The Cheltenham Festival 2016 gets underway on Tuesday and Sky Bet are running a First Race Special every single day! Simply place a bet on the 1.30 at Cheltenham each day and if it loses, Sky Bet will refund our stake as a free bet up to a maximum of £25.00. Translated into matched betting terms, this gives us a guaranteed minimum profit of around £64.00 and here’s how…
Qualifying Bets:
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.
This offer is available on the following races…
| Race | Time | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Supreme Novices’ Hurdle | 13:30 | Tuesday 15th March 2016 |
| Neptune Novices Hurdle | 13:30 | Wednesday 16th March 2016 |
| JLT Novices Chase | 13:30 | Thursday 17th March 2016 |
| Triumph Hurdle | 13:30 | Friday 18th March 2016 |
I’ll update this post each day with an example for the respective eligible race…
Day 4: Triumph Hurdle (13:30 Friday 18th March 2016)
As we get a free bet refund if our qualifying bet loses, this is effectively a risk-free offer and so we need to select a horse with long odds. Having looked at the odds available, I’ve opted to place my qualifying bet on Let’s Dance.
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 £20.00 as our Cashback amount as we would expect to extract 80% of a £25.00 free bet refund as cash…
As you can see, the calculator tells us that our lay stake should be £22.22…
Place £25.00 on Let’s Dance @ 15.00 = Potential profit of £350.00
Lay £22.22 on Let’s Dance @ 16.00 = Potential liability of £333.23
Let’s have a look at our potential profit/loss for the possible outcomes…
| Let’s Dance wins | + £350.00 – £333.23 = £16.77 profit |
| Let’s Dance doesn’t win | – £25.00 + £21.77 + £20.00 (extract 80% from our £25.00 free bet) = £16.77 profit |
So, regardless of the result of the race and with some good odds, we should make a guaranteed minimum profit of £16.00 each day. If we apply the same strategy to the first race on all four days of the Cheltenham Festival 2016, we should make an overall guaranteed minimum profit of £64.00 on this Sky Bet Cheltenham offer!
* I actually placed my qualifying bets as follows…
| Day | Race | Selection | Back Odds | Lay Odds | Profit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tuesday | 13:30 | Tombstone | 15.00 | 16.50 | £16.11 |
| Wednesday | 13:30 | Thomas Hobson | 26.00 | 27.00 | £17.88 |
| Thursday | 13:30 | L’Ami Serge | 10.00 | 10.50 | £16.51 |
| Friday | 13:30 | Let’s Dance | 15.00 | 16.00 | £16.77 |
…As you can see, I made an overall profit of £67.27 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.