While it still may not be as popular as football with the bookies, rugby league’s presence in the market is constantly on the rise and bookmakers and punters alike are continuing to embrace the sport. 

For a lot of people though, rugby league can appear to be quite a complex sport, one with a lot of strange terminologies and difficult to follow rules. 

Once you have come to grips with how the sport works, however, you will find that there is quite a lot of money to be made putting a cheeky few bets on it. 

If you’re considering getting started betting on rugby league, then check out the following guide to make sure you understand all of the basics before you part ways with your hard earned cash. 

Not to be confused with rugby union, the rugby league’s top flight in England- the Super League, kicks off at the start of January and holds it final game in October. 

The league consists of 12 teams who each player each home and away once, then at a neutral venue during the magic weekend. 

The magic weekend sees all 12 teams play a game in the same venue over two days and is often an excellent occasion for fans and punters alike, with plenty of action to be watched and plenty of money to be made. 

Various other rugby league divisions run throughout the year as well, with the Australian League being one of the most popular for fans. 

Betting on rugby is becoming increasingly popular and as such, bookmakers in the UK and around the world are constantly expanding their markets. Here are the most common types of bets placed on rugby league: 

The easiest type of bet to place on rugby league is one on the match outcome. This is a simple, straightforward bet where you bet on either the result going in favour of the home team, the away team, or ending in a draw. 

It is worth noting however that draws are not as common as rugby as they are in other sports like football or hockey. 

Once you have gotten used to betting on rugby results, you may want to take a look at handicap betting in order to find some better odds and make yourself some more cash. 

The idea of handicap betting is to level up the playing field in a game where one team is a clear favourite over the other. 

You are effectively betting on a hypothetical situation where one of the teams is beginning the games with a disadvantage. 

A handicap bet in rugby league may see one of the teams start on -2 or -4, meaning that they would have to beat their opponents by more than that amount of points to win the game. 

Another type of bet that is popular with rugby league fans is the total points bet. As the name of bet suggests, this involves selecting the number of points that will be scored either in the game overall or by one of the individual teams. 

This is often presented in an over/under style format where the customer will choose whether they believe the game will see more or less than a chosen amount of points in the game. 

Similar to football, accumulators are becoming an increasingly popular way of betting for rugby league fans. 

An accumulator or an ‘acca’ as they have become known is when you place four or more selections on your betting slip and all of those must come in for your bet to pay out. 

Accas are a lot of fun and they are often low-risk bets with high reward. That being said, the problem with accumulators is that you need every result on your slip to come in and this can prove to be incredibly frustrating when just one result lets you down for hundreds of pounds. 

Try scorer markets are similar to the goalscorer markets you will find in football where you can place a bet on either the first or last try scorer in a match or on whether or not a certain player will score a try at any point during the game. 

Special bets

 

With rugby leagues ever-growing popularity with the bookmakers, you will often find a lot of the markets that are offered with rugby are incredibly similar to those offered with football. 

Player specific type bets, number of fouls, man of the match and various other match-day markets will be available for all of the big games, though, you may struggle to find them for some of the more obscure encounters. 

A lot of bookmakers may also offer good sign-up bonuses or offers for the sport and will often offer money back as a free bet style bets for the big matches.

Rugby league betting strategy

 

Like all sports, rugby league is one that requires a lot of research on the part of the customer. 

Things such as the forms of the teams and the players should be studied in detail, as should the tactical approach deployed by certain teams and how they might match up against different tactical approaches. 

Another important thing to keep an eye on is if a team has any injuries or suspensions, as the last thing you want to do is to place a bet only to find out your team has their star player missing for the game.