Try tackling this sporting chance

Horseracing and football are the biggest betting markets for both traditional fixed odds bookmakers and the spread betting firms; cricket, as numerical a sport as one might create, is, as the firms will confess, a game made for spreadbetting.

Rugby, meanwhile, with an evergreater share of television time and its countless possibilities for creating betting markets, has now firmly embedded itself as the next biggest sport that the punters get stuck into.

And with 48 matches next October and November in the Rugby World Cup, what is there not to look forward to in trying to unpick the wounding mismatches (or bigteams-struggle-against-minnows, delete as applicable) at the pool stage of the tournament, and then, the hard-to-call major matches from the last eight onwards in the last fortnight of the finals?

And for the bookies too. Sporting Index has been offering a complex array of rugby markets longer than anyone else, and reckons the punters are becoming ever more knowledgeable as more and more televised rugby union takes the sport away from its middle-class enclave who know their hookers from their flankers and into the mainstream.

"People have much greater access to the game and not just the domestic games but with all the coverage of the southern hemisphere games by Sky as well," says Mark Maydon, Sporting Index's commercial director. "So many more people are now more likely to have an opinion on rugby now, and it is a case of whether you want to back that opinion."

That interest has seen a mushrooming in the dozens of markets available per game and during the game. Number of successful kicking metres? You need to know not just the fly-halves and full-backs stepping up to the tee but the mindset of the captain on deciding whether to go for the posts. Try scorers' total shirt points? Some teams are not natural crossers of the try-line but even so it is still worth checking out who might be coming off the subs' bench with 21 or 22 on his back late on when the game may be breaking up.

Spreads like buying or selling the eventual winner or the total number of tournament tries are moved by a combination of weight of money but also, especially early on in something like the Rugby World Cup, on the opinion of spead bet firms' oddsmakers.

"We have well and truly had our trousers down taken on occasion when everyone seems to be on one side of the spread," says Maydon. "We did so when in 2007 we reckoned the northern hemisphere teams would score more points than the southern hemisphere teams. It's fiendishly mathematical but it appeals to small punters and high rollers alike, and some ended making huge amounts."

For more information on CMC Markets: http://www.cmcmarkets.co.uk/en