Why bother looking for horse racing tips today, when you can do a bit of matched betting and make low-risk profits? Sky Bet are back with another First Race Special on Friday’s horse racing. If the favourite wins the 1.35 at Newmarket race course, 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 £17.09 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 walkthrough guide on how it should be done.
It’s entirely up to which horse you place your qualifying bet on as long as it’s not the favourite at the start of the race. It therefore makes sense that we go for a horse with long odds. This ensures that if the favourite wins, we will automatically be eligible for a free bet refund as our qualifying bet will have lost. At the time of writing, the lay odds aren’t great 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 Field of Vision @ 9.00 = Potential profit of £200.00
Lay £22.55 on Field of Vision @ 10.00 = Potential liability of £202.91
Let’s have a look at our potential profit/loss for the possible outcomes…
| Field of Vision wins | +£200.00 – £202.91 = £2.91 loss |
| The favourite wins | -£25.00 + £22.09 + £20.00 (extract 80% from our £25.00 free bet) = £17.09 profit |
| Neither wins | -£25.00 + £22.09 = £2.91 loss |
So we will make a nice profit of £17.09 if the favourite wins and we stand to lose £2.91 on any other outcome. A £2.91 risk to make £17.09 profit gives us effective odds of 6.87, so the fact that the current favourite is priced at 1.80 to win, makes this a very profitable offer in the long run.
If you don’t want to risk losing the £2.91 in the event that the favourite doesn’t win, you can simply lay £2.97 on the favourite at Smarkets. This means you would make a little less profit if the favourite does win but at least you’ve covered the small potential loss if it doesn’t.
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 Kurland at back odds of 15.00 and lay odds of 18.50. The favourite, Quiet Reflection, won the race meaning I made an overall profit of £14.89 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.