Strategies for:

Exchange signup offers

Betfair Cash refund offers

Betfair Tote offers

Betfair Multiples offers

(Note that this article does not deal with offers in the Betfair Sportsbook, which are normal offers with no commission on the back side).

Betfair offers are slightly different from ordinary bookmaker offers because if you win you have to pay commission. This therefore needs to be factored in to calculations.

I have used Betfair as the example here, because the vast majority of the offers are there, but these strategies would apply equally to any of these offers at another betting exchange.

Most of the multiples offers cannot easily be done risk free. I have extracted various suggested strategies from the forum and accredited them to their authors. You may wish to ignore any or all of these strategies and develop your own!

Signup Offers

Risk Category A

There are two sorts of signup offers at Betfair – account credit and refund if first bet loses. The 2nd of these is much the most common.

Account Credit

If you are lucky enough to find one of these offers you can usually simply place the money on a lay bet to lay off a bookmaker bet. The bet is stake returned, so no special calculations are required.

Refund if First Bet Loses

Often these are restricted to back bets only, and you need a 2nd betting exchange (best choice is usually Betdaq) to lay the bet off. You will therefore have to pay commission on the winning half of the bet. Treat the refund at Betfair as SNR.

The matcher spreadsheet allows you to put in commission for both bets:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This screenshot shows that for odds of 7 at both exchanges you can make nearly £39 from a £50 refund offer. As for any SNR free bet, odds of above 7ish produce the best returns, but remember that you will need enough money in Betdaq to cover the liability on the lay bet.

Cash Refunds

Risk Category B

Howard Hutchinson (from the forum):

Some of Betfair’s Midweek Mania offers are a straight cash refund. Today’s offer was Bet £10 on the Tote for a £5 cash refund, win or lose.

Other refunds are a cash refund only if we hit a loser.

I have previously supplied a spreadsheet for the lose only situation, but here are separate sheets for Lose Only, and Win Or Lose offers.

I have re-named the lose only sheet (previously called Refund Cash), so if you have downloded the earlier sheet, you won’t need this Loser Only sheet.

Here are the download links :

Cashback on a Loser only Refund_Cash

Cashback Win or Lose Refund_Cash_Win_or_Lose

Note that you may now need Excel 2007 or a later version to view these sheets. if your version of Excel is earlier than 2007, give the download a try as the only difference from previous files is the background colour of one or 2 cells.

Tote Offers

Risk Category B (D for Tote multiples offers)

Many of Betfair’s offers are for Tote bets of various types.

Betfair’s Tote betting is not the easiest to understand if you are not used to it, and in particular it is misleading because it looks as though you can only do things like jackpots and placepots, when in fact you can place singles too.

First find Tote betting – go to the Horse Racing section and click on the green Tote icon.

You will then see 2 dropdown boxes at the top, one saying “Select Meeting” and the other “Select Pool”. Choose the meeting you want, and then look at the select pool dropdown and you will see that for each race it says win/place. This is what you want if you are looking to place a single bet on one horse. For other promotions you may want the jackpot (find all the winners at the meeting – specific meetings today only) or the placepot (find a placed horse in all the races at a specific meeting, available on all meetings today).

The important thing to remember about Tote odds is that you are not taking the odds you see. The pool will be divided in proportion amongst the winning bets, and you have no way of knowing exactly how much you will win.

Single bets

For offers of the type “Place a £10 Tote bet and get a £5 refund”, select win/place as above. The tactic is then to choose a low priced horse (often the place market is good for this, but be aware of the problems of non runners – see each way article). You can then lay off the horse just before the off, when the price at Betfair is likely to be nearest to the tote return on the horse. I would advise underlaying a bit to avoid having to pay out too much if the bet wins and the tote odds are shorter. You can estimate the Tote return and use Howard’s spreadsheet (above) or simply decide who much you want to get back if your bet loses, and lay that.

How you tackle this may also depend on whether the refund is only if the horse loses or if you get a refund whatever happens. You may decide to simply cover yourself for no loss if the horse loses and a win if it wins, for example. This is one of those offers where personal taste and some judgement are involved as there is no exact mathematical answer.

Jackpots, Placepots and Scoop 6

eg Place £20 worth of Tote Placepot bets today and get £10 cashback.

These are multiple bets as explained above. Once again, because of the Tote aspect, you have no idea what you are going to win.

corner

For those who have no idea what the placepot is, you have to select a horse (or more than 1) in each of the first 6 races at any one meeting. The placepot wins if ALL 6 horses are placed. The definition of “placed” is the same as that used for bookmakers each-way bets, ie 2 places in races with less than 8 runners, 3 places 8-15 runners and non handicaps with 16 or more runners, 4 places in handicaps with 16 or more runners. If there are 1-4 runners the bet in that race goes on to win.

You can choose more than one horse in each race and bet with smaller stakes. To calculate the number of bets you need to multiply together the number of horses you select in each race.

eg. race 1 (3 horses), race 2 (1), race 3 (2), race 4 (3), race 5 (2) race 6 (1) number of bets = 3 x 1 x 2 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 36

You can see that the number of bets gets very big very quickly if you include several horses in each race.

You should also note that as this is a tote bet, the returns depend critically on how many people get it right. If all the favourites are placed, returns are likely to be small, and there is nothing you can do about this. You therefore can’t treat it like a multiple and lay individual horses in the place markets, as you have no idea what you can afford to lose if the horses are placed.

As this offer is bet £20 for a £10 refund, it is possible to lose £10. The placepot may sound easy, but it can be surprisingly difficult to get it right. Good luck if you decide to have a go.

These offers can take 2 forms at Betfair – either a refund of some or all of your stake if you place one of these bets, or a refund of only one bet loses. Personally, because of the risk of a low payout if all the favourites are placed, I would not attempt to lay these bets at all. Others may disagree with me, but you can get yourself in quite a tangle laying multiples individually, which you would have to do with these (see multiples, below). I would therefore only be tempted by one of these if it was a full cash refund, and I would treat it as a straight punt for a bit of fun.

Howard Hutchinson

The way to tackle this one may be to select 1 runner per race and lay each runner until you hit a loser.

Each lay will need to recover previous lost stakes.

As we will be layimng in the Place Only market of horse races, the odds could be quite short if we select well fancied runners.

This rough spreadsheet shows the stakes required for each lay :- Refund_on_Acummulator

The Initial stake input at cell B2 should be the same size as your Bet in the Place Pot.

If our runner is unplaced, we have a successful lay that recovers our stake that we bet in the Place Pot.

We will have commission to pay on that lay.

If we can hit a loser before our commission reaches the level of our Refunded £10, then our profit is £10 less the commission paid on our successful lay.

Once we hit one unplaced horse, that is the end of the whole trade.

The Initial stake input at cell C2 should be the same size as your Bet in the Place Pot.

If we hit a placed horse, we need to input the lay odds of our lay on the placed horse, and then lay in the next race with a lay big enough to recover our liabilities from all previous lays.

We will have bet in the Place Pot for a refund, and layed in the Place Only market to recover our Bet Stake.

Note once again that I have not tested this with my cash.

Hope that’s ok, and good luck if you decide to have a go at this.

You could of course set the stake at C2 bigger than your bet and then you would make a bigger profit.

For this to lose, commission at 5% would need to be paid on only £200 worth of lays to hit £10.

It’s not for me as it is chasing losses – – – not my idea of a good trade.

Howard.

clickclark

i’ve been playing with the placepot offers since they started in fact they are my favourite betfair offer. the first one i simply used as a value bet and luckily it won so i had the confidence and the money to experiment. the method (certainly not a system) has evolved as i have gone along trying to make it alittle less risky. there is nothing risk free about this its a pure gamble. my first attempts were to pick two or three horses in each race (depending on how unsure i was on picking the right one) keeping my fingers crossed for the first 4 races and then laying them off for the final two. my worry has been that as its a pool bet i have no idea how much i would win so if i started laying the horses from the first race i might end up losing more than i win. what i tried today was pick two horses in the first 5 races and the favourite in the last.

this led to a bet of 40p a line costing £12.80.

as i am getting £5 back i’m set to lose £7.80.

the next step is to lay the first 2 horses in the first race in the place market for £2 each.

this means i’m set to lose £3.80 if i bomb in the first race.

as long as one of the horses gets into the frame i continue laying the 2 horses in each race. the stakes i use will have to depend on what has happened in the previous races, prices of the horses and my risk aversion.

now i can see lots of problems, if both horses win in each race the liability will shoot up, but if they all win you have 32 winning lines which should cover that. and you have to work out as you go how much you want to risk/stake.

there is also the small problem of picking the right horse. i tend to pick the favourite and one other. i’m no expert on form so i use amixture of selection methods, folllow the money, use the bet72 arbfinder if there is a horse which is a lower price on the exchanges it maybe that a lot of people think it can win. it may also just be a run started by traders.

look for big differnce in prices on betfair. if 2 or 3 horses are around 2 to 4 and the rest are 12 and 14 just pick a couple of the lower ones.

see if any tipsters are going for a particular horse read the spotlight or form remarks use your own judgement or pick the grey.

todays effort went like this:

wolverhampton

race one: bright sparky 1.6, our kes 3.3. laid both for £2. lost £1.20 on sparky and won £2 on our kes. net +£0.80

race two:flaxen lake 2.7, lewyn 2.00. laid both for £2 lost £2 on lewyn won £2 on flaxen lake net +£0.80

race three:sotik star 1.5, straight face 2.1. laid both for £2 lost £2.20 on straight face won £2 on sotik net +0.60

race four : ancient times 1.31 laid £4, heading to first 1.15 laid £5 both horses lost i won £9

the placepot has now lost so no more bets. sad really all three horses in the next races were placed.

after commision i ended up £1.80 in profit.

i increased the stake on the the last race because the prices were so low i would only be £2 down if both of them won.

thats my ramble over it may give someone an idea or two, any suggestions that don’t involve me doing embarassing acts welcome.

Tote USA

Occasionally for big events like the Breeders Cup, Betfair send out email offers for Tote USA. Finding out how to place these is not obvious.

To find Tote USA on Betfair go to Horse Racing >USA in the menu and click on Tote USA at the bottom of the list. Select the meeting you are looking for. Then you can choose from a multitude of mind-bogglingly complicated bets such as pick 6, exacta, trifecta, superfecta, quinella… or you can choose the slightly more familiar win/place/show. I suggest, because it is easy, that you select a simple win bet. Each way is difficult since the us tote does this weird win, place & show bet, which is 3 bets, one to win, one to be 1st or 2nd and one to be 1st, 2nd or 3rd, and it costs 3 times the unit stake.

When you have chosen your horse enter the amount of your bet (eg $10) in the stake box, which is in $ and it will tell you how much this is in £. There are some guide odds, but these are NOT what you will get paid at. You have no way of knowing what odds will be paid, so it is difficult to lock in a profit, so it is probably best to treat this as a straight punt.

Multiples

Risk category D or E

Placing a multiple at Betfair:

Go to the Betfair multiples section and choose the sport and events you want to bet on. Enter each selection into the multiples slip. Betfair will then calculate the odds for the multiple for you.

Note that horse racing multiples are only available at SP

Laying multiples individually

This needs to be done with Betfair offers because the offer won’t apply if you back and lay the same multiple using the multiples section. You MUST choose events which do not overlap as you need to know the result of each leg in order to decide what to do with the next one. Choose the shortest prices possible otherwise your liabilities will start to get very big if all the selections win, and longer prices are likely to be longer to lay than to back at SP, in general.

Selection 1: Lay the full amount of your multiple stake to cover stake and commission.

If selection 1 loses – stop

If selection 1 wins proceed to selection 2.

Selection 2: Lay enough to win back your stake + commission + what you lost from the liability on selection 1.

Selection 2 loses – stop.

Selection 2 wins – repeat for selection 3, covering the lost liability on selections 1 and 2.

Etc.

Cash Refund

Howard Hutchinson

I’ve been working on a spreadsheet for trading the Doubles that Betfair put up each week.

Examlpes have been – – Place a multiple and Betfair will give you a free tenner in cash.

This is what I have come up with if we bet a double to get the free tenner :- Bet the first horse, equalizing our lay stake to include the free £10. When we do that, we are underlaying, so our lay liiabilities are a fair bit less than any bet winnings.

If we hit a loser, we have winnings, end of trade.

If we hit a winner, we have £10 times the S.P. bet odds riding onto our 2nd runner.

Our potential Net winnings are that amount x the S.P of the 2nd runner, less the liabilities from our first runner, less our original £10 bet stake.

We can now lay the 2nd runner to a much bigger £££ amount, again equalizing our lay stake for an equal win or lose profit.

From what I have so far, the potential win or lose profit on this 2nd runner is quite a bit bigger than from the first runner.

It may be best to try to hit 2 winners, or at least hit a winner with our first runner, and then we should be able to increase our profit when we lay the 2nd runner to some amount above £10.

The spreadsheet I have needs the S.P. odds and liability inputting into the 2nd sheet for trading the 2nd runner.

I hit a winning double last week and made just over £20, after laying both horses.

Getting the bet odds for the sheet involves a bit of guesswork as the S.P. is rather unpredictable.

I open 2 Internet windows to get my bet odds somewhere near for inputting into the spreadsheet, one window for the normal Win market so that I can place my lay, and I have a 2nd window open in the Multiples market so that I can get the approximate Bet odds.

If you’d like to test this sheet, e-mail me [email protected]

Named loser

Minimum doubles

Darren

£10 Cashback if our favourite loses!

Flow Chart lines up in the 14.20 at Southwell today, but if he loses the race, you could get £10 cashback!

Place a Racing Multiples bet with a minimum of two selections and a minimum stake of £10, that includes Flow Chart before 14:15 GMT today.

If Flow Chart loses the race, you’ll get a tenner back.

Simple as that! But don’t forget to opt–in!

Terms and conditions apply – click here for details.

“Am I right in thinking that if you do a £10 double with Flow Chart as your first selection, then if he loses you get your £10 back, but if he wins then you can lay off the second horse for a guaranteed profit?”

Yes exactly that makes it risk free.

If you like you could underlay Flow Chart, say £4 or £5 that way you will make a profit whatever as if it loses you win the straight LAY plus get the tenner back.

Howard Hutchinson

This is cash refund of £10 Use the sheet that I uploaded earlier this week. Refund_Cash

Bet and lay Flow Chart for £10 with a refund amount of £10. If that wins, do the same again on your 2nd hoss, using the FULL £££ amount from your S.P. winnings (including your returned bet stake of £10) as the bet stake, and once again a free £10 entered into the sheet.

If Flow Chart wins, you will win on both trades. If Flow Chart gets beaten, you will win once as there is no need to hedge the 2nd hoss.

If Flow Chart wins, there is no refund, but we have layed at less than the win return so we have profit. THEN, just a straight lay of your 2nd hoss for minimum loss is what is required. Apologies for the error and good luck,

Howard.

The Flow Chart offer was fairly simple, because you only had to place a double. Betfair quickly realised this and changed the offer to minimum trebles.

Minimum Trebles

*Place a Racing Multiples bet with a minimum of three selections and a minimum stake of £10, that includes Alexandros before 17:35 GMT today.

If Alexandros loses the race, you’ll get a tenner back.

Simple as that! But don’t forget to opt–in!

You can still do this, using the named horse as the first bet, but it is harder if he wins as you then have to lay off the remaining two selections while ensuring your liability stays below what you will win if all 3 horses win. There is a worked example of this in this post.

Multiples offers like this but with only half the stake returned as cashback become seriously unattractive unless you are thinking of gambling.

There is a spreadsheet by Howard Hutchinson for these offers and an explanation of it on this page.

Cashback if one leg lets you down

*Place a Racing Multiples bet with a minimum stake of £10 on a line of three or more selections (i.e. treble, fourfold, fivefold etc.) on Thursday’s races.

If only one horse lets you down in that bet, we’ll give you a tenner back!

It really is as simple as that! But don’t forget to opt–in!

Obviously you would choose a treble here as the smallest possible number of selections. You are working with SP and no guaranteed refund, so you must lay the first horse fully in case it loses but is not the only loser. If this horse loses, stop – you will either make no profit or loss, or get a refund. If the first horse wins, you need to lay the 2nd horse to cover what you lost on the lay on the first horse, because you will not get any winnings from the multiple unless all 3 win. If the first 2 win you can underlay the last horse a bit because you will get some money back if you have just the one loser. You can check roughly what you will get back should all 3 win by checking the SPs on the first 2 winners. http://www.sportinglife.com/racing/r…/settlers.html is a fast results page where results and SPs appear fairly quickly. I would not recommend doing these offers unless you fully understand the principles involved.

* Stake a minimum of £10 on a match odds fivefold from any football matches taking place between Monday 1st and Wednesday 3rd February 2010. * If you suffer the frustration of only one of your selections letting you down, we’ll give you your stake back (up to a maximum of £25).

By the time you get to fivefolds things start getting really tricky, and I wouldn’t advise attempting to lay this sort of bet. You might decide to do a 5 fold on 5 very short priced football teams in the hope that all would win or only one would lose for a refund, but that would definitely not be risk free. Very short priced favourites do lose quite often.

Offers of this type which do not offer a full refund (eg bet £10 for a £5 refund if one leg loses) are really not worth trying in my opinion.

Andy Gray multiples

Darren

Andy Gray’s Multiples on this weekend.

Will look at 3 low odds options at least, perhaps let the first 2 ride if they come in then lay the others as we go. Will be picking games starting at different times too or it is possible to BACK HOME and DRAW as one selection, brings the odds down a tad but can give you 3 nailed on selections so you can hopefully have those 3 in the bag and just lay the 4th selection in the regular market to lock in a profit. So if I get the first 3 in, they just look to lay the draw in the Chelsea / Arsenal game tomorrow.

Use Betfair multiples to place this bet, gives you the odds that you will get on the multiple.

This particular offer was for a full refund – more usually its only half and may therefore not be worth bothering with.