Risk free bets are the most common Matched Betting intro offer in the US. Fanduel, Draftkings, Caesar’s, Betrivers, and Barstool all offer risk free bets as their sign up offer. That being said, if this is your first time on the site, I would recommend checking my beginner’s guide first.
What the heck is a risk-free bet?
A ‘risk-free’ bet is NOT exactly what it sounds like. In fact, it’s almost criminal that sportsbooks are calling it that. Risk free implies that if you lose, the sportsbook will give you a full cash refund. A ‘risk free bet’, on the other hand, is basically the sportsbook saying that if you lose your bet they’ll give you the amount you lost in either a) site credit or b) free bets.
Both options are worse than cash. Site credit is only marginally worse: it is just cash that you must play through once. However, free bets are normally convertible to only 65%-75% of their face value.
If you made a bet with 500 dollars cash or site credit with odds -150 and won, it would pay out $833.50, but if you made that same bet with free bets you would only get $333.50….so obviously there is a huge difference.
Despite this, both types of risk free bets can still be very profitable, especially in the US of A, where books are offering thousands of dollars in risk free bets.
So how do you use matched betting to turn a risk-free bet into cash?
Any time you come across an offer that you aren’t used to or haven’t seen before, it’s helpful to ask yourself two simple questions.
- What steps can I take to turn this offer into cash?
- How much cash can I turn it into?
These questions are helpful because it gets you to re-imagine bonus offers as cash with extra steps. This allows you to analyze those steps and remove the risk from them.
Risk free bets have two steps: the first step is making the bet to unlock the free bet, and the second is to make another bet to turn that bet into cash. The second step should be obvious, as it is really just your average matched bet; place your lay and your back bets and you’re done. The first one, however, is a little more difficult to manage, because if you win you don’t unlock the bonus bet and you’ve essentially lost that bonus. How do we get around this?
By matching our bets, accounting for the fact that if the side offering the risk-free bet loses, we will receive the value of the site credit or free bets.
For example, let’s take the $500 Betrivers risk free bet offer. If you lose your first bet with Betrivers, they will grant you a free bet equal to however much you bet up to $500. Let’s assume there’s two tennis games (let’s call them games A and B) in the month, both with odds +270 on Betrivers and -300 on your hedge book, which you’re going to use to unlock your free bet.
For risk free bets, you should always bet on underdogs on the side offering the risk free bet. The higher and tighter the odds, generally the higher conversion you will get on your risk free bet.
Your plan of action with game A should be to match your bets so that your payoff if the risk free bet loses equals a payoff (p), while your payoff if the risk free bet wins equals p + the cash value of the free bet. Free bets are generally convertible for about 65% of their face value.
This is because in the scenario where Betrivers wins you will get an extra $325 in value (65% of $500), so your Betrivers bet should return $325 more.
Now let’s walk through the two scenarios:
Scenario A – Betrivers Win: If Betrivers wins, you will receive $1,850 from Betrivers, and $0 from the hedge book. You bet $500 on Betrivers, and $1,144 on the hedge book ($1,644 in total) so your profit is $206. Congrats! You can withdraw your money.
Scenario B – Hedge Book Wins: If the hedge book wins, you will receive $1,525 from your bet on the hedge book, and your bet on Betrivers will go to zero. You placed $1,644 so you actually lost $119 from your bets. However, since you lost on Betrivers, they will grant you a $500 free bet, which you can convert to $325 using matched betting. You lost $119, but you profit $325 from the free bet Betrivers granted, so your net profit is $206.