BetStars Offer – Barcelona v Real Madrid

Grab a £5.00 free bet on El Clasico with BetStars! Place a single bet of at least £10.00 on any pre-match market for Barcelona v Real Madrid and BetStars will give us a £5.00 free bet to be used in play on the same match. Translated into matched betting terms, this gives us a guaranteed profit of £3.49 and here’s how…

Qualifying Bet:

If you’re unfamiliar with qualifying bets, please see my Qualifying Bet Strategy page for a walk-through guide on how it should be done.

Qualifying bets must be placed pre-match at minimum odds of 1.50 (1/2) or greater to be eligible for the free bet. Having looked at the odds available, I’ve opted to place my qualifying bet on a Barcelona win.

I like to place my exchange lay bets with Smarkets as they have great liquidity, 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 £9.94…

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

So regardless of the result of match, we will lose £0.26 in qualifying for our £5.00 free in play bet.

Free Bet:

Our £5.00 free bet can only be used in play on Barcelona v Real Madrid.

It’s impossible to know what odds will be available until the matches have kicked off but by using straightforward matched betting, we should be able to extract 75% out of the £5.00 free bet as cash, so £3.75. If we take into account our qualifying loss of £0.26, this gives us a guaranteed profit of £3.49!

Extracting profit from our free bet can be a little tricky when betting in play. My advice is to wait until half-time to place your free bet and then lay them at Smarkets. This is simply because the odds don’t fluctuate as much as when the game is live. There’s nothing worse than placing a free bet on a market and then something happens in the game that changes the odds before you have chance to get your lay bet on! I tend to look at the correct score markets first and then if I can’t find anything suitable I move onto goal scorer markets.

If you can’t wait until half-time, you might want to look at placing it on 1-1, 2-1 or 3-1 whilst the score is at 0-0. By selecting a scoreline where both teams score, it reduces the risk of the odds fluctuating unfavourably.