How to Utilize Free Bets and Risk-Free Offers
Free Bet Offers
After you’ve gotten used to simple arbitrage, where you take boosted odds offered by a sportsbook on an event, and use an exchange to bet against the opposite outcome and guarantee yourself a profit, you’re ready to move onto some more complex types of matched betting.
First, we’ll start with free bets, which are a very common promotional tool used by traditional sportsbooks, and which can be very profitable for a savvy user.
The idea of profiting with a free bet is simple - place your bet, and use an exchange to bet on the opposite outcome. Since you’re not risking anything to make your bet on the book, you can ensure a profit even if the odds would not be profitable for a normal arbitrage.
As standard, most free bets fall into the stake-not-returned (SNR) category, which means that you are only paid the profits of your bet if you win at the sportsbook, but are not also given the cash value of the free bet. This does make the math a little more complicated, but you can easily calculate the correct amount to maximize profits on either side using our free bet calculator.
Risk-Free Offers
The next level up from this involves something called a risk-free bet, which combines a normal bet and a risk-free bet. This type of offer comes under many different names, such as “No-Sweat”, “Money Back” or the standard “Risk-Free”, but rest assured, you can profit off all of them in the same way.
Here’s how it works;
The sportsbook offers a promotion where they refund your stake if your bet loses, usually up to a certain amount. To take advantage of this offer, you place two bets like with our other matched bet types - one on the exchange, and the other on the opposite outcome of the exchange bet.
There are two possible scenarios we have to consider for this offer, and which we will use to optimize the exact amounts to bet on the exchange to maximize your profits in every scenario. Fortunately, all of the math will be taken care of for you with our risk-free calculator.
1. If your original bet wins: You will receive the winnings from your bet at the sportsbook, and will lose a smaller amount at the exchange. If you maximize your profits using our calculator, then you will have lost a significantly smaller amount with us, knowing that you can profit from the free bet should your initial bet have lost. In this case, you’ve made your money and the offer is complete.
2. If your original bet loses: You will lose the stake you placed at the sportsbook. However, since you laid the same outcome at the exchange you will win there, and you will receive a refund equal to your stake at the sportsbook. Simply treat this free bet like any other on the next event you bet on, and lock in a profit by betting against it on our exchange as well!
The calculator used to maximize risk-free profits has one extra input, which is something called your retention percent. This is decided by you, but the general idea is that it is the expected percentage of the risk-free bet that you think you can turn into cash. You’ll have a good idea of the typical percentage you get if you take advantage of other free bet offers, but a good rule of thumb is that ~70% retention is usually pretty easy to find. Finding bets which will give you higher retention rates is certainly possible, but just takes a little bit more work! Unfortunately, it’s very rare to find a combination of bets to get your retention percent to 100, but never fear, you can still make a healthy profit with these offers!