Well now the football season has resumed, its highly likely that in some of  the top Premiership and European  games Bet 365 will be running their very lucrative ‘Bet up to £50 get a free in play bet for the same stake’ This is one of the best bonuses around and back in the day when we used to receive it we made some decent money with it.

The secret is not to lose the stake on your qualifying bet. Now that may sound obvious but Bet365 are counting on the fact that like most punters, you will have a bet and then another bet with the free in play stake and very probably lose on both. This is what happens most of the time (otherwise they wouldn’t run it) as football is a difficult sport to make money on, even though we all think we are ‘experts’.

Method 1

There are a couple of ways of saving your initial stake, the first one will be familiar with those of you who do Matched Betting. Basically whatever you bet on in Bet365 you lay it on the Betting Exchanges (Betfair/Betdaq/Smarkets). For example if you have backed Chelsea to win the game and placed a £50 bet at 2-1 then you would let someone back it with you on the Exchanges for the same stake and hopefully the same odds. This means that you will break even whatever the result. If Chelsea win you will win £100 in Bet365 but have to pay out £100 in Betfair, and if they don’t win then you will lose your £50 with Bet 365 but win £50 on Betfair (the other persons stake money). The disadvantage of this is that you would need to have a decent amount of money in your exchange account to allow someone to bet with you, in the above case you would need £100+ in your account. The other slight drawback is that you would probably have to lay it at slightly higher odds (it is rare to get an exact match on football odds) and also pay commission, so you would probably lose about £5 overall. To be honest though if someone offered us a £50 free bet for a fiver we would bite their hand off every time!.

Method 2

The second method of protecting your stake, and the one we tended to use, was to place the £50 bet on there being > 0.5 goals in the game. The odds on this can be anything from 1-8 to 1-50, but Bet365 don’t stipulate a minimum odds requirement. Basically you are backing that the game wont finish 0-0 and to be fair, given the type of game Bet365 select for this bonus, very few actually do. We know of some people, who as soon as they have placed that bet and the game has started, they then put the £50 free in play bet on < 0.5 goals at odds at anything  from 8-1 to 33-1. They are happy to make a couple of quid if a goal goes in but if the game finished 0-0, they would happily lose their initial £50 as they would be picking up anything from £500-£1500 on the free bet. Now we don’t recommend this as it does go against the Terms and conditions of Bet 365 and they could refuse to pay out on such blatant manipulation. The people we knew that did this, always got paid out, but that was a couple of years ago and we wouldn’t advise this method.

Our preferred method

We do however, suggest a similar approach to Method 2 where the initial qualifying bet is £50 on > 0.5 goals in the game. What you do then is sit and watch the game until the first goal goes in. Once that has happened your qualifying bet has won, you have made a couple of quid and you now have a £50 free bet to do whatever you want with, whether it’s a safe 2-1 shot or a speculative 33-1 shot. You can even lay half of your stake off on the exchanges to guarantee a profit regardless of your free bet winning or losing.

The only downside to this is what happens if that first goal doesn’t go in? Well, we suggest sitting it out for about 70-75 minutes and hope the first goal is scored, on the vast majority of occasions this will happen. If it doesn’t then what we did then was put the free bet on a 0-0 score, always making sure the odds are better than evens – it is usually about 70-75 minutes when a 0-0 score starts to go odds on. By doing this, if there is a late goal then you will win a couple of quid and lose your free bet and if it stays 0-0 you will lose your £50 stake but win more than £50 on the free bet (which is why the odds need to be greater than evens). We are still manipulating the system a little bit but not blatantly. In all the times we used this bonus we only needed to back the 0-0 draw two or three times as usually a goal has been scored by then.

This is one of the best bonuses for making good money during the football season as they usually do about two a month, but the secret to making money from it is simple – DO NOT LOSE YOUR INITIAL STAKE.

Happy punting!