Author Archives: Dustin Scott

Betting on LPGA: Tseng Tees It Up as Big Chalk at HSBC Women’s Champions

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World No. 1 Yani Tseng of Taiwan racked up her first victory of the new LPGA Tour season last week in Thailand, and she’s the overwhelming 2/1 favorite on the golf betting odds to win again this week at the HSBC Women’s Champions 2012. The tournament begins Thursday on the Garden Course at the Tanah Merah Country Club in Singapore.

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Tseng followed up an uncharacteristic opening-round score of 73 (one over par) last week at the Honda LPGA Thailand with successive rounds of 65-65-66 to edge Ai Miyazato of Japan by one stroke and pick up her 13th career victory on the LPGA Tour.

Tseng, who has never won the HSBC Women’s Champions title but has posted consecutive third-place finishes at this event in the past two years, also finished just two shots ahead of Jiyai Shin of South Korea who wound up in third place last week in Thailand.

And Miyazato and Shin both have previous victories at the HSBC Women’s Champions, with Miyazato winning the 2010 title and Shin earning the crown in 2009. Both players are listed among the contenders to challenge Tseng again this week in Singapore at 14/1 odds to win.

Karrie Webb of Australia is the defending champion of this event, and is back at 28/1 odds to repeat the feat despite turning in a solid performance last week in Thailand with a T9 finish.

Cristie Kerr and Stacy Lewis lead a strong American contingent at 16/1 odds, with Paula Creamerat 20/1, Brittany Lincicome at 25/1, and Michelle Wie back at 30/1 odds to win the HSBC Women’s Champions.

Visit Bovada now for all your golf betting odds and props, as well as LPGA Tour futures.

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Sprint Cup Field Hits Track for Daytona Gatorade Duels

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The Budweiser Shootout has been contested and the front row for the Daytona 500 has been locked in, so next up on the NASCAR betting menu for this week are the two Gatorade Duel races on Thursday afternoon.

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Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle had the two fastest times in qualifying over the weekend, so they’ll be in the front row when the Daytona 500 gets underway on Sunday afternoon. As well, they’ll each start out in front for one of the Gatorade Duel races on Thursday.

Edwards, who had the fastest time over the weekend and will be the pole sitter for the Daytona 500, leads the way for Gatorade Duel 1 on Thursday. His Duel race will feature 25 drivers, including Dale Earnhardt Jr., Tony Stewart, Kevin Harvick, and Denny Hamlin.

Trevor Bayne, the defending Daytona 500 champion, is also a part of Gatorade Duel 1, as is Danica Patrick. Both Bayne and Patrick have guaranteed spots on the Daytona 500 grid.

Biffle will be out front for Gatorade Duel 2 on Thursday afternoon, and his field for the day contains just 24 drivers. Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Matt Kenseth, Ryan Newman, Kasey Kahne, Kyle Busch, and Kurt Busch are all part of that second Duel race as well.

The results of Thursday’s Gatorade Duel races will determine the order of the rest of the starting grid for the Daytona 500 this weekend. As well, it’ll serve as a qualifying event for drivers who have still not clinched a spot in the 43-car field for Sunday’s big race.

Each Gatorade Duel race is 150 miles, and they get underway at 1:00pm ET on Thursday.

Find Sprint Cup Series betting odds - including all your Daytona 500 lines – today at Bovada.

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PGA Odds: Wagner Looks for Second Win at Mayakoba Golf Classic

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With the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship hogging most of the headlines this week in golf bettingaction, the best of the rest on the PGA Tour will tee it up beginning Thursday at the El Camaleon Golf Club in Riviera Maya, Mexico for the sun-drenched Mayakoba Golf Classic.

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Defending champion Johnson Wagner, who has a tournament win under his belt already this season on the PGA Tour, headlines the full 132-player field that will head south to compete for the winner’s share ($666,000) of the $3.7m purse as well as 250 FedExCup points that are up for grabs this week at the Mayakoba.

Wagner defeated fellow American Spencer Levin in a playoff to win last year’s tournament, and those two players are both listed at 14/1 odds to win this event come Sunday – along with 2008 winner Brian Gay.

Wagner won the Sony Open back in mid-January and has yet to miss a cut in five starts in 2012, while Levin wound up in third place at the Phoenix Open and T9 two weeks ago at Pebble Beach. Gay’s best finish so far in 2012 was T6 at the Sony Open won by Wagner, and he finished T5 at Mayakoba last year.

Also expected to be among the contenders this week are Jarrod Lyle, Charles Howell III andRory Sabbatini, who are each listed at 20/1 odds. Lyle is coming off an impressive T4 finish last week at the Northern Trust Open, and has a consistent track record of solid results at the Mayakoba.

Champions Tour luminaries in the field this week in Mexico will include Tom Lehman and John Cook(both at 80/1 odds), as well as El Camaleon course designer Greg Norman (150/1). Cook turned back the clock with a solo third-place finish last year behind Wagner and Levin.

Visit Bovada now for all your golf betting odds and props, as well as PGA Tour futures.

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Jeff Gordon Set for Another Run at the Sprint Cup Series Title: NASCAR Odds

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After finding his way back to Victory Lane several times last season can Jeff Gordon regain his past glory this year and challenge for the 2012 Sprint Cup Series championship? Bet on NASCAR today.

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Gordon won just one race in three years from 2008 to 2010 but he broke through again and managed to take checkered flags three times in 2011, winning at Phoenix in February, Pocono in June, and Atlanta in September.

None of those victories, however, came during the Chase portion of the schedule, leaving him to finish in eighth place in the overall standings, 116 points back of both Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards in the race to claim the Sprint Cup title.

Overall Gordon managed to pick up 13 Top-5 results and 18 Top-10 finishes in 2011, numbers which were both up slightly from 2010 (11 Top-5 results, 17 Top-10 finishes).

So clearly the Hendrick Motorsports driver has something left in the tank. That’s reflected on his Bovada odds to win the Sprint Cup championship this season, as he sits in the top tier of contenders at 10/1 to claim the title; teammate Jimmie Johnson is the 5/1 leader.

Gordon is also listed at 12/1 odds to win the Daytona 500 on Sunday afternoon, after he drove to a 15th-place finish at the Budweiser Shootout last weekend. The No. 24 car had a Daytona 500 to forget last year, as he ended up way back in 28th place at that race.

Gordon hasn’t won the Cup title since 2001, but he also hasn’t finished worse than 11th place in the standings in the past 10 years.

Find Sprint Cup Series betting odds - including all your Daytona 500 lines – today at Bovada.

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2012 NASCAR Daytona preview: Kurt Busch

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The NASCAR season begins this Saturday with the non-points Budweiser Shootout ahead of next Sunday’s Super bowl of the sport, the season-opening . WagerWeb.com previews the prospects of No. 51 at Daytona.

After a major fall from grace, 2004 points champion Busch is starting over with a small, fledgling Cup team. Perhaps no driver in NASCAR history has fallen as quickly as Busch has.

“What did I learn from it? I was doing a lot of things wrong,” he said.

Doing things wrong like berating his team through R-rated radio transmissions and contentious media sessions; threatening to fight a reporter and ripped a transcript out of the hands of another; then, firing through a verbal tirade of an ESPN personality caught on camera, igniting 700,000 views on YouTube and fan-triggered bans of former sponsor Shell Pennzoil. lIt was that behavior that served as the catalyst for Busch and Penske Racing to part ways at the end of 2011.

“At the end of the day, is it the money you’re putting in your pocket, or the fun you’re having while doing it?” Busch said. “There’s been a lot of advice I’ve been given this offseason and it’s been a great way to digest and now I’m excited to get to the track and put it into place.”

The place is now the small-funded, one-car team of Phoenix Racing. Driving the No. 51 car a full season has given life to the ashes of the 2004 champ. Busch knows life will be much different at Phoenix Racing, where there are 18 employees to support a single-car operation, than it was during the six years he was top dog at Penske Racing, which employs closer to 300 and ran multiple cars. While most NASCAR teams are based within 10 or 20 miles of the NASCAR R&D Center in Concord, N.C., Phoenix Racing is located in Spartanburg, S.C., about 80 miles to the southwest.

“There are going to be little victories that we claim, even if it’s finishing 15th and putting the car back in hauler without a scratch on it,” Busch said. “Those are going to be big days because we have two really good bullets right now — our superspeedway car for Daytona and we have a car that came from Hendrick that’s got a ton of R&D stuff on it. So I need to protect that car when we go to Vegas [in the third week of the season] because you want that car again in a couple of weeks at California. So we need to take care of that baby right now, and then hopefully we’ll get a few more built like that.”

While Busch is having fun with his new team, he knows that racing can be a lot of fun when winning is involved. And he and Phoenix Racing should be contenders at Daytona. Phoenix Racing’s lone Sprint Cup victory came at Daytona’s sister track, Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway, in April 2009 with Brad Keselowski driving, while Busch has 12 top-10 finishes in 22 point-paying starts at Daytona, including runner-up finishes in the Daytona 500 in 2003, 2005 and 2008. Last year, he won the Budweiser Shootout and the first of the two 150-mile Gatorade Duel qualifying races.

Place your NASCAR bets at our online sportsbook!

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NCAA Betting: VCU, Northern Iowa Get the National Spotlight

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The VCU Rams will try to build their resume for a return to the NCAA Tournament this spring when they play host to the Northern Iowa Panthers at the Siegel Center on Friday night in a BracketBuster matchup on ESPN2. Get your college basketball odds for the event at Bovada.

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Virginia Commonwealth made it all the way to the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament last season on a Cinderella run that saw them fall to Butler in the national semi-final. The Rams went 12-6 in the Colonial Athletic Association last season, and 28-12 overall.

This year VCU sits at 13-3 in conference play and 22-6 overall heading into Friday’s matchup with Northern Iowa, and they’re 14-12-1 against the spread. However, they had their 11-game winning streak stopped in their last game on Tuesday night, falling 62-61 on the road against George Mason.

Bradford Burgess and Troy Daniels each scored 13 points for the Rams in that loss, with Daniels also grabbing a team-high eight rebounds. Darius Theus picked up 11 points and six assists in that contest for Virginia Commonwealth.

Before Tuesday the Rams hadn’t lost since falling in back-to-back games to Georgia State and Drexel in early January. VCU’s other defeats this season came at the hands of Seton Hall, Georgia Tech, and Alabama back in November.

The Panthers have struggled in the Missouri Valley Conference this season, although they do have a win over a ranked team on their resume this year – they knocked off then-No. 13 Creighton by a score of 65-62 at home on February 4.

None of VCU’s wins this year have come against ranked teams; the only time they took on a team in the AP Top 25 was when they fell 72-64 on the road against then-No. 13 Alabama back in November.

Bet today on all of tomorrow’s basketball stars with Bovada’s NCAA odds.

Legends In The Making.

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NBA Odds: Lin, Knicks Host Hornets to Tip Off the Weekend

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Point guard Jeremy Lin and the New York Knicks will get back in action on Friday night as they play host to the lowly New Orleans Hornets at Madison Square Garden. The Knicks will be trying to run their winning streak against the Hornets to seven games, having picked up six straight victories over them since 2009. New York has also managed to cover the spread in seven straight against the Hornets.

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Overall the Knicks are 6-4 straight up and 7-3 against the spread in their last 10 meetings with the Hornets, with the OVER/UNDER going 4-6 in those 10 contests.

And with the Linsanity in full swing the Knicks are getting a little more attention on the NBA futureslists right now; New York sat at 18/1 at Bovada at last update to win the NBA championship this season, and at 10/1 to claim the Eastern Conference crown.

The Hornets, by far the worst team in the Western Conference, are off those boards.

In their last game on Wednesday night the Knicks beat the Sacramento Kings 100-85 at home, getting 15 points and 10 rebounds from Landry Fields. Lin was held to 10 points in that win, but also picked up a career-best 13 assists.

In Lin’s previous game on Tuesday in Toronto he hit the game-winning shot as time expired and put up 27 points and 11 assists. His hot stretch of starts began against the Jazz last Monday when he scored 28 points; Lin followed that up with quality games against the Wizards (23 points), Lakers (38 points), and Timberwolves (20 points).

The biggest stars hit the hardwood. Get your NBA odds at Bovada.

NBA Back in Business.

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Paul Williams vs. Nobuhiro Ishida in Junior Middleweight Bout

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Junior Middleweight action will soon be available for boxing betting fans at Bovada for the upcoming battle betweenPaul Williams (40-2) and Nobuhiro Ishida (24-6-2). Both fighters are working towards a big-name fight and need a win if they hope to see a sizable payday in their future.

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Williams was once considered one of the top pound-for-pound boxers in the game with wins over big-name fighters and a WBO Welterweight title. A recent loss toSergio Martinez, however, and a controversial decision win against Erislandy Lara have dropped his star down from the lofty position it was in just a little over a year ago.

At the age of 30 is Williams past his prime, or will the results of his last two fights motivate him to return to the form we became accustomed to seeing from The Punisher? If he does return to form he should have an easy day with Ishida, who has fought few top-ranked opponents.

Ishida has spent most of his boxing career fighting in his native Japan. He suffered a split-decision loss to Rigoberto Alvarez in 2010, but since then he’s had impressive winning performances against James Kirkland and Edson Espinoza. Despite those performances he will still be an underdog when the two fighters step into the ring.

Keys to victory for Williams would include staying away from Ishida’s power and keeping the pressure on the Japanese fighter for as long as it takes to get the upper hand. For Ishida, he needs to stay in the fight long enough to test the questionable chin of Williams. One big shot could win it for Ishida; he just has to find the right spot to land it.

Find boxing odds for all of this month’s big matchups right now at Bovada.

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Harvick a Top Contender to Win 2012 Cup Title

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Kevin Harvick was second in the Sprint Cup Series with four checkered flags in 2011, but that was only good enough for him to finish third in the final driver standings. He’ll be looking to improve on that position and win the circuit’s championship in 2012. Bet on NASCARyourself with Bovada.

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Harvick tied Kyle Busch with four visits to Victory Lane in the Sprint Cup Series last season, and they were both just one win short of eventual championTony Stewart.

Harvick, though, only managed to finish in the Top 5 nine times in 2011, which was well down from his 16 Top-5 results from 2010. Harvick also had fewer Top-10 finishes in 2011, just 19 compared to the 26 he earned the previous season.

That caused the Richard Childress Racing driver to end up 58 points back of Stewart in the standings at the end of the season, and in third spot for the second year in a row.

On the current Sprint Cup Series championship futures at Bovada Harvick is listed fourth at 8/1 odds (along with Stewart) to win the 2012 title; he trails Jimmie Johnson (5/1), Carl Edwards (6/1), and Kyle Busch (7/1) on that list.

And Harvick is also in a pack of drivers at 12/1 to win the season-opening Daytona 500 in two weeks. Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. are the current favorites on those Bovada NASCAR odds at 10/1 to pick up that win at Daytona International Speedway.

Harvick had a Daytona 500 to forget last season, as engine trouble had him finish in 42nd place. Harvick’s four 2011 victories came at Auto Club in March, Martinsville in April, Charlotte in May, and Richmond in September.

Find Sprint Cup Series odds - including all your Daytona 500 lines – today at Bovada.

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Wolfpack Head to Durham for Date with Devils

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The North Carolina State Wolfpack are riding a three-game winning streak, but they’ll in tough to stretch that streak to four games on Thursday night when they take on the No. 5 Duke Blue Devils at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Bet on college basketball with Bovada.

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And the Blue Devils will be full of confidence on Thursday after they edged bitter rival North Carolina 85-84 last Wednesday in Chapel Hill and then crushed Maryland 73-55 at home in their last game on Saturday.

Seth Curry led the Blue Devils with 19 points in that win over the Terrapins on Saturday, whileMason Plumlee was good for 16 points and 10 rebounds, and Miles Plumlee contributed 13 points and 22 boards.

That result improved Duke to 21-4 straight up and 11-14 against the spread on the season, and they’re now up to No. 5 in the rankings. North Carolina State sits at 18-7 straight up and 9-12 against the spread on the season heading into Thursday night.

The Wolfpack earned a win in Georgia Tech in their last game last Thursday, grabbing a 61-52 victory behind a 15-point performance from C.J. Williams. C.J. Leslie added 13 points and 10 rebounds for North Carolina State that night.

Duke won both of its games against North Carolina State last season, and they’re 8-2 straight up and 6-4 against the spread in the last 10 meetings between the schools dating back to 2005. The OVER/UNDER went 8-2 in those 10 contests.

Although the Blue Devils beat the Tar Heels last week, they still trail them on the NCAA Tournament futures right now; Duke is at 12/1 to win the national title, with North Carolina at 15/2. North Carolina State is a longshot at 300/1 odds on that futures list.

Bet today on all of tomorrow’s basketball stars at Bovada.

Legends In The Making.

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