Cheltenham Festival 2019 Offer – Bethard

The Cheltenham Festival 2019 gets underway on Tuesday and you don’t want to miss this Bethard Double the Odds offer! Simply place a bet on the first race at Cheltenham each day and if our horse wins, Bethard will double our odds, based on a maximum stake of £20.00. Translated into matched betting terms, this gives us an overall guaranteed profit of £40.00 and here’s how…

Key Terms:

• Minimum stake of £5.00.
• Promotion applies to maximum stakes of £20.00.
• Qualifying bets must be placed before the first race each day (13:30).
• If our selection wins the race, Bethard will double our odds.
• Double odds winnings will be capped at a maximum of £50.00.

Qualifying Bets:

This offer is available on the first race each day as follows…

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.

We’ll need to select horses with short odds in order to maximise our profits.

There are two ways we can play this offer. Our first option is to just lay our bets normally and hope our horses win for some big profits. Our second option is to overlay our bets and lock in a guaranteed profit on each race.

The back and lay odds should tighten up on the day of each race. In the meantime though, I’ll use fictional lay odds for Defi Du Seuil (11/4) in the JLT Novices’ Chase to illustrate how this offer should be done each day. I’ll update the table at the bottom of the post with some actual selections after each race.

To work out our back stake, we just need to divide the capped maximum winnings of £50.00 by 2.75 (back odds minus 1.00, to account for our stake), which gives us £18.18. It’s best that we stick to round numbers when placing our qualifying bets, so we should stake £20.00 instead.

At the time of writing, laying our bet at Smarkets is likely to give us the biggest guaranteed profit.

We can calculate our overlay stake by entering our effective odds into my matched betting calculator…

£20.00 (stake) * 3.75 (odds) = £75.00 (initial returns)
£75.00 + £50.00 (capped double winnings) = £125.00 (total returns)
£125.00 / £20.00 (stake) = 6.25 (effective odds)

As you can see, the calculator tells us that our lay stake should be £31.41…

Outcomes:

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

So, regardless of the outcomes and with some good odds, we should make a guaranteed profit of around £10.00 each day. With four days of racing to look forward to, this gives us an overall guaranteed profit of £40.00 on this Bethard offer!

If eligible, our extra winnings will be credited by 16:00 on the day of the respective qualifying race.

I’ll update the following table with some actual selections after each race…

* The double winnings were not capped at £50.00 for the first two days of the festival, which led to higher profits. *