It is not always advisable to have a bet a long time before an event starts. You don’t exactly what is going to happen and you can find that, the person of team you bet on has something happen to them that greatly reduces the odds of your bet coming in. However, it can also really be worth making a bet far out, as your odds can be superb as the bookmakers are unsure of how to set them. You take a risk but you might gain a big reward.

This used to be particularly risky in the old days where you had few levers to pull if your bet was going wrong or if you wanted to place a wager that was as low risk as possible. However, we now have things like cash out, request a bet and free bets, which allow us to take longer terms bets, to bet on events a little ways away, without risking our own money. If you were to bet on say, Rafael Nadal to win Wimbledon and he got injured before, if you used a free bet then it doesn’t really matter, you haven’t risked any of your own money and you’ve lost nothing.

However if he was to win, since you bet a while before the event, you are likely to have got great odds and picked up more money than if you had bet a few days before or even during the event. With that in mind, we thought it would be fun to look at some bets around the World Cup. Though it is around 90 days away, there are some trends and things which look likely to happen even if we cannot be sure right now. Placing a bet in the weeks leading up to the event could well net you a tidy profit, so here are two ideas for World Cup bets you can make right now.

Egypt to make it the furthest of the African Teams

Egypt have a strange relationship with the World Cup, having long failed to qualify despite dominating their own continental competition, winning a lot of African cup of nations titles but failing in world cup qualification. Now though they have an ace in the hole, Mohamed Salah, the Liverpool player, is one of the Premier League top scorers and can light up the World Cup. They have a group featuring Russia, Uruguay and Saudi Arabia which they can make it out of. Uruguay are good but nothing special, Russia are a very poor team and Saudi Arabia have no one close to Salah, they could well be Africa’s best team.

South Korea to get out of their group

Group F has a clear winner, in Germany, who as the current world champions, will be confident of progression. Then there are three teams who seem very evenly matched in South Korea, Sweden and Mexico. What sets them apart though is that, in Tottenham’s winger Son Heung-min, Korea have a world class player. Put you money on them to take second place in this tight group.