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What Are Blackjack Side Bets?Side bets are bonus bets placed on a round of Blackjack on outcomes beyond whether the player or dealer will win. The majority are staked at the start of the round before the cards have been dealt alongside regular bets and many have fixed odds that usually offer greater payouts than the simple 2:1 rewarded for beating the dealer.Play Blackjack at Pinnacle Casino

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Side bets provide an exciting way to make Blackjack games more interesting whilst offering you a greater number of ways to win. So what are side bets, what side bets are available and are they worth it? Read on to find out.

Blackjack Side Bets Explained

Finding a niche market in betting can often lead to value. This can be anything from specialist knowledge of handball betting to extensive experience in betting on Japanese baseball. Providing you know more than the bookmaker, there is money to be made.  &lt;Bet on soccer at Pinnacle&gt; They also make for interesting and potentially profitable bets, as they can be a little more reliable

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A corner is one of the most inexplicably exciting events in soccer. Only around three per cent of them lead to a goal, but you can guarantee that the attacking team’s fans will roar their approval and encouragement if their team are awarded one. Read on to find out how you can benefit from betting on corners.

Corners betting in soccer: Value in a lesser-known market

Poisson Distribution is a mathematical concept for translating mean averages into a probability for variable outcomes across a distribution. For example, if we know Manchester City average 1.7 goals per game, so by putting the Poisson Distribution formula tells us that this average equates to Manchester City&nbsp;scoring 0 goals 18.3% of the time, 1 goal 31% of the time, 2 goals 26.4% of the time and 3 goals 15% of the time.

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Poisson Distribution: Predict the score in soccer betting

What is Expected Value?The amount a player can expect to win or lose if they were to place a bet on the same odds many times over, calculated through a simple equation multiplying your probability of winning with the amount you could win per bet, and subtracting the probability of losing multiplied by the amount lost per bet.A simple example of Expected Value (EV) put into practice -&nbsp;if you were

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The Expected Value of a bet shows us how much we can expect to win (on average) per bet, and as such is the most valuable calculation a bettor can make when comparing bookmakers' odds. How can you calculate Expected Value in sports betting in order to predict your winnings? Read on to find out.

How to Calculate Expected Value

Andrew's&nbsp;career may have mysteriously taken him from earning a degree in Media to working for a bank, but his&nbsp;true passion has always been soccer. After observing how&nbsp;data has proliferated the sport in recent years, Andrew&nbsp;was quick to see what numbers could tell bettors&nbsp;about "the beautiful game". He is now pursuing a career in analysing football stats and has a keen interest in predicting match outcomes.

Andrew Beasley

<h3>The importance of the pre-season</h3>
<p>During the pre-season, new signings also get an opportunity to become attuned to the wavelengths of their new colleagues. It's a vital period in which teams hope everything will come together to help them improve for the forthcoming campaign.</p>
<p>Clubs also use the time to go on&nbsp;lucrative overseas tours in the hopes of attracting new supporters, with the more glamorous the opposition the better. Of course, this won’t be possible in the shortened pre-season of summer 2020. Over the preceding two years, Premier League teams have collectively averaged six pre-season fixtures each, and there were only three examples of a team having fewer than five.</p>
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<li><a style="color: #f50;" id="articleLink" href="https://www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/Betting-Strategy/why-information-is-more-important-than-betting-tips/4JN2TV54T54NDXSQ/" target="_blank"><b>The value of information in soccer betting</b></a></li>
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<p>While it is possible to bet on the outcome of friendly matches, trying to forecast a game in which all of the above factors have to be accounted for (as well as players more consciously attempting to avoid injury) seems like an impossible task. However, can the outcomes of summer friendlies give bettors any insight into how a particular team will perform in the competitive campaign nine months ahead of time?</p>
<h3>The impact of the pre-season on the start of the season</h3>
<p>As with any trend, there will be examples that fit your theory and others that appear to render it meaningless.</p>
<blockquote>Of the 34 Premier League teams involved in the 2018 and 2019 pre-seasons, 19 (56%)&nbsp;underwent a change in form during the pre-season that was maintained in the following campaign.</blockquote>
<p>However, let’s take a look at the previous two summers and see what they can tell us about the Premier League seasons that followed them. With three teams being relegated each year, there are obviously 17 that retain their place in the top flight from one campaign to the next.</p>
<p>From the pre-seasons of 2018 and 2019, we therefore have 34 teams we can evaluate. The first step is to see if their points per game (PPG) average was better during the summer than in the league season that preceded it. There were a total of 23 teams who improved, and 11 who got worse.</p>
<p>Our first concern is the opening six matches of the new campaign, <a style="color: #f50;" id="articleLink" href="https://www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/Soccer/importance-of-first-six-games-in-soccer/J3R2FJ6DY6MBZVW2/" target="_blank"><b>as it has been shown to be a crucial period</b></a> in terms of determining where a team is likely to finish in the league table once all 380 games have been played.</p>
<p>Of the 23 teams who improved their previous season's form in the summer, 12 were also better in their first six games of the following season. For teams who got worse in the pre-season, the correlation was stronger, with seven of the 11 sides also performing more poorly in their opening six matches.</p>
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<li><a style="color: #f50;" id="articleLink" href="https://www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/Soccer/both-teams-to-score-betting-analysis/V392T7MQAWC2AY9C/" target="_blank"><b>Both Teams To Score (BTTS) in soccer betting</b></a></li>
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<p>Combine the two samples together and we find that for 56% of teams (19 out of 34) their shift in form from the previous season to the summer continued into the season that followed.</p>
<p>But&nbsp;what about the other 15 teams? There was a very definite split in terms of what happened to them. For 11 of them, their improved form during the summer was seemingly a red herring, as their PPG average from the opening six matches of the new season was lower than their PPG for the preceding campaign.</p>
<p>That leaves just four whose form dipped in the pre-season but went on to improve upon the previous term once the new season got underway. Among these were Manchester City, Liverpool and Chelsea, which makes sense - the biggest teams often play the glamor friendlies, while also giving their top stars a break from the summer tournaments in which they have represented their countries. It’s therefore not that surprising if their pre-season results aren’t the strongest.</p>
<h3>The impact of the pre-season&nbsp;on the whole season</h3>
<p>When it comes to looking at how many teams carry their pre-season form across the entirety of the next campaign, the total of 21 is basically the same as the 19 who maintained their changed record into the first six games of it.</p>
<p>The breakdown is less evenly matched though, with 14 teams posting a higher PPG in both the summer and the subsequent season than they had the year before, with seven clubs being worse in both instances.</p>
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<li><a style="color: #f50;" id="articleLink" href="https://www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/Soccer/soccer-goalscorer-player-props/4YYJG2TJSUH4NLCZ/" target="_blank"><b>Soccer Player Props: Goalscorer betting in soccer</b></a></li>
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<p>In total, there were 15 clubs in the past two seasons who were better or worse in the pre-season than they had been in the previous campaign, and went on to maintain that status for both the opening six games of the subsequent season and across all 38 matches.</p>
<p>The quintet of teams who were worse and stayed there are probably the more interesting part of the group, as four of them sacked their managers in the first half of the season. José Mourinho was let go by Manchester United in December 2018, while Mauricio Pochettino, Unai Emery and Marco Silva were all relieved of their duties before Christmas in 2019. Whether bettors should pay attention to pre-season results is up for debate, but club chairman certainly seem to take note of them.</p>
<h3>The impact of the pre-season&nbsp;on the Golden Boot</h3>
<p>There are countless players whose form in the pre-season bears no resemblance to how they perform once the competitive action kicks off, but the research for this study did throw up one interesting example.</p>
<p>In the 2018/19 season, Danny Ings failed to score a league goal past December. However, his three goals in the warm-up matches ahead of last season may have given him a psychological boost, and he ultimately ended the campaign joint-second in the Premier League Golden Boot standings.</p>
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<li><a style="color: #f50;" id="articleLink" href="https://www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/Soccer/golden-boot-betting-analysing-trends/WCS2BRHSWS8DM87P/" target="_blank"><b>Analyzing the trends of the Premier League Golden Boot race</b></a></li>
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<p>With odds of up to 200/1 available each way before the 2019/20 season began, that could’ve proven a seemingly unlikely, but very profitable bet. Naturally, you shouldn’t bet on every player who scores goals in pre-season friendlies to win the Golden Boot, but this suggests that they can provide certain players with a motivational lift.</p>
<p><b>Overall, it appears to be impossible to say with any degree of certainty what impact the summer friendlies have upon the next season for either the players or the teams. However, there are enough examples to suggest that you shouldn’t simply dismiss the significance of the pre-season either.</b></p>

What can bettors learn from pre-season soccer matches?

The pre-season is an important time for all soccer clubs, but what can betters actually take from it to learn about the upcoming competitive campaign? Andrew Beasley takes a look in this article.

Article

The pre-season is an incredibly important time for soccer clubs. Players have to get themselves back into peak physical condition before the grueling new season begins, and the matches offer managers the opportunity to tinker with their tactics and formations in games where the result is unimportant. But what can bettors learn from all of this? Read on to find out.