There’s a big day of horse racing at Cheltenham today and Sky Bet are getting involved with another of their First Race Specials! Simply place a bet on the 1.25 at Cheltenham and if it loses, Sky Bet will refund our stake as a free bet, up to a maximum of £20.00. Translated into matched betting terms, this gives us a guaranteed profit of £12.00+ 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.
Losing stakes are refunded as a free bet, so this is effectively a risk-free offer. We therefore need to select a horse with long odds. At the time of writing, the lay odds are pretty poor so I’ll use fictional odds in the following example and I’ll update the bottom of the post with my actual selection after the race.
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 work out our lay stake by using the ‘Risk-Free Bet’ setting on my matched betting calculator. We can enter £16.00 as our ‘Cashback’ figure as this is the amount we can expect to extract (80%) from our £20.00 free bet refund, should our horse lose…
As you can see, the calculator tells us that our lay stake should be £16.80…
Place £20.00 on O O Seven @ 7.00 = Potential profit of £120.00
Lay £16.80 on O O Seven @ 7.40 = Potential liability of £107.53
Let’s have a look at our potential profit/loss for the possible outcomes…
| O O Seven wins | + £120.00 – £107.53 = £12.47 profit |
| O O Seven doesn’t win | – £20.00 + £16.47 + £16.00 (extract 80% from our £20.00 free bet) = £12.47 profit |
So, regardless of the result of the race and with some good odds, we should make a guaranteed profit of £12.00+ on this Sky Bet offer!
If our selection loses, our free bet will be credited within 24 hours of the race ending and will be valid for 3 days.
If you’re unsure how to extract 80% of our £20.00 free bet, check out my Free Bet Strategy page for a walk-through guide on how it should be done.
* I actually placed my qualifying bet on Whisper at back odds of 3.50 and lay odds of 3.50. Whisper won the race at a starting price (SP) of 3.75, meaning I made a profit of £16.21 on this Sky Bet offer. *
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Matt Kirman – Matched Betting Blogger
Since 2014, I’ve blogged over £85,000 worth of profit, and made it my mission to make matched betting accessible to everyone.