decision is reached for LBW, whilst the likes of infrared and microphones can reveal if the ball has been struck. It means that a player might be given out, only for that decision to be reversed once DRS has been employed and the decision looked at again.

Key Events

As you might imagine, there are some key events in cricket just as with any sport. Sometimes they are about rivalries, whilst others are down to the manner in which the competition has been structured in order to make them big moments during the year. Cricket has big competitions that are very much worth knowing about, with the following being the key ones:

The Ashes

By Nic Redhead, flickr

In 1882, Australia beat England in a Test at the Oval. An obituary was published in The Sporting Times, stating that it proved the death of English cricket and that ‘the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.’ These mythical ashes were then fought over in the 1882-1883 series, with Ivo Bligh, the England captain, declaring that the team planned to ‘regain those ashes.’ When they won the first two Tests, the team was presented with a tiny urn reported to contain the ashes of a burnt wooden bail, with any Test match between Australia and England forever known as ‘the Ashes.’

Traditionally speaking, an Ashes series consists of five Tests, with the series hosted alternately by Australia and England. The team that wins gets the Ashes, whilst a draw means that the previous winners ‘retain’ the Ashes. Between the first Test in 1882 and the Test in 2023, there were 73 series, with Australia winning 34 and retaining the Ashes six times, compared to England’s 32 wins and retaining them once. Though competition between England and Australia is always fierce in all forms of cricket, the Ashes are only played for in the Test version of the sport.

Other Test Series’

by tpbermingham, flickr

At the time of writing, there are 12 full members of the International Cricket Council, with any Test between two of the competing nations worthy of attention. Here is a look at the 12 countries that are part of the ICC:

• England
• Australia
• South Africa
• West Indies
• New Zealand
• India
• Pakistan
• Sri Lanka
• Zimbabwe
• Bangladesh
• Ireland
• Afghanistan

Whilst there is always going to be more interest in big Tests like the Ashes or India versus Pakistan, it is noteworthy when any Test takes place involving the ICC members. That being said, it is often likely to be less worthy of your attention when Ireland plays Afghanistan, say, unless you have a tie to one of the countries. However, Test cricket is always an interesting contest watch and to wager on.

Cricket World Cup

By rushdi13, flickr

When it comes to international competitions, there are few as noteworthy as the Cricket World Cup. There are other formats of similar international things, such as the ICC T20 World Cup, but this is the ICC World Cup and involves a series of ODIs in order to decide upon the best team in the world. There are preliminary qualification rounds in order to decide which countries will play in the World Cup proper, with the first one taking place in 1975. The qualification period lasts for three years, with the tournament itself seeing ten teams go up against one another.

As you might imagine, the format of the tournament has changed quite a lot since 1975, with the format expressed here the one that was in place for 2019. In 2027, the competition will be widened to include 14 teams rather than the current ten. Each team plays against one another in a round-robin format before the top four teams progress to the semi-finals. These teams play each other once, with the winner from each semi-final making it through to the final where they go up against one another to decide which team is the world champions and the best ODI cricket nation.