London, UK -- (SBWire) -- 02/21/2012 --As Cardiff City prepare to take on Liverpool in the Carling Cup Final on Sunday 26th February, staff at leading sports spread betting firm Sporting Index are preparing for their first major domestic final of the football season and one of their busiest League Cup finals ever.

Sporting Index will offer around 200 spread betting markets before the match kicks-off and over 150 spread bet markets for betting in-play – more than on any League Cup final before.

There is plenty of interest in this year’s contest, in part because it is the first time a Championship club has reached the final of this tournament since 2001. Premier League club Liverpool start as supremacy favourites for the match, but the Welsh club have visited the new Wembley Stadium four times in as many years while the Reds are yet to play there. The Bluebirds were also the last non-top-flight team to reach a major domestic final, when they lost to Portsmouth in the 2008 FA Cup final.

Sporting Index allow punters to bet higher or lower on a number of match occurrences, both pre-event and in-play. They can challenge predictions of how many goals Liverpool will win (or lose) by, the number of corners or the number of bookings and sending-offs referee Mark Clattenburg will issue, among many others. Punters will also find it easier to browse markets with Sporting Index’s new market grouping feature.

A popular market is total goal minutes, where if a goal is scored in the 26th minute and the 55th minute, the market makes up 81. Sporting Index’s football traders set their prediction spread, and invite punters to bet higher or lower. The more a punter is right, the more they win – but if they are wrong, the further away the outcome is from the initial prediction the more they stand to lose. Continuing this example, imagine the spread is set at 115-125. If the punter had sold (bet lower) at 115 they would win 34 times (115 minus 81) their stake. If they had bought (bet higher), they would be wrong and therefore lose 44 times (125 minus 81) their stake.

“Cardiff City have quite a knack of progressing far in knockout tournaments, but they’ll find it tough to beat Liverpool, one of the top clubs in the country,” comments Sporting Index spokesman Wayne Lincoln. “We’re pleased to be able to offer so many exciting markets on the match and our football boys are revved up and ready to take our clients on! Good luck to all!”

About the Sporting Index Group
The Sporting Index Group is best known as the world’s largest sports spread betting business, offering the widest range of markets and taking some of the largest bets on sporting events around the world. Markets include rugby spread betting, cricket spread betting and football spread betting.

The Group has 180 staff, all based at its London HQ. It is privately owned and is the undisputed world leader in sports spread betting, dominating the global market with an estimated 80%+ market share. Today it makes thousands of markets on upwards of 500 events every week, offering the sports fan the opportunity to bet on a wide variety of sports, political and showbiz events, as well as on a portfolio of unique virtual games. Clients transact via its websites, award winning mobile phone applications, and a 24/7 voice telephony service. Sporting Index’s B2C business continues to grow in the face of a fiercely competitive online betting market.

At the heart of the business is a world class trading, modelling and liability management capability that is widely acknowledged as amongst the best in the global betting market. The Group combines the latest technology with unrivalled trader expertise to service its core sports spread betting clients as well as an increasing number of wholesale customers who rely on the company’s fixed-odds in-play pricing data to underpin their own sportsbook operations via the Sporting Solutions brand. This has quickly established itself as a leading data provider with a number of flagship betting brands signed up.

Sporting Index is authorised and regulated in the UK by the Financial Services Authority and the Gambling Commission.