Hockey Betting Without the NHL

Hockey Betting Without the NHL

By Jack Ratcliffe Nov 1, 2012

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The lack of hockey action caused by the current lockout is disappointing for fans and frustrating bettors. With no end in sight for the dispute (at the time of writing), we investigate hockey betting options beyond the NHL.

The NHL is the world’s marquee hockey league, with teams from the USA and Canada netting the association a cool $3.1B per year. It’s big-money games and huge exposure mean that it casts a shadow over the rest of the North American professional hockey scene represented by the American Hockey League.

Often viewed as the NHL reserves, every American Hockey League has a player development agreement with an NHL team, so any knowledge of AHL players can usefully transfer over to the NHL and vice-versa.

Numerous NHL professionals (such as Cody Hodgson) are keeping their blades sharp in the AHL during the lockout, so knowledge of NHL players is also highly transferrable to AHL betting, and Pinnacle Sports has full coverage with our usual low margin offerings and best-value AHL odds.

Beyond the USA

Outside of the USA, there’s a host of fiercely competitive European ice hockey leagues – most of which have provided NHL talent at some point.

The top four are the Russian/Ukrainian Kontinental Hockey League, the Finnish SM-liiga, the Czech Extraliga and the Swedish Elitserien.

Pinnacle Sports offers odds on these and even more niche leagues, including A-Bank Liga (Denmark), GET Ligaen (Norway), Extraliga (Slovakia), Allsvenskan (Sweden) and Nationalliga A (Switzerland). Pinnacle Sports has odds for games in all of these leagues – head to the homepage to browser the lines.

The advantage of betting these leagues is that as their profile is much lower than the NHL the volume is lower so the market is less efficient providing greater opportunities to find an over-valued or under-valued team.

There’s also less information available on these leagues, so if you develop specialist knowledge you can calculate when the traders have incorrectly priced teams.

Other Sports

When the NHL was last in lockout back in 2004-05, it’s widely agreed that televised poker helped fill the winter sporting event void, leading to a boon for the poker industry. Could a similar thing happen this year?

Poker betting is now an established bookmaker norm, but could we see the rise of another indoor sport – like pool betting? The Mosconi Cup is already listed on Pinnacle Sports – could we see more events appear to fill the NHL-shaped hole?

 

*Odds subject to change

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