spread betting is a form of betting that requires the user to process a lot of information

After a number of enquiries from members about how to spread bet, and after a very successful spread betting campaign at the World Cup, I want to lay down how you should be thinking when you bet on the spreads.

Spread betting is certainly not for the faint-hearted, but if it is done properly it can generate impressive returns and is a useful addition to your football betting armoury. But be careful, if you don’t know what you are doing, it can be a dangerous way to gamble.

I will let the spread firms explain how the mechanics of sports spread betting works, because they do it pretty well:

• Sporting Index – The original sport spread betting firm has perhaps the most comprehensive and easy to follow guide to spread betting
• Spreadex – Considered the number two in sports spread betting term, Spreadex is a good little firm that offers excellent spreads
• Extrabet – This ambitious spread company has a simplistic animated guide, but it is effective for the new spread betting punter to understand what the format is all about

Spread betting is not about picking a winner or loser, it is about finding the value. That is why, although spread firms do offer something very similar to a win-lose-draw bet, its more popular markets are based more on the details of a match.

Markets offered include total corners, total booking points, total shirt numbers (total of the number on the back of goalscorers in a match), time of first goal, performance points (pluses for goals scored, not conceded, minuses for bookings etc..), and even total number of points a team scores in a season (something I will be tipping on this season).

You have to think differently than you do with fixed odds. Where you might be able to say that Man Utd will beat Stoke, for example, a spread bet will force you to be more accurate in your prediction – and will reward you/punish you depending on how right/wrong you are.

It is not for the unknowledgeable. If you are unaware of how strong a team is, how each team plays, whether they are an aggressive side, what the referee’s previous performance stats are, how the pitch will effect play, home and away records of teams, even what shirt numbers will be on the back of likely goalscorers, then you can get your pockets burned very quickly.

But there are huge advantages to spread betting. It is perfect for in-play betting, because the spreads will fluctuate regularly throughout the 90 minutes of a match. This allows the spreader to get perhaps better value if they believe that something is going to happen, but it hasn’t happened yet. Total bookings is a good example. Often cards are not awarded until towards the end of a match, and the spreads often reflect this, but then the spread will still come down – and it is possible to play the market later on in the game, at a better price.

Spread betting like this is more like trading, and is very popular with people familiar with how trading works. But traditional football punters perhaps have a better advantage in the long-term markets. Footbet showed this in the World Cup recently. I tipped Slovakia to get out of the group stage and the rewards were far higher than the fixed odds markets because we could trade out at a higher price before they played their second round match. We could trade out of a position while the market was still live.

Likewise our spread betting tips on Mexico and Germany, who both over achieved in this World Cup just gone.

This season we intend to concentrate on the English league markets because there is better value to be had. This is mainly because information is harder to come by for these markets and so there are fewer people speculating with the kind of knowledge needed to make a decent profit.

This will allow us to identify teams that will perhaps start more weakly and strongly than expected and trade out of these bets when we feel they are about to improve or fade.

Footbet has already identified a number of candidate teams and will be rolling out tips in the next two weeks, once the markets open.

I strongly recommend that you do not enter into spread betting unless you have access to good advice, or are confident in your understanding of how it work, and how much money you can lose if your bet goes wrong.

Because spread betting is a dangerous game to be playing if you don’t have a full set of cards.