Matched betting - How to profit from promotions

In general, advantaged sports betting can be split into two categories; promotional strategies and non-promotional strategies. You are already familiar with the common non-promotional strategies; positive expected value betting and arbitrage betting. Let's dive into promotional strategies now.

Promotional strategies rely on gaining an edge through a specific promotion that a sportsbook offers. Sportsbooks will offer promotions in the hopes of encouraging more individuals to sign up to their service and for current users to increase their betting frequency. Although it is possible to gain an edge through these promotions, the majority of bettors don't have the knowledge of how to, which results in more profit for the sportsbooks.

The underlying edge from most promotional strategies comes from 'bonus bets'. This is a sportsbook specific currency that is obtained through betting on promotional events and via depositing money into a sportsbook. Bonus bets differentiate in a number of different ways when compared to regular cash.

• Bonus bets can't be directly withdrawn - they must first be converted into regular cash by betting with them and then withdrawing the subsequent profits.

• Bonus bets have a lower payout - only the profit from the win with a bonus bet is paid out, not the initial value of the bonus bet.

• Bonus bets expire - after receiving a bonus bet, it is common for it to be valid for only 1 week.

As mentioned, you may receive bonus bets for depositing into sportsbooks. This is known as a deposit bonus. After initially opening an account with a sportsbook, it is common to receive a text message or email offering a sign-up deposit bonus. This is the easiest way to make your first profits from advantaged sports betting - you can make a few thousand dollars from just sign up bonuses alone.

As previously mentioned, bonus bets can't be withdrawn, they must first be bet with. This is where the concept of converting bonus bets to cash comes in. How exactly do you convert bonus bets and how do you ensure you're getting the most value from them?

Hedging method

Bonus bets can be converted into cash using a technique similar to arbitrage, where you're betting on all the outcomes of a particular match. This works by placing the bonus bet on one outcome and then placing regular stakes on all the other outcomes.

Retention

To ensure we are extracting the most value from bonus bets, we need to quantify the conversion efficiency, or in other terms, the retention for a bonus bet. The reason why this is an important factor is for the fact that the value of the bonus bet is not included in the payout of a win, unlike with a regular bet.

Compared with a regular bet:

We can understand retention by observing how the total profit changes depending on the odds that we place the bonus bet on and the odds for the hedge stake.

It can be seen from the table that the higher the odds that we place the bonus bet on, the higher the retention. The other thing to note from the table is the combined implied probability for the odds: in this example, all the odds had a combined implied probability of 100%. We can consider the role that combined implied probability has on retention too.

From the two tables, it can be concluded that bonus bet retention can be maximised by betting on the high odds with the bonus bet and minimising the combined implied probability.

Promotional advantaged sports betting crucially relies on turning over a large amount of bonus bets at a high retention.

Meet the WagerWise Bonus Bet Converter Software.

Our bonus bet converter software continuously evaluates sportsbook odds to find the highest retention bet options for our members.

The head-to-head multi strategy relies on a common promotion where in placing an outcome multi, if one leg fails, you receive a bonus bet back at the value of your stake (often limited to a maximum bonus bet of $50). We can calculate the expected value of this bet by considering the sportsbook odds and the fair odds of each selection.

Example

Promotion: Place a 3+ leg head-to-head multi, if one leg fails, receive a bonus bet up to $50

• First we need the fair odds for each selection

• From here we can compare the sportsbook multi price with the fair multi price

Let's pick three teams for our multi: Atlanta Hawks, Indiana Pacers and Boston Celtics.

We can calculate the sportsbook's margin by dividing the fair multi odds by the sportsbook multi odds. The sportsbook has a 12.43% margin in this case. The margin on each individual selection is only around 4%, but in combining the selections, the margin compounds.

• We can now calculate the expected value for this multi

For a $50 stake

We can see the multi alone has a negative expected value. This is what is expected due to sportsbook margin. For this multi to have a positive expected value, the value offered by the promotion must be greater than -$5.53.

The promotion offers a bonus bet if one of the legs fails in our multi. We can calculate the probability of each case where one leg fails, and then find the total expected value of the promotion.

The probability of two legs succeeding and one leg failing can be calculated as follows:

- where odds₃ is associated with the failed leg.

From here we can calculate the total probability of any one leg failing by adding the individual probabilities.

With this figure we can calculate the expected value of the promotion, as we know there's a 44.59% chance of receiving a bonus bet for this multi.

The expected value can be calculated as follows (assuming retention of 80%):

We are now able to calculate the total expected value of the multi with the promotion by adding the two previously calculated expected values.

We can expect a profit of $12.31 placing this bet, assuming we convert the bonus bet at 80%.

What about the other options for the multis?

The specific multi in the selection was chosen for a specific reason. Let's quickly explore the opposite multi to understand why.

We can see the expected value of the multi without a promotion is very similar, however, due to the probability of one leg failing being dramatically reduced (44.59% -> 25.98%), the expected value of the promotion suffers. In order to extract the most value from this promotion, we should create multis using the lowest odds options.

This type of promotional strategy is very similar to the head-to-head multi strategy. The difference being that instead of being a multi with match outcomes as the selections, it's a multi with outcomes within the same game as the selections. This difference makes calculating expected value a little more difficult as certain selections are linked to each other, for example if a certain player scores a large number of goals, the team they are on is more likely to win. With same game multis, positive and negative correlations exist, meaning we can't simply multiply odds together to find the multi price. Sportsbooks have their own unique ways of calculating the odds for a same game multi, and we can base our calculations on this.

There are two common same game multi promotions; place a 3+ leg multi or a 4+leg multi - and receive a bonus bet back if one leg fails.

Generally the best strategy for these promotions is to create a multi with a combination of 'moneyline', 'handicap', 'total points' and a 'player prop'. Let's use 'moneyline', total points and a 'player prop' in our example.

Example

Let's calculate the expected value of the following multi:

Entering these selections into the sportsbook we get odds of 3.60. Using the approach for calculating fair odds with individual odds, we can calculate fair odds for same game multis.

Let's now enter in all the options for one leg failing and note the odds.

This is all the information we need to calculate expected value:

We can expect a profit of $13.02 placing this bet, assuming we can convert the bonus bet at 80%.