“EVERY wicket felt like a stab in the heart. By the end of the night I felt like I’d been scalped.”

With those two brief sentences former Liverpool midfielder Dietmar Hamann highlighted the perils and pitfalls of spread betting. “Shrewdies sell, mugs buy” is an old rule of thumb for that most volatile of betting mediums – and Hamman felt like he’d been well and truly mugged after losing a staggering £288,400 on a single bet.

Having taken up spread betting as a distraction from problems in his personal life, Didi suffered the loss on a cricket match between Australia and South Africa.

He explained: “I was spread betting because it requires more thought, and the more my brain was engaged the less I thought about the devastation I was feeling inside.

“That night I bought Australia for £2,800 at 340 runs. That meant for every run over 340 you win £2,800, but for every run under you lose the same amount.

“Australia collapsed for 237. It is a score I remember well. It cost me £288,400.”

There are punters who make a living from spread betting – but their names can be written on the back of a postage stamp, in marker pen.

Spread betting is the arena for the serious punter – but it comes with a wealth warning attached.

It’s like playing the stockmarket – but with sport.

In the stockmarket when you want to deal in traditional shares you go to a stockbroker and he will quote you two prices.

The lower of the two prices, which is the one you will get if you are selling shares, is called the bid price.

The higher quoted price is what you will have to pay if you are buying shares, and is the offer price. The difference between the two prices is called the ‘Spread’.

In spread betting the principle is exactly the same, two quoted prices, bid and offer.

You can either ‘buy’ at the higher price or ‘sell’ at the lower offer.

And you can bet on almost anything. For Liverpool’s Carling Cup semi-final second leg Sporting Index offered 125 markets, including injuries, corners, bookings, goal minutes – even the total shirt numbers of goalscorers in the match – the total would have been eight from the first leg . . . which if you’d ‘sold’ would have left you quids in.

But that’s where the bookies cash in.

Punters are always eager to buy the total number of games in tennis matches at Wimbledon, the French Open and the Australian Open as players do not play a tie-break in the fifth set at these events, so buying games in a match that develops into a five-set marathon can yield a sizeable return.

Game buyers hit the jackpot in the 2003 Australian Open when Andy Roddick defeated Younes El Aynaoui 21-19 in the fifth set.

Selling games resulted in a catastrophic loss to others, though.

Which is why the bookies make so much money.

Many spread punters trade sentimentally, backing what they hope will happen rather than what they think will happen.

This is why, spreads are often pitched artificially high.

Nothing illustrated this better than when Sporting Index issued the first ever corners spread.

They did not have stats to hand and came up with a feel price of 23-26, more than double the average number of corners in a game. And guess what?

They saw far more buyers than sellers!

If only Didi Hamann had been a shrewdie and sold, rather than bought Australian runs!