The Chinese Basketball Association - or CBA China for short - is probably the most unpredictable and fun basketball betting market outside of the NBA. This is because the CBA is a real high octane league - fast paced, super aggressive, and loaded with top foreign imports who can just light up the scoreboard at any time. That tends to create huge totals lines, wildly swinging handicap spreads, and plenty of odds movement from one sportsbook to the next.
Bettors looking at CBA matches will find that bookies like Bet365, Pinnacle, DraftKings, and FanDuel usually offer a full range of betting options including straight up moneyline odds, point spreads, over/under totals, and live betting.
Our OddsRun CBA matches page focuses on tracking just how much the odds are moving, whether bookies are laying out differently, and what's happening with the markets in the lead-up to tip-off.
Looking at historical data we can see that there's a huge tendency for games in the CBA to go over in terms of total points (that's according to our OddsRun database so far).
This explains why sportsbooks tend to keep yanking around those totals all day long. When the opening lines come in below the league's scoring average, you'll often see sharp bettors jumping in and attacking the over early, which can drive totals up fast before the game even starts.
For a lot of matchups, the totals markets can shift by 4 or 5 points during the betting process, especially when a team with a top foreign player is facing off against a team that can't stop anyone on D.
CBA games tend to have a stronger favorite dynamic than a lot of European leagues.
Historically, we've seen:
That means favorites tend to dominate the moneyline market, especially when a top tier club is taking on a mid-table team.
Clubs like Guangdong Southern Tigers, Liaoning Flying Leopards, Zhejiang Golden Bulls, and Xinjiang Flying Tigers - the big boys in the league - will often open up as significant favorites, sometimes with moneyline odds as low as 1.40 depending on who they're playing.
The CBA is a high scoring, wide open league, which can make for some pretty big winning margins.
Because of this dynamic, bookmakers tend to open up handicap lines pretty wide - often between –7.5 and –12.5, and if there's a real mismatch between the teams, you can see spreads go out to –15 points or more.
One thing that really stands out about the CBA betting market is just how fast the lines tend to move from one bookie to the next.
This is because of a bunch of factors, including:
What it means for you as a bettor is that you need to be keeping a close eye on odds comparison and dropping odds across bookies to catch the biggest moves in totals markets.
From a betting perspective, the Chinese Basketball Association has got some real unique characteristics:
So if you're looking at upcoming CBA games, try combining historical scoring trends with what's going on with the odds in real time across the major bookies, and you might just find some value in moneyline, point spread, and over/under markets before tip-off.