Help needed with free bet

Profit from the bookie is (£25 x 4.00) – £25 = £75. You’ve deducted the stake twice in your calculations.

You should be able to get better extraction from your free bet than 66% you’ve gotten here. The free bet strategy guide is quite good. I think you want higher odds than 4ish but then it does mean you need more in your exchange account.

You’re still deducting your stake twice.
Odds of 4.00 are 3/1 with stake not returned. So winnings are either 4.00 x stake less stake (4.00 x 25) – 25 = £75 winnings. Or you can consider winnings the 3 part of the 3/1 or 4.00 less 1.00. Either way, you are winning 3 times your stake which is £75. And with a normal bet you’d get your stake back which would give £100. So the 4.00 breaks down to 3.00 winnings and 1.00 stake. I hope that kind of makes sense.

Either work in fractional OR decimal odds, not both. You will save yourself a lot of headaches trying to work out what 11/4 is in a split second before a race goes off by sticking to decimal in my experience.

Also I can only echo the comments above about getting FAR more out of our free bets. If you have the exchange float for it then you want to target 10/1 + kind of odds. I frequently go as high as 34-40/1 to get full value out of free bets. I appreciate that is not possible if you’re just getting started though. Also don’t rush to use your free bets and accept shitty odds as a result. Obviously you need to use them before they expire – you should ALWAYS know when that is (God knows how many I have let lapse!) but try to be selective and aware of what events are coming up during the time you have to use them.

Yep, it’s not always easy, but when I say take 34-40/1 odds I obviously only mean when the corresponding lay odds are available, not in the hope of getting matched 🙂

The first rule of match betting is always back first, but the second is only back when you can get the lay odds you want there and then, with enough liquidity to make sure you won’t get stung by someone taking the small amount available at your desired lay price. [The third rule, btw, in the absence of any knowledge of the market, is to cut your losses if you do get stung rather than losing the whole back stake 🙂 ]

There are several reasons why you might opt not to lay immediately, which you can justify to yourself however you like provided you have some rationale behind your reasoning (e.g. there is a price boost which artificially/temporarily increased the lay price), but I would stick to rules 1 and 2 (and 3!) above for now.

Try to stick to markets with high liquidity – big Saturday races / footy games for example, and if you have the time then study the market, even for a few minutes to see which way the prices have been moving and how much money is coming and going on each horse/team…

You don’t need oddsmatchers either, you will quickly become proficient in finding good matches yourself. If you really don’t want to do it though, then just pay the £15 or whatever it is for Oddsmonkey Pro or whatever they have labelled it now. Trouble with that is you will probably end up betting on the same things as all the other MBers out there, so you become more easily identifiable.

Sorry, that turned into a long, rambling post, but I hope some of it helps.