Silva now. Silva later.
How early is too early to place a bet on the Anderson Silva vs. Rich Franklin bout on UFC 77?
The fight is still more than two weeks away and probably isn’t too high on anyone’s radar, just yet.
There are some risks in betting too early. There’s still a lot of time for information to leak out that might have some affect on the betting.
However, sometimes, you’ve got to realize a deal when you see it and move in with some early money.
Odds on mixed martial arts events often don’t get posted by the online bookmakers until a day or two before an event. The exception are the marquee matches on UFC events, which can go up weeks ahead of time.
In looking at Silva vs. Franklin, the early money line at Bodog has Silva at -190 and Franklin at +155. This means that you’d have to bet $190 on Silva to win $100. Or you could bet $100 on Franklin and win $155.
Another way to look at it is that Silva is a 65 percent favorite, while Franklin is only given a 39 percent chance of winning (The percentages add up to 104. The extra 4 percent is where the bookies make their money).
The first thing that you should do before deciding how to bet is to determine what the real odds on the fight should be. Remember, the odds that the bookies set are mostly intended to push the action in one direction or the other. Sometimes, the odds are very close to what they should be but, other times, they’re skewed because of factors such as a fighter’s popularity or reputation.
In this case, I think Silva should probably be slightly better than 65 percent.
This is no disrespect to Franklin who is a classy guy and was a great champion before he got his face rearranged by Silva at UFC 64, almost a year to the day of their upcoming rematch.
Silva is just head and shoulders above anyone in the UFC middleweight ranks. He has stopped his last five fights early and has shown that his supposed weakness, his ground game, isn’t too shabby. A lot of folks don’t give him credit for his Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt.
The guy’s striking is phenomenal and pin-point accurate. And we know that he has the most lethal knees in all of mixed martial arts.
I don’t think that the fact that the fight is in Franklin’s hometown of Cincinnati will have that much of an impact on Silva. Fighting in hostile arenas is nothing new to Silva, a former member of the Brazilian Chute Box Academy who has won belts in North America, Europe and Asia. Silva comes across as a very humble, well-grounded guy. There’s no reason to think he’ll come into the rematch looking past Franklin because, well, there is no one past Franklin.
The scary thing is that he’s still got some room to improve. If his takedown defense, for example, improves, he could very well be champ for years to come. (Or at least until Dan Henderson moves down in weight.)
I think Silva has the psychological advantage, as well. I’m not sure how Franklin gets past the last fight. How do you pump yourself up to get back into the Octagon against someone who totally destroyed you?
Sure, you can bet the farm that Franklin has been training and sparring against the Muay Thai clinch. He also gets props for leaving Cincinnati to train out west because he wanted to avoid the distractions.
Still, I think Silva warrants an early bet at -190 because I think the line will go past -200 before fight time.
Grab the bargain, now. If the lines, for some reason, draw closer before the fight, all the better.
