How and Where to Bet on Surfing & WSL Online
Your favorite surf events are about to get even more exciting. Now, surfers and fans from all over will have the ability to bet on their favorite athletes, competitions, and more. And the best part? You don’t need to be a surf pro to get involved. Here’s how and where to get started with surf betting, plus a few things you should know and consider before punting your first wager.
Where to bet on Surfing
To begin your surfing betting journey, you’ll need an account with a sportsbook that offers bets on WSL surf competitions. It’s a good idea to sign up for multiple sportsbooks as they often offer different signup bonuses, deposit promotions, and varying odds or betting markets. By having multiple options at your disposal, you can make informed decisions and maximize your betting opportunities. Make sure to check out our Partner Sportsbooks take advantage of the sportsbook’s best Signup Offer to enhance your initial bet.
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Types of sports bets to make on Surfing
First, you’re going to need to understand the types of bets you can make on surfing. Here are a few of the bets you can expect to see available.
Surfing Futures Bets
With this type of wager, you place your bet well in advance of an event. It could be weeks or months before it takes place. It is difficult to win this type of wager since so many things can change before the event happens. That being said, a futures bet can have a significant payoff if you get it right, making bets like this of the most popular for professional surfing competitions.
Surfing Overall Winner Bets
For quite a few surfing competitions, the main type of wager available is choosing the overall winner for the entire event. This can be quite a difficult wager to win since surfing can be so unpredictable.
Surfing Top 3 Bets
Sometimes, betting sites will allow you to wager on the top three competitors rather than just the overall winner. Naturally, this is particularly common with Olympics betting, though you’re still pretty likely to run into it during other surfing competitions, too.
Surfing Head-to-head Bets
One type of wager that can give you a better chance of winning rather than trying to predict the overall winner is head-to-head betting. With this type of bet, all you have to do is try and figure out which of two surfers will outperform the other.
Surfing Prop Bets
At the time of this writing, proposition bets for surfing competitions do not seem to be widespread. But as surfing becomes more popular, prop bets may become more commonplace. When you place a prop wager, you are simply betting on something unrelated to the final outcome of the event.
Surfing Parlay Bets
For some events, you might be able to incorporate surfing bets into parlays. These types of wagers include multiple selections. If all of the selections are winners, so is the bet. If any of them loses, so does the whole wager. Although these types of bets are hard to win, they pay out well.
Strategies and things to consider when betting on Surfing
You’ll need to develop your own personal strategy for handicapping surfing events. We can provide all the stats and odds to help you along the way, as well as offer a few basic pointers.
Monitor the forecast and surf conditions
Surf conditions are a huge factor in determining the outcome of a surfing event. Pay attention to the type of wave (a right point break and a beach break will favor different surfing abilities), the surf forecast, the tides, and whether or not the contest will run that day. Surfing takes place in a living, dynamic environment that is constantly transforming. The more you can grasp how the ever-changing conditions impact surfers, the better. Don’t forget that it only takes a small deviation from the forecast during a surfing event to change everything. Even an unexpected lull in waves or shift in the wind during a heat can have a dramatic effect.
Learn all you can about the competitors
Studying a surfer’s strengths and weaknesses, following what they are doing as they train, and learning how they perform in different conditions all can lead to a strategic advantage. You might want to try placing some head-to-head bets when they are available, as you’ll be able to put more depth into your research than if you tried to study all of the competitors.
Shop the odds
This recommendation applies across the board for all sporting events you can wager on, and surfing is no exception. You may find more competitive odds on some sites than others, and your job is to hunt for value. One way you can facilitate this process is to sign up for accounts at multiple sports betting sites. Doing so will ensure that it’s fast and easy to wager at the most competitive odds you find when the moment arrives.
Get involved
There are few better ways to get insights into a sport than to try it. If you happen to live near the beach, see if you can take a few surfing lessons. Even if that’s all you ever do, you’ll immediately gain a much better understanding of what is involved with the sport. Gaining hands-on knowledge can allow you to make even more intelligent and informed predictions.
Popular surfing events & formats
During a competitive surfing event, this is largely what’ll happen. A surfer will select and catch waves. They will be judged and scored on each wave out of a maximum of 10.00 points. Their total score for each heat is the sum of their highest two wave scores, with a maximum of 20.00 points. The surfer also needs to make sure they’re following the relevant rules, which can vary depending on which event they are participating in. An international judge’s panel will rate the surfer in a variety of categories such as variety, speed, power, flow, commitment, and progression. The highest and lowest scores are dropped, and the middle three are averaged for the final wave score.
World Surf League, more commonly referred to as WSL, is the most popular surf league and hosts the Men’s and Women’s Championship Tours. Typically these competitions consist of several rounds of heats where athletes catch waves and are judged on their performance. As usual, judges will award each surfer a score based on a few criteria such as the difficulty, the power and flow of their surfing, and the overall impression they make on the judges. The surfer with the highest score at the end of the heat is declared the winner of the heat. Surfers who do not advance to the next round are eliminated. The event continues in this format until only a few surfers remain, and eventually, the surfer who wins the final heat is declared the contest champion.
Judging Criteria
Commitment and degree of difficulty
Riskier movements are worth more, as judges reward a surfer’s commitment to bigger turns or more critical sections of a wave.
Innovative and progressive maneuvers
Tail slides, aerials, and other innovative maneuvers are valuable, as judges seek to reward progression and push the boundaries of surfing performance.
Combination of major maneuvers
Rather than just rating each maneuver on its own, the judges will also rate the way they are connected to one another.
Variety of maneuvers
If a surfer keeps performing the same moves over and over, those aren’t going to be rated as highly as a wider range of different types of maneuvers.
Speed, power, and flow
Speed refers to the surfer’s overall speed as well as the speed of their adaptations. Flow is related to combinations of maneuvers and refers to how seamlessly they are linked together. Power is fairly self-explanatory.