If you’re looking for greyhound tips to improve your return on investment, then you should give matched betting a try. It’s a method of exploiting bookmaker offers to generate an expected profit and can be applied to almost any sport, including greyhound racing.
The basic theory is quite simple. Bookies offer free bets and bonuses to encourage you to signup or continue betting with them. The value of these bookmaker rewards can be leveraged to make a real money profit. This may seem underhand but is completely legal and let’s face it, we all want to bash the bookies don’t we?
Using a typical £10 free bet welcome offer as an example, you can use matched betting to lock in a cash profit of around £8. This is done in two stages with the help of a betting exchange like Betfair for example. You will need to place a real money bet to qualify for the free bet. This can be covered with a lay bet on the exchange. A lay bet is to bet that something won’t win, meaning you have both possible outcomes covered.
Let’s say you back the dog Droopys Nidge to win a race with your £10 bookmaker bet at odds of evens. In decimal odds, this is 2.00 and the same selection is available to lay at 2.05 on Betfair, so you place a £10 lay bet. This means that you will have to pay out £10.50 at the exchange if the dog wins, known as your liability. If the dog wins, you will profit £10 from the bookmaker but lose £10.50 at the exchange. If it loses you will be down £10 to the bookmaker but pocket £9.50 from the exchange – your £10 stake minus 5% commission. Therefore, no matter what happens, it has only cost you 50p to qualify for the free bet.
The profit is then generated by matched betting with free bets which follows a similar process to the qualifying bet. The difference here is that you are no longer betting with your own money and the free bet stake will not be returned. Let’s say you use your £10 free bet to back Kinto Nebo at decimal odds of 12.00 and the lay odds are 12.30. A lay bet of £8.98 would have liability of £101.47 and produce a profitable situation. If the bookmaker bet wins you will get a return of £110 but have to pay out £101.47 on the exchange. If the bookie bet loses, then because you were using a free bet it has cost nothing but the lay bet will return £8.98 minus 5% commission. This results in an expected profit of £8.53 from the free bet, giving a final profit of £8.03 once your 50p qualifying loss has been factored in.
There are plenty of signup offers to exploit and matched betting can also be used to generate a profit from ongoing promotions. Right now there’s a whole plethora of bookmakers that promote greyhound racing offers. These include; Coral bet £20 on Sky Dogs Get 4x £5 Free Bets and numerous money back specials from the likes of Paddy Power, BetMcLean, Tommy French, Mint Bet and Brucebetting to name but a few.