Cheltenham – Day 2 Offers and Strategies

JDUBU. If you are short in the exchange you don’t have to put on the full £50, try less.

tony. I went for guaranteed of about £2! I don’t like the 4/1+ offer so always go to guarantee. By definition of the offer you are always unlikely to win the free bet.

just got 6.5/6.6 that was good timing!

Here you go Chris

Bet365 race offer

Most people like to take advantage ofBet365’s Channel 4/1 offer by backing and laying a horse for a small qualifying loss, hoping for the horse to win. However, I wanted to share the possibility of guaranteeing a profit (after all, this site is about matched betting). As usual, I like to start out with a highly theoretical approach before considering practical implications.
With the Channel 4/1 offer, you back a horse at odds of 5.0 or above and, if it wins, you receive a risk-free bet on the next eligible race. The second part of the offer, which is easy to overlook, is that if you win and place a risk-free bet on the following race, you can win another risk-free bet again (if it wins). Therefore, the theoretical approach is to take the offer as an infinite sum!
Firstly, it’s obviously optimal to find odds on a horse as close to 5.0 as possible – this maximises our chances of winning a free bet. Let’s suppose you have two races in a row with horses @ 5.0 on both Bet365 and the exchange (yes, I know, very unlikely but let’s start out theoretically). It’s important to note that your strategy actually doesn’t matter in the long-run, really. I assume 2% commission, as on Smarkets.
Approach 1)
We can play the offer somewhat naively and simply overlay the first leg. Back £50 on the horse @ 5.0 and lay £51.02 @ 5.0. If the horse wins, we lose £4.08 and get the £50 free bet. If the horse loses, we breakeven.
Approach 2)
Wait, hang on… Let’s guarantee a profit! Knowing that we’d have a £50 free bet should the horse win we can guarantee a profit; let’s assume 80% extraction. Back £50 on the horse @ 5.0 and lay £58.23 @ 5.0. If the horse wins, we’d lose £32.93 and get the £50 free bet (which we can turn into £40 on the next race). If the horse loses, we’d get £7.07. Regardless of outcome, we’ve just made £7.07!
Approach 3)
Let’s go one one step further… If the horse does indeed win, we not only get a £50 risk free bet, but we also get another chance at winning a free bet! The calculation becomes an infinite series. In a theoretical world, if you have an endless stream of races with horses which can be backed and layed @ 5.0, we can guarantee a higher profit than before. It turns out that we can guarantee £8.82 per race in this scenario.
Turning to a more practical side, I think the best strategy for the Channel 4/1 offer is to look at the day’s races and use a spreadsheet to calculate optimal stakes to (more or less) guarantee a profit regardless of outcomes. You can often guarantee £50 on a Saturday if you follow the correct approach.

WH sprinter sacre 6.5/6.6 for 15:30

If you’re punting free bets, my advice:

1. even though you’re not laying, still good idea to check the exchange to make sure you are getting value.

2. don’t go for short odds, since they are stake not returned it works out really bad long term value. eg free £10 @ evens you will win £10 back just short of half the time – so that’s an average of less than £5. BUT a free £10 @ 9/1 you will win back £90 about short of 10% of the time for an average of about less than £9.

3. Don’t punt on anything 20/1 or over. There is a favourite bias in gambling so the long shots get much much poorer odds and you can see that by checking the exchanges – 20/1 horses will probably only win once in 40 races so the 20/1 value from the bookie is really a bit of a lie.

I’m hoping Fred has something pretty special lined up for his 12:30. Yesterday’s double was spot on.

Also (non chelt related) he is currently boosting Barca/Bayern double to Evs, lay 1.88, £100 max