Refund if 2nd to SP favourite
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Hi everyone. I was reading the strategy on matchedbettingblog regarding these types of offers and the author only really recommends the standard “refund if selection finishes 2nd”, but I am a premium member on oddsmonkey and looking through their racing matcher each day the best offers only seem to be “refund if horse finishes 2nd to SP favorite”. Now being new to matched betting I am assuming that SP favorite is just the horse with the shortest odds (please correct me if I’m wrong).
So are these offers the best I can hope for or are there still offers where you get refund purely for finishing 2nd?Cheers
+1July 10, 2017 at 3:50 pm
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Only selected races in Big meets or Saturdays have ‘just 2nd’, the rest is 2nd to SP crap which is only good if the Fav horse is 1.5<
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It’s probably the best you can hope for. In this case you are hoping for either the ideal scenario where you have a race with say 5 horses, one very short odds on fav and one okay horse and the rest extremely long odds. Then it’s a very good chance to hit the refund.
Either that or you might get a cheap or small arb on one of the horses and then may just be worth it if only risking pennies.
Your basically betting on the straight forecast 1-2. So you want sp fav to win and your selection to be second. You risk your qualifying loss and you stand to win a free bet worth whatever. So this gives enough to calculate the effective odds. You can double check the effective odds against the bookie odds for the forecast which bet365 will usually have a good estimate. Make sure you’re getting good effective odds.
I also used to have a spreadsheet to estimate prob of hitting free bet using the odds for favourite and the odds w/o for second fav. So if fav is evens then about 50% he will win. If odds of our horse is 4/1 and odds w/o fav of our horse is 2/1 then 20% chance he wins and about 33% he will be beat the rest. That leaves 13% chance he is second to SP fav (because if he wins w/o then only either he has won the race or he is second to the sp fav, these are mutually exclusive and we know 20% chance he won so subtraction gives the rest). Well it gives an idea that if you are taking a 2.50 QL in this case your probably taking an over all loss.
It’s just a way I had of saying oh well this looks like a good 2nd to sp option, but having some hard and fast numbers of knowing when for sure to strike. It helps to answer the questions like how short should the odds on fav be, how strong should our horse be in relation to the rest, what is acceptable QL.
Some horse you would pay £5 QL and still have positive expectation. Some horses you wouldn’t even bother for pennies as it might be too unlikely.
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The other thing to watch out is that if the two top horses are waaaaaay ahead of the rest in the market it can be tempting. But often they can switch fav and if yours is SP fav when they go off then there is no chance of refund. So be careful betting too early in that case wait till the bookies sort themselves out and become confident in which horse is actually fav.
+0Worth checking the terms regarding Each way bets too. For example at stars if you bet 25ew you will get 25 freebie if 2nd to sp. Whereas some either make up the shortfall of your return or nothing at all if you’be returned more than your bet.
Sometimes you can reduce your QLs or turn them into profits especially in the bad ew races. Think it was the first race at Ayr yday where the clear 2nd fave was 7.0/11, hefty QL. The place though was 2.5/1.5. Turning it into a decent QP.
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Don’t turn your nose up at these, I do quite well off of them and I know a few mates do too. It’s all about choosing the right races and getting cheap qualifying losses. In the past week alone I’ve had about 200 in FBs from these and haven’t had to do a crazy amount of races to hit them either.
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