Disclaimer: Readers who have or have had issues with gambling addictions, matched betting may pose a problem for you. Please check out some of our other posts and if you need help with a gambling addiction, you can find help here.
Racing offers are the third type of matched betting we are going to discuss here. They can be quite lucrative however they are a bit more difficult to take advantage of because of the rapidness of the liquidity and odds changes leading up to the race. So most racing offers take the form of bet on a horse and if it runs 2nd or 3rd (sometimes 4th and 5th as well), you get a bonus bet up to the value of your stake. Generally bookies limit these offers to $50. The reason these can be lucrative is that there is a lot of races (especially on the weekend) that you can take advantage of. You can see an example of one of these offers from bet365 below.
How to take advantage of racing offers?
So exploiting these offers isn’t guaranteed profit like sign up offers and is more like multi offers. You make positive EV bets using these offers, which means over time you will come out ahead. We use the same technique of back/lay for the qualifying bets at Betfair to make a slight loss and hope our horse runs 2nd or 3rd. If they do then we get a bonus bet up to the value of our stake. You can then convert using the back/lay technique for about 70-80% retention of the bonus bet amount. If they don’t we have only made a small loss.
When selecting a horse for the qualifying bet, I would recommend looking at both the loss you would make and the odds of the horse. Picking a horse that is likely to run 2nd or 3rd based on the odds is a decent strategy; if you don’t know much about horse racing and/or believe in “knowledge of the crowd”. The only problem with racing offers is that the odds only get close around 5-10 minutes before the race. Also the liquidity and odds change rapidly so you have to be quick. This means you have to be online at the time of the race and can’t set up bets in advance.
Step by step
- Find a race with an attached racing offer.
- Find a horse with close odds for a low qualifying loss.
- Back the bet on the bookie, and lay the bet on Betfair.
- Await the race results.
- If your horse finishes within the offers conditions, convert the bonus bet for 70-80% using BonusBank‘s ATM.
Racing offers made easy
Luckily the guys at BonusBank have got just the tool for this. It is a browser extension called HorsePower that grabs all the odds information about a race on one page for you. This allows you to quickly make a decision about which horse to put your qualifying bet on. This greatly reduces your time investment and allows you to place better bets with lower qualifying losses. You can also use it to convert bonus bets from any offers by finding a good back/lay match on a horse.
Hopefully this racing offers rundown has been informative and useful. Please look into it but evaluate if the risk is worth it for you. I have found racing offers a little more difficult and more time consuming than the other methods. However, for many others this is very lucrative, especially those who have the time on the weekend when most races are run. I much prefer the easy income from sign up offers and multi promos. You can also see my total profits from all the matched betting techniques I have used here. Let me know if you have any questions or any experience with this method. I would love to hear it!