Maximising Free Bets and Loyalty Bonuses

Maximising the Value of a Free Bet

Most bookmakers hand out free-bets from time to time. Whether it is a “Welcome Bonus” or a regular “Loyalty Reward”, you’ll have no doubt seen and used them.

Are you using them efficiently though? By this we mean, are you maximising your opportunity to extract the full value from the reward you’ve been given by your bookmaker of choice? This article will explore how to best utilise these to your benefit.

Free Bet Stake Not Returned

Every bookmaker will apply a set of terms and conditions to their free bets. Most must be used within a week for instance, and some may be restricted in what you can spend them on. Almost without fail though, you will read the term “Free Bet Stake is not returned with any winnings”.

This means that if you stake your free £5 bet on a bet at even money, which goes on to win, you will return the profit, but not the value of the free bet. In this example, that’s £5 back in your account rather than £10. Understanding this part of the calculation and how to best extract the value from them is critical.

What is your free bet worth (theoretically)?

In this part we will make one basic assumption. Let’s assume that the bookmakers odds accurately reflect the chance of winning (we know in practice some margin will be added, but we’ll come to this later).

Using this assumption we can reason that a 1/100 “cert” will win 99% of the time. An even money coin flip will win 50% of the time for us, and a 9/1 long shot will win just 10% of the time. Now lets think about how that works on our “expected return on a free bet”.

Placing our free £5 on a 1/100 shot means we’ll nearly always be celebrating a positive return. 99% of the time in fact. The only issue here is that we’re almost certain to get 5p back. That’s not even half a Chomp Bar these days (they are 25p now – who knew???)

Opt for the even money shot instead and things get better immediately. We’ll now expect to return £5 if our bet wins, and that’s going to happen about 50% of the time. So our expected return, over the long run is now £2.50. Not bad, but its only half of the fiver we started with.

So what about the long-shot? Well get this one home and you’re returning 9 * £5. A total of £45. And its going to happen roughly 10% of the time. Place ten free bets at 9/1 and you’d expect, luck depending, to return on average £4.50.

You can see that as the odds get longer, the expected return alludes towards the full value of the free bet.

Margin Distribution

Bookmakers are typically a little more cautious on long-shots. They are harder to price up accurately in many situations, and given their implied margin % is small, its easy for them to price these up shorter than they should be. A 100/1 with a typical bookmaker is not going to win once in 100. Its more like half that, which immediately reduces the expected return above from £4.50 to nearer £2.25.

When a selection is shorter in the betting, the proportional over round (bookmaker margin) is lower in most cases. An even money shot for instance would certainly win more than once in four trials. It’s going to be fairly close to once in two – perhaps 45%. This means in the Even Money bet, while you might not get £2.50 it could be something like £2.25 again.

Where is the sweet spot?

The best place to wager your cash is typically around 4/1 – 7/1 range. A 4/1 shot will usually have something like a 17% chance of winning (on average). So you have a 17% chance of retuning £20. £20 * 0.17 = £3.40. A 7/1 shot will win something like 10% of the time – and return £35 when it does. £35 * 0.1 = £3.50.

Of course, betting at these odds still requires a couple of things. Firstly, since your odds are longer, you will need to have a few free bets over time for the numbers to average out. This works really well if you get regular loyalty free bets. It’s also important to make sure you’re betting at somewhere near top price, to ensure you aren’t accidently betting into a selection with oodles of margin already protecting the bookie.

Good luck with your next Free Bet and remember – T+Cs apply.