The racing at Cheltenham continues on Saturday and Sky Bet have yet another First Race Special for us. If our horse wins the 12.40 at Cheltenham on Saturday, Sky Bet will match our winnings with a free bet! Translated into matched betting terms, this gives us a guaranteed profit of £6.30 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.
The maximum stake for this offer is £10.00 and we can’t place our qualifying bet on the unnamed favourite or unnamed second-favourite. The best way to do these offers is to select a horse with long odds. At the time of writing, the lay odds are poor so I’ll use fictional odds in the following example and then I’ll update the bottom of this post with my actual selection after the race.
We know that if our horse wins, our bet will be paid out in cash at normal odds with the double winnings paid as promo cash. Therefore, if we place £10.00 on Wolf of Windlesham at odds of 9.00, it will return £90.00 in cash and £80.00 in promo cash. The promo cash needs to rolled over once before we can withdraw it and we can use the ‘Free bet – Stake returned’ setting on the matched betting calculator. We should therefore be able to extract 95% of it as cash, which gives us total returns of £166.00 and effective odds of 16.60. We can enter these effective odds on the matched betting calculator to calculate our lay stake.
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.
Place £10.00 on a Wolf of Windlesham @ 9.00 = Potential profit of £80.00
Lay £16.63 on Wolf of Windlesham @ 10.00 = Potential liability of £149.70
Let’s have a look at our potential profit/loss for the possible outcomes…
| Wolf of Windlesham wins | +£80.00 – £149.70 + £76.00 (extract 95% from our £80.00 promo cash) = £6.30 profit |
| Wolf of Windlesham doesn’t win | -£10.00 + £16.30 = £6.30 profit |
So regardless of the result of the race, we will make a guaranteed profit of £6.30 on this Sky Bet offer!
* I actually placed my qualifying bet on Wolf of Windlesham at back odds of 11.00 and lay odds of 13.00. Wolf of Windlesham won the race and due to Sky Bet’s Best Odds Guarantee, I was paid out at the starting price odds of 13.00. This meant I received an extra £20.00 in cash winnings and an extra £20.00 in promo cash, from which I will extract 95% as cash, so £19.00. This gave me an overall profit £44.48 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.