Sky Bet Offer – 2.05 Ascot

The football may be back this weekend but don’t forget about this Sky Bet offer! If your horse finishes 2nd or 3rd in the 2.05 at Ascot race course, Sky Bet will refund all losing outright bets on that race as a free bet up to £25.00. Translated into matched betting terms, this gives us a potential profit of £18.04 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 walkthrough guide on how it should be done.

It’s entirely up to you which horse you go for, but it would make sense to select a horse with fairly short odds in the hope of a 2nd or 3rd placed finish. 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 this 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 calculate our lay stakes using the matched betting calculator.

skybet

Place £25.00 on Elbereth @ 6.00 = Potential profit of £125.00

smarkets white

Lay £23.51 on Elbereth @ 6.40 = Potential liability of £126.96

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

Elbereth wins £125.00 – £126.96 = £1.96 loss
Elbereth places 2nd or 3rd -£25.00 + £23.04 + £20.00 (extract 80% from our £25.00 free bet) = £18.04 profit
Elbereth places outside top 3 -£25.00 + £23.04 = £1.96 loss

So we will make a nice profit of £18.04 if Elbereth places 2nd or 3rd and we stand to lose £1.96 on any other outcome. A £1.96 risk to make £18.04 profit gives us effective odds of 10.20.  At the time of writing, Elbereth is odds of 6.00 to win and odds of 1.24 to place in the top 3.  This means that the odds of Elbereth placing 2nd or 3rd are currently 1.56, making this a very profitable offer in the long run.

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

* I actually placed my qualifying bet on Two Jabs, but he was declared a non-runner, meaning I broke even on this offer. *

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Matt Kirman - Matched Betting Blogger

Matt KirmanMatched Betting Blogger

Since 2014, I’ve blogged over £70,000 worth of profit, and made it my mission to make matched betting accessible to everyone.