How to make money from boosted odds arbitrage
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Boosted odds are a great yet common promotion by the bookies, and taking advantage of them is an incredibly easy and lucrative thing to do. Here is how!
A common daily offer by bookies is the boosted odds, and while it may not seem like anything with value, to the punter who understands the basics of arbitrage, it is a veritable goldmine.
Apart from being incredibly easy to implement, it is also incredibly scalable and low effort, really becoming the perfect money making machine for the matched bettor.
How to do it
If you have an idea how back and lay arbitrage works, then this strategy should come easily to you. However, don’t stress if you have absolutely no clue what this means, as I will quickly explain it.
Without going into the maths, all you need to know is that when the back odds from the bookie are higher than the lay odds on the exchange, you can lock in a risk free profit, making money regardless of if the outcome actually occurs.
Now, this rarely occurs naturally, and when it does, scalpers are quick to detect it and trade the opportunity out of existence, but thanks to the boosted odds given by the bookies, you can artificially create the requirements needed for the trade. I will assume that you are manually finding these trades, however, if that is plain boring to you, then read on to find software you can use to make it far easier.
You now just have to go and find odds on the bookies site that, once boosted, will be above that of the lay odds on the exchange. I find that one of the best opportunities for this is when the lay odds are moving down to a new price level, but the bookies haven’t adjusted yet, giving the chance for incredibly profitable trades with returns of 20% and more.
The caveat, however, is that you have to be incredibly fast. In this case, make sure that you place the bet on the bookie first, as their odds are likely about to decrease and thus make the trade unprofitable, and then move to the exchange. Don’t hesitate, and just know that you will make money from it.
A quick note. Not all odds are boosted equally, so it is important to know what odds are boosted by the greatest amount by what bookie. For example, on Betr, I have found odds of 5.0 are boosted the most, going up to 6.0, but then on another bookie, it may be a completely different number. Just keep this in mind when you are looking for potential trades.
I will now show an example just to demonstrate how this risk free money is created. You are searching the bookies odds, and see that they are paying 5.0 for a horse to win, and then check Betfair to find the lay odds are at 5.2. Immediately, you decide that this can be a profitable trade, so you boost the bookie odds to 6.0 and place $200 on it, giving a potential return of $1200, and make the bet.
You now have to quickly lay this bet, and there are two ways you can go about it. The first is to only make a profit if the horse loses, meaning you break even if it wins. If you want to do this and try make as much money as possible on a single trade, you simply deduct the back stake from the potential returns and place that amount in the liability, which in this case would be $238.1, which leaves you with a profit of $38.1, if the horse loses. If you wish to make money regardless of whether the horse wins or loses, you need to fiddle with the liability a bit.
For example, you could decrease the liability to $930, giving you a profit of $70 if the horse wins, or a profit of $21.43 if the horse loses. The important thing to remember with this though is commissions on the exchange.
Unfortunately, I have to pay them as Australia doesn’t have a commission free exchange, so I have to ensure that the profits I make are real, and not being eroded by these fees. I look forward to the day there are no fees, but until then, I calculate them into the profit.
This is why I prefer finding horses with lower odds to create these opportunities, as then I can manipulate the liability to break even for a loss, and make money when it wins, creating an asymmetric trading environment you can’t pass up.
How to scale it
Without a doubt, this strategy is by far one of the easiest to scale. You simply up the stakes you are wagering, up until you reach the maximum allowed with the boosted odds, or the maximum you can wager on the platform.
However, when you start playing with far higher stakes, you need to remember that you need to worry about the liquidity on the exchange you are using. Unless there is a decent amount of liquidity, you could very quickly find yourself with a bet placed on the bookie but no way to match it at profitable lay odds.
You need to become far more selective with which races and horses you used boosted odds for, ensuring that they will have the liquidity to take your money and allow you to lock in the profits.
Using software to help find opportunities
Manually finding opportunities for boosted odds arbitrage can be time consuming and boring, so it makes far more sense to use automation if possible.
Software for matched betting allows you to compare odds between the exchange and the bookies, giving you a notification whenever a profitable trade can be made. You simply set the filters, such as the bookie odds being at 5.0, and the exchange odds at 5.2, and then notifying you about it.
Importantly, you have to be available to make these trades, as the actual betting cannot be automated, but the hard part of finding the potential profit is taken care of. You also still have to be incredibly fast, as the odds often don’t stay at the profitable levels for very long.
Special Price Boosts
The examples that I gave above were all reliant on you choosing the race to have the odds boosted on, but there are also plenty of examples where the bookies choose to just boost the odds on a specific event, whether it be for a sports team to win, or a fighter to lose in a specific way.
In these cases, the boosts are far larger than what you can get on a daily basis, but unfortunately, the stakes are quite limited, rarely surpassing $25. So while you can generally lock in an easy profit of $10 or so from these special boosts, they aren’t going to make you rich, and sometimes aren’t even worth the effort of partaking in them to begin with.
One word of warning however, I would not partake in these offers on Bet365. They often have around 5 or more great price boosts (they call them mega boosts) each Saturday, and you could probably make nearly $100 risk free from them, but I don’t think they are worth it, especially if you are interested in participating in early payout offers.
The Bet365 account is simply far too valuable to throw away chasing some arbitrage offers that aren’t scalable, and while the money may be nice, is far less profitable than their other offers where you likely aren’t going to even get gubbed from.
Getting Gubbed
I have heard many different opinions when it comes to how taking advantage of boosted odds bonuses impacts your chances of getting gubbed, and unfortunately, I have never had an account where I purely just took advantage of it, so I cannot say for certain.
What I can assume though, is that the chances of getting gubbed depends on how big your stakes are, and what range of odds you bet on. If you bet on horses that have odds of around 10, then you likely are still going to be making the bookie money, so they have no interest in touching your account.
From personal experience though, continually taking advantage of the special odds boosts definitely flags your account as suspicious, and makes it likely to get gubbed. One account I had rarely took advantage of bet return offers, but did use the odds boosts, and it got gubbed quite quickly. I don’t know if the bookie was simply stingy when I did wager on the bet returns, or the times I bet on the boosted odds flagged me as suspicious.
However, if you focus on finding boosted odds arbitrage from the favourite, then you likely are going to win more often, and annoy the bookie, giving them a reason to get you off their platform. If you paired this with high stakes of hundreds of dollars or even more, then I can imagine that they would soon grow tired of having such an expensive customer, and inform you that due to commercial reasons, you are banned.