Arbitrage Betting - Arbitrage in Theory - Bonus Sports Arbitrage

Bonus Sports Arbitrage

Many bookmakers offer first time users a signup bonus in the range $10 – $200 for depositing an initial amount. They typically demand that this amount is wagered a number of times before the bonus can be withdrawn. Bonus sport arbitraging is a form of sports arbitraging where you hedge or back your bets as usual, but since you received the bonus, a small loss can be allowed on each wager (2-5%), which comes off your profit. In this way the bookmakers wagering demand can be met and the initial deposit and sign up bonus can be withdrawn with little loss.

The advantage over usual betting arbitrage is that it is a lot easier to find bets with an acceptable loss, instead of an actual profit. Since most bookmakers offer these bonuses this can potentially be exploited to harvest the sign up bonuses.

Making money:

By signing up to various bookmakers, it's possible to turn these 'free' bets into cash fairly quickly, and either making a small arbitrage, or in the majority of cases, making a small loss on each bet, or trade. However, it is relatively time consuming to find close matched bets or arbs, which is where an arb / close matched bet service is useful. Additionally as many bookies require a certain turnover of the bonus amount, matching money from different bookies against each other enables the player to in effect quickly "play free" the money of the losing bookie and in effect transfer it to the winning bookie. By in this way avoiding most of the turnover requirements the player can usually expect a 70-80 return on investment.

Drawbacks:

As well as spending time physically matching odds from various bet sites to exchanges, the other draw back with bonus bagging / arb trading in this sense is that often the free bets are 'non-stake returned'. This effectively reduces the odds, in decimal format, by 1. Therefore, in order to reduce 'losses' on the free bet, it is necessary to place a bet with high odds, so that the percentage difference of the decrease in odds is minimised.