Sky Bet Offer – 1.20 Cheltenham (New Years Day)

There’s a huge day of racing in store at Cheltenham on New Years Day and Sky Bet are getting involved with another of their First Race Specials! Place a bet on the 1.20 at Cheltenham on Friday and if it loses, Sky Bet will refund us as a free bet up to a maximum of £25.00. Translated into matched betting terms, this gives us a guaranteed profit of around £15.50 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 it should be done.

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. 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 work out our lay stake by entering our odds into my matched betting calculator…

Back Bet (Bookie)

%

Lay Bet (Betting Exchange)

%

Min £
Max £
Lay stake required: £
Bookie
Exchange
Cashback
Total
If back (bookie) bet wins
£
£
£
= £
If lay (exchange) bet wins
£
£
£
= £
Total profit: £

Optimal Underlay

Lay stake required: £
Exchange liability: £

If back (bookie) bet wins: £
If lay (exchange) bet wins: £

Optimal Overlay

Lay stake required: £
Exchange liability: £

If back (bookie) bet wins: £
If lay (exchange) bet wins: £

As you can see, the calculator tells us that our lay stake should be £20.99…

skybet

Place £25.00 on Blaklion @ 7.50 = Potential profit of £162.50

smarkets white

Lay £20.99 on Blaklion @ 8.00 = Potential liability of £146.93

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

Blaklion wins +£162.50 – £146.93 = £15.57 profit
Blaklion doesn’t win -£25.00 + £20.57 + £20.00 (extract 80% from our £25.00 free bet) = £15.57 profit

So regardless of the result of the race and with some good odds, we should make a guaranteed profit of around £15.50 on this Sky Bet offer!

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 Le Mercurey at back odds of 15.00 and lay odds of 16.50, meaning I made a profit of £16.11 on this offer. *

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Matt Kirman - Matched Betting Blogger

Matt KirmanMatched 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.