In case you hadn't copped it, betting on the hurling and football championships has never been more popular.

Knowing a little about rugby can be a help. Take the man who walked into the Boylesports office in Tralee last Christmas and placed 20 on a six-way accumulator. Ireland to win the Triple Crown at 7-1, Munster to win the Heineken Cup at 13-2, Mayo to win the Connacht title (evens), Armagh to win Ulster (11-8), the Dubs to win Leinster (6-4) and the Cork footballers to win Munster (11-4). All six came up. The customer walked away with 53,437.50.

"You'll note, " Paul Magee of Boylesports adds, "that he'd backed against his own county, yet Kerry went on to win the All Ireland in the end. So he was a winner both ways."

Not that Magee expects anyone to shed tears for the unfortunate bookies; there is, one scarcely needs to add, no cause to. Having the Dubs go a long way in the championship without going all the way constitutes a bonanza for the layers. The 27th of August, the afternoon of the second All Ireland football semi-final, is a day likely to be enshrined in Irish bookmaking lore.

Mayo, the underdogs, won.

Better still, Dublin lost. Cue delighted grins and foreign holidays all over the place.

"The best result of the year for us by a distance, " Eoin George of Paddy Power confirms. "We had Mayo at 3-1 and we didn't take any money for them. Everyone was on Dublin, getting stuck in big time." It was, says Eoin Ryan of Betfair, "the most high-profile in-running reversal of the championship for punters . . .

several of them took 1-10 about Dublin shortly after half-time." The result saved Boylesports 50,000 on their ante-post market and, what between wagers on the Dubs to win in 70 minutes and/or beat the three-point handicap, "well over 100,000" on the day, according to Paul Magee. "A great result."

Such is the lure of the Dubs for punters, Eoin George points out. "The longer the summer went on, the more hype there was about them.

Okay, that's probably the case every year, but this year people thought they had the substance to back it up. That it was more than just hype."

Paddy Power priced Dublin at 1-3 to beat Mayo. Prohibitive odds? Not for a number of customers who staked fivefigure sums on them.

That wasn't the last good turn Mayo did Paddy Power.

For the All Ireland final itself, the firm was deluged with "a continuous flow of money" for Mickey Moran's side.

Mayo opened at 3-1, were cut to 11-4 and were subsequently cut to 5-2 before going off at 9-4. Other notable results for Paddy Power during the championship were the Kerry v Cork draw in the Munster final and Galway's defeat by Westmeath in the qualifiers in Salthill. Both Kerry and Galway were 1-5 shots . . . and yes, you do get people steaming in on 1-5 shots.

The key factor in all of this is television. Live TV coverage of hurling and football matches is, says Eoin Ryan, "the lifeblood of GAA betting".

Betfair, whose unique selling point is that they enable the punter to act as bookie by matching a bet from a punter taking the opposing view, report a 34 per cent increase from last year in the volume of trade on the All Ireland finals, the trend assisted by the rise in the number of people outside Dublin with internet access and broadband.

It's not all that long ago, Paul Magee adds, since The Sunday Game comprised a Sunday night programme showing highlights of the afternoon's matches. "Nowadays there's the Sunday Game live, with two matches, and a qualifier live on a Saturday.

Once a match is on TV, you're going to have people betting, whether in the shops or on the internet or over the phone.

A guy in a pub will pull out his mobile and ring his bookie to have a bet, and one or two of his friends will say, 'Oh, have 20 on that for me too.'" The All Ireland football final coincided with a red-letter afternoon on Sky Sports.

Kerry v Mayo went head-tohead with Manchester United v Arsenal and Chelsea v Liverpool and more than held its own. With Paddy Power, the volume of bets on the Croke Park showpiece equalled the volume on the two soccer matches put together.

Betfair had a client who won 17,500 on Kerry the same day. Another had won 7,000 on Kilkenny a fortnight earlier. Oddly enough, the Kerry/Kilkenny All Ireland double, a standing dish for punters every season, didn't cost Paddy Power as much as might have been expected ("A few four-figure doubles, nothing more, " reveals Eoin George).

Talking of Kilkenny, one wouldn't have imagined their championship opener against Westmeath at Cusack Park in early June would have caught the eye of punters. But it did in a big way, for the simple reason that handicap betting has, according to Liam Cashman, become "unbelievably popular". No matter how one-sided a match may look, the handicap evens things up and allows punters back their opinion on how much the favourites will win by (i. e. by more than the handicap or less than it).

Cashman's had a "very good" betting championship on the hurling, seeing money for all five Munster teams . . .

including Limerick when they were going well during the National League . . . at various stages. The Kerry/Cork, Kerry/Kilkenny, Cork/Cork and Cork/Tyrone doubles were also popular, though Mayo reaching the football final was a bad result for the firm, who'd taken a number of each-way bets on the county, among them one of 5,000 at 33-1. Cashman's, incidentally, have cut Galway to 9-2 for McCarthy Cup glory next September in the light of recent events.

Punters should not, however, be seduced by what Brian O'Neill of Sports Spread Betting asserts are "urban myths about GAA betting". Betting on the draw is good value, for instance? It isn't, claims O'Neill. "There wasn't one draw in the hurling championship this year, and football was hardly better."

Coups abound? "They certainly don't." Surprises abound? "They don't either.

The 2006 championships barely threw up one. Football has become only marginally less predictable than hurling.

Surprises in football and hurling are a myth, fuelled by the media giving publicity to managers bullshitting about how their teams had been 'written off ' when of course they hadn't."

Finally, O'Neill advises, don't be afraid of lumping on Cork and Kilkenny for hurling silverware in 2007, regardless of how skimpy the odds might appear. "One prominent GAA scribe will soon try to convince the nation, for the umpteenth time, that the odds against Kilkenny and Cork are ridiculously short. He does it every year and he's always wrong. Kilkenny and Cork have won seven of the last eight All Irelands. Had you backed both of them every year, you'd be well in profit."

Ger Loughnane may beg to differ.