The NRL Ladder for Punters: Find out who to back on the Line Ladder

All league fans keep a close eye on the NRL ladder, but it offers few valuable insights for NRL punters!

From a betting perspective you can learn much more with our NRL Line Ladder.

While the traditional NRL ladder simply records wins and losses, the Line Ladder instead records performance against the closing betting line.

NRL Line Ladder: The NRL Ladder for punters

The 2022 regular season is done and like the AFL, the NRL Line Ladder had an outlier at either end of the table. The most profitable team to back all year was the Cowboys, who beat the market in 16 of their 24 games… a remarkable achievement. At the other end was the Doggies, who covered in just 8 of their 24 games.

We’ve also added the results if you were to bet $100 every week at $1.90. The Cowboys produced $640 profit at 27% PoT. After them were the Panthers, Sharks and Souths with $450 profit at 19% PoT and the Dragons with $260 at 11% PoT. The Roosters and Broncos were also marginally profitable.

The NRL Ladder for Punters: How it works

While the regular NRL ladder simply records wins and losses, the Line Ladder takes the betting market into account and measure performance against the line.

For example, let’s say the Storm were playing the Dragons. The closing line is -9.5 (Storm) and +9.5 (Dragons).

Storm win the game by 20 points.

The Storm covered the line by 10.5 points. So they record 1 cover, and their ‘Final margin v closing line’ figure is 10.5.

The Dragons record 1 miss, and their ‘Final margin v closing line’ figure is -10.5.

Then those figures just accumulate through the season. The ladder is ranked first by covers, then by cumulative margin vs the closing line.

That’s all there is to it. It measures team performance, but in relation to the market. So you get a view of how well the betting market is performing in predicting each team’s results. A good example of this in 2019 was South Sydney. They had a great year, finishing in third position on the NRL ladder at the end of the regular season. But despite looking good in terms of wins and losses, they often fell short of the market’s expectations. They covered the line only ten times in their 24 matches to finish way down in 13th position on the line ladder. They weren’t often a good line betting proposition. That’s the sort of information that is valuable as a punter, and isn’t available on the regular NRL ladder.