Another Saturday, another First Race Special from Sky Bet, this time on the racing at Goodwood. If your horse finishes 2nd or 3rd in the 2.00 at Goodwood race course on Saturday, 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 £18.06 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 walk-through guide on how they 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.
Place £25.00 on Belvoir Bay @ 4.50 = Potential profit of £87.50
Lay £23.54 on Belvoir Bay @ 4.80 = Potential liability of £89.45
Let’s have a look at our potential profit/loss for the possible outcomes…
| Belvoir Bay wins | £87.50 – £89.45 = £1.95 loss |
| Belvoir Bay places 2nd or 3rd | -£25.00 + £23.06 + £20.00 (extract 80% from our £25.00 free bet) = £18.06 profit |
| Belvoir Bay places outside top 3 | -£25.00 + £23.06 = £1.95 loss |
So we will make a nice profit of £18.06 if Belvoir Bay places 2nd or 3rd and we stand to lose £1.95 on any other outcome. A £1.95 risk to make £18.06 profit gives us effective odds of 10.26. At the time of writing, Belvoir Bay is odds of 4.50 to win and odds of 1.55 to place in the top 3. This means that the current odds of Belvoir Bay finishing 2nd or 3rd are around 2.36, making this is 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 walk-through guide on how it should be done.
* I actually placed my qualifying bet on Belvoir Bay at back odds of 6.00 and lay odds of 7.00. Belvoir Bay was narrowly beaten into 4th, meaning I lost £3.94 on this offer. *
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Matt Kirman – Matched 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.