FoG

Free Bets. You have got to believe that every time you place a bet you are giving money to the bookie's. Yes you win some, and lose some but in the long run the bookie has set up the odds with an edge in their favour. Depending on if you like to bet on favourites or underdogs you could be losing 10% to 50% of your stake in the long run. This is true unless the bookie is giving you something back in return - like a free bet. At the moment both Ladbrokes and Will Hill have been offering money back as a free bet if the horse you backed to win finishes second. This is usually available for the Channel 4 races. Paddy Power have been offering money back too, but only if 2nd to the SP favourite. Coral have started offering your stake back as a free bet but this time if your 3/1+ pick  wins . Betfair sometimes have a similar offer. Bet365 have the same offer as Coral but your odds have to be 4/1 or longer to qualify. Other online bookie's like Betfred, sportingbet, S...

Last season Paddy Power ran a promo on the top goalscorer in the Premier League. They are bringing it back this season to my delight. I have my bets in already - see here . Betfair don't want to lose the market to Paddy and have come out with a similar offer. See their website here . Paddy Power vs Betfair The Original offer. 1. You only need to stake €20. This is a pro. The Bookie is sure to have a nice little edge built into this market. You can probably expect to lose 10-20% back to the bookie here. So long term this offer will cost you about €2 to €4. 2. You can back multiple scorers and get free bets on each one. This is a huge pro - its the offer that keeps giving. I would draw the line at 3 players as there is a €10 free bet limit per week. So after 5 goals per week you can't earn any more value. 3. You only get €2 free bet each time your pick scores (up to a max €10 per customer per week). On first sight this looks like a con. But if your man s...

For these tips I am taking advantage of paddypower.com 's free bet promotion. In May I won over €100 on this strategy on the Premier League matches. These profits are documented in my latest article here . Since that article PaddyPower have continued the promotion on some International friendlies and some Copa America fixtures. In June I have managed to win another clear €100. The key now is to place my real money bets on outcomes at 1/2 (this is the shortest odds allowed by the promotion). By betting on shortest odds possible and combining outcomes I am able to guarantee the minimum risk for my real money. This frees me up to be creative with the free bets - here I am always looking for 13/2 or 7/1 odds for my free bets (to see why - read here ). This way I had Paraguay at 13/2 in-play against Brazil to qualify for the Semi Final. I also had 6 plus goals backed in-play in the Argentina/Peru match at 13/2. I won about €30 on each of these. Both were free bets. The free bets...

Bet365 will give you a bonus to match your first deposit up to €200 . Is this good value? If you read the terms and conditions you must stake your original deposit and the bonus three times before you can withdraw any winnings off your bonus. So for a €200 deposit with a €200 bonus that would require staking €1200. This is the equivalent of 60 €20 bets. You have 90 days to do this. A further restriction is that the bets must be made at odds of 1/2 (1.5) or higher. We can still work with these restrictions and hopefully have some money left of the €200 bonus after the turnover requirements. The chart below shows that the shorter the odds, the closer to breaking even or even making a small profit. The chart was compiled from my database of odds and results from football-data.co.uk which records odds from 2002. It has also been augmented with odds for matches collected from paddypower.ie for all the top leagues in the Europe and some from outside Europe since the beginnin...

So you read my article here before and were wondering how the strategy panned out. I have posted the totals at the head of the below table, and continue scrolling for all the details. In 1 month I made a  € 100 total profit. Its not going to be enough to become a professional gambler, but I think most casual gamblers would be happy enough with that. In total I staked  €46 0 (23 bets @  € 20 each), on the real bets I came out at a loss of  € 32.54 which is 7% of the total staked. From The Happy Medium article we can see that on average betting on even money favourites I would expect to lose about 4% of my stake. So I lost a little more than expected but not too much more. This earned me  €23 0 in free bets and I won  €137.50 back. This is free money. This is roughly as expected. Most of our bets were at odds of on average about 5/2. The chart here indicates that we would expect to win back about 60c for every  € 1 at those odds in free bet...