Ladbrokes Cheltenham Offer – Money Back if the Favourite Wins

The Cheltenham Festival 2016 kicks off on Tuesday and you don’t want to miss this Ladbrokes offer! Simply place a bet on the 1.30 at Cheltenham each day and if our horse loses to the SP (starting price) favourite, Ladbrokes will refund our stake as a free bet up to a maximum of £25.00. Translated into matched betting terms, this gives us a potential profit of around £72.00 and here’s how…

Qualifying Bet:

If you’re unsure about how to place qualifying bets, check out my Qualifying Bet Strategy page for a walk-through guide on how it should be done.

This offer is available on the following races…

I’ll update this post each day with an example for the respective eligible race…

Day 4: Triumph Hurdle (13:30 Friday 18th March 2016)

It’s entirely up to you which horse you place your qualifying bet on, as long as it’s not the favourite at the start of the race. It’s always a good idea to wait until nearer the start of the race before placing our qualifying bet in order to ensure that we are not selecting a horse that is likely to start the race as favourite.

Having looked at the odds available, I’ve opted to place my qualifying bet on Let’s Dance.

I like to place my exchange lay bets with Smarkets as they have great liquidity in the run up to races, the site is really easy to use and they only charge 2% commission in comparison to the 5% charged by other betting exchanges.

We can calculate our lay stakes using my matched betting calculator…

As you can see, the calculator tells us that our lay stake should be £23.47…

Let’s have a look at our potential profit/loss for the possible outcomes…

So, we will make a nice profit of £18.00 if the favourite wins and we stand to lose £2.00 on any other outcome. Risking £2.00 to make £18.00 profit gives us effective odds of 10.00, so the fact that current favourite, Zubayr, is priced at 5.50 to win, makes this a profitable offer in the long run.

If we apply the same strategy to the first race on all four days of the Cheltenham Festival 2016, we stand to make a potential profit of around £72.00 on this Ladbrokes Cheltenham offer!

If you’re unsure how to extract 80% of a £25.00 free bet, check out my Free Bet Strategy page for a walk-through guide on how it should be done.

Note: It is possible to place an extra lay bet on the favourite, in order to lock in a guaranteed profit, but unless the favourite has really low lay odds of around evens, I prefer to let it run as shown above.

I’ll update the bottom of this post with my 4 selections at the end of the Festival.

* I actually placed the following qualifying bets…

…The favourite won the 13:30 on Thursday and Friday, meaning I received £50.00 (2 x £25.00) in free bets, from which I was able to extract £40.00 cash. Taking into account my total qualifying loss of £6.68, I made an overall profit of £33.32 on this Ladbrokes offer. *