Odds: Canelo favored to beat Jacobs
Canelo Alvarez is the favorite over Daniel Jacobs this Saturday, but is there a bet to be made here?
Boxing sometimes gets criticized for fights where the best are not fighting the best, and that criticism is often valid. Not this weekend. In one of the sport’s major fights for the first half of 2019, megastar Canelo Alvarez (51-1-2; 35 KO) faces Daniel Jacobs (35-2; 29 KO) in a Middleweight unification fight. Here are the odds, courtesy of OddsShark:
Canelo Alvarez -500
Daniel Jacobs +350
Not a surprise that Canelo is the favorite, but those are wider odds than I would have guessed. And interestingly, they’ve grown wider as the fight has drawn near, starting at -270 to +192.
Canelo is coming in off his highly controversial 1-0-1 record against Gennady Golovkin (well, that and a silly tune-up fight against Rocky Fielding, but that’s easy to ignore). Jacobs is on a three fight win streak dating back to his 2017 loss to GGG. Golovkin is an interesting name at play here, as he beat Jacobs, and Canelo beat him, so the always unreliable boxing math says Canelo wins this.
BUT, very few felt that Canelo beat Golovkin either time - at best, he should be 0-1-1 in their series. While Jacobs took Golovkin to the scorecards and lost in a very close decision. So it would be fair to say Jacobs outperformed Canelo against GGG, and against a better version of GGG.
BUT (again) there’s no denying that historically, judges just favor Canelo. We can debate why all we want, but the evidence is there. Against GGG, against Mayweather, against Trout, against Lara, it has been Canelo benefiting from various degrees of wonky scoring.
So might Jacobs be the better man Saturday night? Yes, maybe. But if it gos to the cards (and I suspect it will), will he have done enough to have judges give him the nod against Canelo? That seems unlikely.
Because of that, no bet from me here. But if you wanted to take a shot on Jacobs, these odds are in your favor.
Here are the available odds on the rest of the card:
Vergil Ortiz Jr. -3000
Mauricio Herrera +1100Sadam Ali -10000
Anthony Young +1600
Join us at Bloody Elbow all week and Saturday night for Canelo vs. Jacobs coverage.