With an ever increasing number of bookmakers competing for your betting rand punters are spoiled for choice in terms of range of markets and prices on offer.

I will focus on the former in this column so let’s take the Currie Cup for example where the handicap bet is the most common. In this bet bookmakers give the underdog a start and you have to select which side of the line the final score is going to fall, a 50/50 call.

This past weekend Western Province took on Boland and the handicap was 45.5 points, in other words if as I did you fancied WP to hand out a rugby lesson you needed them to do so by 46 points or more. The problem with these one sided matches though is that the fancied team (in this case WP) would often step off the gas in the second half as with the job done they made substitutes and looked to preserve their squad ahead of the semi-finals.

This made backing the -45.5 Province pretty risky as there was no guarantee that they would push on for a massive win once the 4 try bonus point was in the bag.

Enter on of the cornerstones of the Goodforthegame Forum who posts under the handle “Squatter”. His suggestion in these high handicap matches was to take a look at the half time handicaps which works on exactly the same principle only your bet is decided when the hooter sounds to end the first 40.

His logic when applied to this match is that you can take advantage of the fact that the favoured team will be focused on their bonus point in the first half and if your call is correct you can make your money and get out before the consolation tries and inevitable handling errors become a factor.

Putting this to the test I took WP -22.5 at half time instead of the -45.5 full time quote. They were poor on the day but still managed to beat the half time line falling just short in the end of beating the 80 minute handicap.

By taking advantage of this additional market offered by select bookmakers, I was able to turn a potential loss into a profit – there is always a betting angle to suit your requirements although you still have to be correct to collect of course. brent@goodforthegame.co.za

This article first appeared in the Citizen CitiGaming section on Thursday 08 October 2009

Brent Graham is a blogger on www.goodforthegame.co.za and presents a sports betting radio show every Saturday morning at 07h30 on 1485AM Radio Today or Channel 169 of the DSTV Audio Bouquet.

You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/brentgraham or get on his mailing list by dropping him a line at brent@goodforthegame.co.za

Goodforthegame will be posting betting previews on the Currie Cup, ICC Cricket, Premier League and PSL.