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Man of Mystery

I opened my Betfair account on 22nd April 2003. I was one of the first subscribers to Adam Todd's BetTrader and was a founding partner of JuiceStorm.com on 17th February 2007.

Latest posts by Man of Mystery (see all)

• The TopTrap Greyhound Profit And Loss Account On Betfair - March 17, 2022
• Betfair Best Execution – 11 Requested & Filled At 320 - January 16, 2022
• BTB System e-book - March 13, 2015

An example of this type of offer from Skybet:

Free Bet Offers!

Back the winner of the 2.00 Kempton and receive a free matched bet on the 5.00 Kempton.

Back the winner of the 5.30 Kempton and receive a free matched bet on any horse racing bet on Thursday.

The T&Cs link doesn’t work atm, but Sky’s free bets are SNR.

Update – phoned to ask about T&Cs:

min odds 3-1 (4.0) for qualifier

min stake £5, max stake £50

free bet is SNR.

The girl I spoke to didn’t know any more, but I would strongly advise attempting this on only one horse per race, as these offers often apply to first bet only.

Tackle this by overlaying the bet on the qualifying race. You need to go for the shortest possible odds, and the first bet needs to be an arb after the overlay. If the horse loses you will make the profit on the arb, but nothing more. If the horse wins you will pay out more at Betfair than you win at Skybet but you will have a SNR free bet to play with.

Choosing the overlay.

Technically you have a 100% free bet, ie if you bet £25 and win you get an extra £25, effectively adding 1.0 to the odds. But the free bet is SNR and it is on a particular race, so your options are going to be limited. Skybet have chosen races where most of the runners are at reasonably high odds so laying is expensive. I would therefore recommend going for the shortest possible odds (because laying high odds is expensive) and covering only about half of the free money with the overlay. This effectively means adding 0.5 to the back odds.

Example

Supposing I find a horse at Skybet at 5.0 and the lay odds are 5.2. I enter the back stake for this bet as 5.5:

Result this bet is then:

If the horse loses I win 36p and get no free bet.

If the horse wins I get paid at 5.0 at Sky so my back profit is £100, and I lose £112.14 at Betfair, but I have a £25 free bet.

Suppose I can then cash out my free bet at 7.5/8.5:

This wins me £18.27, so my overall profit on the deal is £6.13.

Play with the numbers on the spreadsheet and you will see that the higher the odds and the more profit you ask for from the qualifier, the lower the returns are from the offer as a whole, if you should win, and the bigger the risk of not being able to find odds that will return a profit at all.

As an additional strategy which could gain you a little more profit should your horse nearly but not quite win the first race, you could do as above then place a £5 lay in running at 1.5. If your horse wins this will cost you £2.50 of the profit, but if it nearly wins but not quite you will win an extra £5 less commission. If your horse runs badly your in running bet will be unmatched and you won’t lose anything on the original deal. (This strategy can be used for any arb which is big enough to give enough leeway to cover the additional loss should the horse win, and you can choose any odds you like – the shorter you choose the less you will pay if the horse wins, but the less likely you are to get matched and lose.)