Boxing betting: Canelo Alvarez a surefire pick over Caleb Plant and likely by stoppage
LAS VEGAS — Caleb Plant says all the right things. Hell, he does all the right things. He looks the part.
Despite all that, there doesn’t seem to be a way he can find to defeat Canelo Alvarez when they meet Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden Arena for the undisputed super middleweight title.
If we talk in college football terms, Alvarez has Alabama, Georgia, Cincinnati and Oklahoma on his résumé. Plant has UNLV, Kansas, Tulane and Slippery Rock on his. It’s no contest.
No one I have spoken to gives Plant even a snowball’s chance of winning.
BetMGM has Alvarez as a -900 favorite, with Plant at +500. Alvarez is -190 to win by KO/TKO.
Plant certainly is not inept. Rocky Fielding, whom Alvarez beat for a secondary super middleweight title in 2018, was inept. Plant is a solid, professional fighter.
The problem is, he’s in with an all-time great. Alvarez may be the greatest Mexican-born fighter ever, and if he’s not there yet, he has a chance to reach that exalted status before he walks away.
Alvarez has fought the best of the best in whatever weight class he’s been in, never ducking anyone and seeking out challenges at every turn. Plant’s biggest win was against Jose Uzcategui. Only serious, hardcore boxing fans know much about Uzcategui.
Alvarez has been in with elite opposition like Floyd Mayweather Jr., Miguel Cotto, Gennadiy Golovkin and more. His only loss came to Mayweather in a super welterweight fight.
He’s a punishing body puncher, a vastly underrated defender and he has one of the best chins in the game. He was in there for 24 rounds with Golovkin and never so much as wobbled.
Plant has good quickness and above-average footwork, and he’d be a test for any other super middleweight. Look, though, at what Alvarez did to other super middleweights:
He terrified then-unbeaten Callum Smith and badly pummeled him, winning 11 of 12 rounds on two scorecards. He made Billy Joe Saunders quit on the stool. And yeah, while Fielding was a joke as a champion, Alvarez dealt with him as such, dropping him four times and stopping him in the third.
There seems almost no way that Plant wins this fight. So that means we have to look at how and when Alvarez wins in order to get a bet down, because laying $900 to win $100 is almost as bad as guzzling castor oil (look it up).
He’s -190 to win by KO/TKO and you can get him at +450 if you want to bet him to win by KO/TKO in the first four rounds.
Alvarez is +2500 to finish the fight in the first round and +2000 to finish it in the 12th. Plant is +12500 to win by KO/TKO in the first and is the same to win that way in the 12th.
I see Alvarez stopping Plant in the middle rounds, somewhere from six to nine, so as attractive as it is to get Alvarez at +450, it’s going to be tough for him to win inside of four.
So I’ll simply play Alvarez to win by KO/TKO and put two units on it at -190, hoping to make a $200 profit.
