Extra Place Offers

Extra place offers are a must if you’re serious about maximising your matched betting profits.

Bookmakers will often pay an extra place on select events such as big horse races or golf tournaments. This gives us an opportunity to risk a small amount for big returns.

Extra place offers are available to all customers, even those who have been gubbed, so it’s a great way of boosting your profits each day.

What is an extra place offer?

Before reading this guide, it’s important that you have an understanding of how each way bets work. If you’re unfamiliar with each way bets, please see the ‘Each way betting explained’ section at the beginning of my Each Way Arbing guide.

I’m going to focus on horse racing as that’s by far the most popular type of extra place offer. As mentioned above though, keep an eye out for extra place offers on other sporting events, particularly big golf tournaments.

Generally speaking, all bookmakers tend to pay the same amount of places, depending on the amount of runners and the type of race as follows…

The ‘Place’ market at the betting exchange usually matches the standard amount of places paid by the bookmaker, so when a bookmaker offers to pay more places than the betting exchange, it gives us an opportunity.

We can simply place our each way bet at the bookmaker and then lay the individual ‘Win’ and ‘Place’ parts at the betting exchange.

Let’s say the bookmaker is paying 4 places and the exchange market is for 3 places. If our selection finishes in exactly 4th place, we’ll win the place part of our each way bet at the bookmaker (because our selection finished in the top 4). We’ll also win our place lay bet at the betting exchange (because our horse didn’t place in the top 3).

As you can see, it’s the place part of our bets that give us an edge and the potential to make some rather tidy profits.

Don’t worry if that doesn’t quite make sense at this point, things will become clearer as we work through an example.

Picking the right horse

You can find a complete list of eligible races on my extra place offers page, which is updated daily. The bookmakers tend to go big on Saturdays and during the big festivals, but there are usually a handful of extra place races each day.

You’ll also find them advertised on the bookmaker’s homepage and through their social media channels.

Obviously, there’s no way of knowing which horse is going to finish in that exact extra place. The strategy, therefore, is to find horses that give us a small qualifying loss and big potential returns.

Allow me to introduce you to the Extra Place Matcher, a fantastic tool offered by OddsMonkey…

The Extra Place Matcher trawls the latest odds and highlights any profitable opportunities in an instant. Just select one of the extra place races from the drop-down menu at the top and away you go.

As you can see from the above screenshot, the Matcher has highlighted a couple of huge potential profits for minimal qualifying losses.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with manually searching for selections, however, the Extra Place Matcher tool really does save you a lot of legwork.

How to profit from an extra place offer

I’m now going to walk you through an example of a bet I placed on the 17:20 at Newmarket on Saturday 30th September 2017. Betfred were paying 5 places instead of 4, with the place part being paid at 1/5 odds.

Always be aware of the minimum amount of runners required for the bookmaker to pay the extra place(s). For this particular race, a minimum of 16 runners were required, otherwise standard each way terms would apply.

There were 18 horses running and having looked at the Extra Place Matcher search results above, I opted to place my bet on Qeyaadah…

Once you’ve done a couple of extra place offers, you’ll be able to spot the profitable horses at a glance.

As explained in my Each Way Arbing guide, to work out the bookmaker place odds, we just divide the fractional win odds of 14/1 by 5, which gives us 2.8/1. Calculating the place odds from a decimal is almost the same, we just need to subtract 1.00 at the start (to account for the stake) and then add it back on at the end…

So, as you can see, I was getting really tight odds on both the win (15.00 & 15.00) and place (3.80 & 3.85) parts of the bet, which made for a profitable opportunity.

To work out our ‘Win’ and ‘Place’ lay stakes we just need to complete the fields on my each way calculator using the ‘Extra Place’ setting…

As you can see, the calculator tells us that we need to lay £10.03 on Qeyaadah ‘To Win’…

…and then lay £10.00 on Qeyaadah ‘To Place’…

You’ll find a detailed breakdown of our potential profit figures at the bottom of the each way calculator…

As you can see, it shows us the profit or loss of all four parts of our matched bet. We have the win and place parts of our each way bet at the bookmaker and then the win and place lay bets at the exchange. The ‘Win’ back and lay bets will always cancel each other out but our ‘Place’ back and lay bets both win if our horse finishes in the extra place.

So, I stood to make a profit of £37.02 if Qeyaadah finished exactly 5th, otherwise I’d lose a maximum of £0.98. Risking £0.98 to make a potential profit of £37.02, gave me effective odds of 38.78, which I’m sure you’ll agree made it a profitable bet in the long run.

I would always recommend working out your effective odds. You can then use them to gauge whether or not it’s worth placing the bet.

It’s worth noting that the above example was based on an each way stake of £10.00. If we increase our stake, we stand to make an even bigger profit, but it’s important that we stake an amount we’re comfortable with.

Fond memories

Bet365 traditionally run a fantastic money back offer on the Grand National. Just place your bets on the Grand National and bet365 will give us half of our stake back in cash, up to a maximum of £125.00. They usually offer to pay 5 places instead of the standard 4 places.

By using the extra place strategy above, we’re usually able to make a guaranteed profit of £75.00+ regardless of the outcome, with an outside chance of making £400.00+ profit if our selected horse finishes exactly 5th.

In 2015, the starting favourite, Shutthefrontdoor finished in 5th place. This was a result that would have disappointed many a punter, but it was the perfect scenario for us matched bettors who managed to bag £419.04 profit!

Final thoughts

Hopefully, you’ll now feel confident enough to give extra place offers a go. You won’t be able to find suitable odds every time, but it’s always well worth having a look.

More often than not, you’ll incur a small loss, but every time you hit a winner, it’ll be a huge boost to your matched betting profits!

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• Logically structured to tackle strategies and offers as you’re ready for them.
• Bag profits every step of the way. About £600 from welcome offers, and another £500 monthly.
• Make £15 from your very first offer.

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