Another big day of racing at Cheltenham and Sky Bet are at it again with yet another First Race Special! If our horse finishes 2nd in the 1.00 at Cheltenham today, 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 £18.21 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 place finish.Having looked at the odds available, I’ve opted to place my qualifying bet on Maputo.
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 stake using the following calculator…
As you can see, the calculator tells us that our lay stake should be £23.69…
Place £25.00 on Maputo @ 3.25 = Potential profit of £56.25
Lay £23.69 on Maputo @ 3.45 = Potential liability of £58.04
Let’s have a look at our potential profit/loss for the possible outcomes…
| Maputo wins | +£56.25 – £58.04 = £1.79 loss |
| Maputo places 2nd | -£25.00 + £23.21 + £20.00 (extract 80% from our £25.00 free bet) = £18.21 profit |
| Maputo places outside top 2 | -£25.00 + £23.21 = £1.79 loss |
So we will make a nice profit of £18.21 if Maputo places 2nd and we stand to lose £1.79 on any other outcome. Risking £1.79 to make £18.21 profit gives us effective odds of 11.17, which I’m sure you’ll agree, makes this a 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.
Many bookmakers run 2nd place refund offers and there’s big money to be made, so you might be interested to read my 2nd place refund strategy guide. Ladbrokes run these offers every weekend and Paddy Power are running this offer on every race of a selected meeting for every day in November 2015.
* I actually placed my qualifying bet on Altior at back odds of 2.875 and lay odds of 2.96. Although Altior won the race, I actually made a small profit due to Sky Bet’s best odds guarantee. Altior started the race with odds of 3.00, meaning I made an overall profit of £2.08 on this 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.