Price boosts are quickly becoming the number one earners in the matched betting arena after the slow decay of the “Bet X get Y Free Bet” offers.
Increasingly free bets only tend to be given out on big sporting occasions such as Cheltenham Festival, The Grand National, Royal Ascot. For football, events such as European Championships and the World Cup present the best opportunities for these types of offers.
For normal sporting events the general move made by bookmakers has been away from free bets and towards enhanced odds in order to win punters business. This represents an opportunity for us matched bettors as there are often dozens of price boosts a day.
Dedicating some time to these enhanced prices is now one of the quickest ways to increase your matched betting profits. If for some reason you don’t know what matched betting is then have a look at my matched betting page here.
So let’s start this guide with the most fundamental of questions…
What is a price boost?
Put simply, a price boost does what it says on the tin.
It is an occasion where a bookmaker offers customers an increased price (increased odds) on a particular situation occurring in a specific sporting event. For example, they may increase the price of Cristiano Ronaldo scoring in a football match from odds of 2.0 to 3.0.
This means they are inflating the price beyond the what the market deems an appropriate level in order to win custom from punters. This is what allows us matched bettors to profit.
How do you make money from price boosts?
Inflating the odds in this manner creates and arbitrage opportunity between the bookmaker and the exchange. In the example above the lay price of Ronaldo may not have been previously profitable (2.0 vs 2.2 on the exchange).
However, once that price is inflated to 3.0, it becomes very profitable.
Look at the screen shot taken below of the Oddsmonkey calculator which demonstrates the newly found value in this price.
As you can see a £50 stake on this boost would see a hefty £18.18 profit. Furthermore, we would only need a liability of £81.82 in our exchange account to cover this boost. So these price boosts aren’t at all exclusive to people with large exchange balances!
Why are price boosts better than free bets?
Free bet offers are becoming increasingly obscure.
At the rate bookmakers are going it won’t be long before their leading offers are something along the lines of “Bet £10 and get a £10 free bet if Harry Kane scores a bicycle kick blindfolded, with both hands tied behind his back”.
Ok, I may have ever-so-slightly over-exaggerated there, but you get the point.
Free bets are becoming harder and harder to qualify and they only get given in very particular set of circumstances (e.g. your horse comes second and also gets beaten by a length or less).
Add in the fact that you also have to wait for the free bet itself. Sometimes they are not credited for 24 hours or more after your qualifying bet settles and even then they may have sneaky expiry dates that they don’t make clear, restrictions on which sports you can place them on, and in worst case scenarios, wagering requirements that are more than x1.
A price boost is so simple. Place your back bet (as much as you are allowed/can afford) and then place the corresponding lay at your preferred exchange. Reap your profits instantly as it doesn’t matter what the outcome of your event is (unless underlaying/overlaying – more on this below).
Isn’t this just Arbing?
In essence, yes. However, there is a crucial difference. These are arbs that bookies actually want you to take. Think of them as an arb given with their blessing. They are trying to win your custom with these enhanced prices so by taking them you are showing them their strategy is working.
However, you will notice that if you end up on the winning side of these boosts more often than not, they may place restrictions on how much you can place on them as you are taking too much value.
You may be restricted on a certain boost (e.g. William Hill Flash Odds) or a certain sport. It all depends on how well you’ve done out of them over the history of your account.
It may be wise to spread your boosts over many accounts, don’t over-rely on just one bookie, hitting every boost they offer. When they eventually restrict you, your profits will suffer concurrently, so keep them guessing by varying boost quantity and changing up which boosts you take.
How to underlay/overlay a price boost?
Referring to the screenshot once more, you will notice two options on either side of the standard lay stating “underlay” & ”overlay”.
In theory they both do the same thing, they give you a risk-free bet on the outcome of the event.
So, let’s just use Ronaldo scoring scenario again for simplicity. Let’s say he’s playing against a really poor quality side and he’s expected to bang the goals in.
You may want to underlay as you believe the event boosted is very likely to happen. If he scores, you recoup £40 instead of £18.18, more than doubling your profits. If he doesn’t you win nothing, but crucially you don’t lose anything either.
Again for overlaying, it’s the opposite. Perhaps it’s his first game back from injury and he is up against a great team with a world-renowned defence. You are pretty sure he won’t score, so you chose to overlay.
If he doesn’t score you receive £33.33, once more a hefty increase in profit. But if he defies the circumstances and scores you are left with nothing gained, nothing lost.
You’ll find that you’ll rarely be overlaying with price boosts. You will tend to take the guaranteed profit or underlay as a risk-free shot at making more.
I only tend to underlay when the boost isn’t great (e.g. £0.50 – £1 guaranteed profit) and aim for the increased return (£6-10) knowing full well that a lot of the time it won’t come in (there’s a reason these prices are boosted!).
What if a price boost is too good to be true?
Sometimes you will see a boost, check the corresponding market on the exchange and see that there is a whopping difference.
Two things are likely to have occurred here:
- The bookmaker has made a genuine mistake pricing the boost (known as a Palpable Error). These bets rarely get honoured and get voided, leaving you in a tricky situation if you have already placed your lay.
- You are looking at the incorrect lay market. If I had a pound for every time someone thought that a boost on winning both halves was the same market as HT/FT result, I would be rich! (I include myself in making that mistake early on, so don’t be too ashamed of yourself).
If you are ever in doubt, always double check your boost by just asking the friendly chaps and chapesses in the Oddsmonkey community and they will quickly tell you if you have found a stonker or you’ve got it completely wrong.
Where to find price boosts?
This is pretty much different for every bookmaker so this is difficult to answer directly. However, I will list below bookmakers I have a lot of experience with and then add to this guide as and when I discover something new.
William Hill
They do a Flash Odds boost on horses every day 12 noon – 12:15pm.
They tend to provide enhanced odds on BTTS in the second half which often have dutch opportunities available (usually with Betfair Sportsbook) when a football match reaches half time. If it’s still 0-0 you can just lay on the exchange BTTS – Yes.
They offer football flash odds around 5-6pm before a 7-8pm kick off, they will email you in advance to let you know the price. It is sometimes beneficial to lay in advance as the lay price rockets after releasing the boost.
They have a daily boost token on the new version of their website/mobile app which means if you can find a very close match you can create your own arb.
Skybet
They offer enhanced accumulators throughout the football season (usually trebles) know as Gillette Soccer Saturday boosts. These are released on Thursday and available until kick off.
Advantaged Life Tip: Back these as soon as they come out on Thursday (Max £25), you should then find that you able to back this treble again on Saturday, earning double the amount of profit!
They also offer flash boosts on midweek televised football matches (e.g. league cup), and have enhanced football odds that often make a nice arb. Be quick with these as, unlike William Hill, these flash odds are gone in a matter of minutes.
Very occasionally they offer good lay sequential boosts (where you lay one event after the other) or “cross sport specials”, but these are only for seasoned matched bettors. If they look confusing to lay, then stick to the normal boosts for now.
Betfred/Totesport
These two bookmakers are one and the same. So a boost on one of the sites is usually reflected on the other.
They do excellent horse boosts almost daily from 10am onwards. They often allow stakes in excess of £100, making their boosts extremely profitable.
During the football season they offer “massive odds boosts” on a Saturday morning (often stake restricted though).
Coral
Saturday mornings see them drop the occasional amazing boost on football, strangely they always tend to be on the same market “back X team to win and BTTS”. BTTS means both teams to score in case you were wondering!
Boylesports
They often drop “Pricebombs” again Saturday morning during football season, but they also do them on horses/special events. Today for example has a tasty Russia v Saudi Arabia 2.0 vs 1.54 Smarkets lay. £10 gives you £3 for 10 seconds work!
Advantaged Life Tip: These boosts are often only available on the either the mobile version of their website or on their mobile app. So you may have to come off your PC/Laptop to complete these.
188bet
They do very good boosts which do tend to be in the 8.0 – 13.0 odds range (so bigger liability required in your exchange) but they get cut so quickly they are difficult to get on in time. If you happen to be on their homepage at the right time you may get lucky and get on before everyone else does.
Paddy Power
Go on the event and look under the “Paddy Price” tab to find the enhanced prices for that particular event. Similar to the sky enhanced odds, sometimes there is a beauty.
Ladbrokes
This bookmaker gives away boost tokens as if they are going out of fashion, again so you can make your own arbs. These are only worth it, if you have a big bank as you’ll often be boosting high odds to maximise profit e.g. back at 31 lay at 26 etc.
But if you’ve got the bank go for it. But obviously don’t start all guns blazing with £200 stakes. Build slowly and limit yourself to no more than £100-£200 stakes (£50 is ideal) before they do it for you!
Obviously this is a tiny fraction of the available bookmakers that offer boosts so here are the rest that I know offer boosts:
10bet
21Bet
888Sport
Betsafe
BetVictor
Betway
Bwin
ComeOn
Dabblebet
Dafabet
Fun88
Grosvenor
Kwiff
LeoVegas
Mr Green
NetBet
Sporting Bet
SportNation
SportPesa
TitanBet
Winner
Remember to get notifications of price boosts when they become available make sure you subscribe (click “watch this thread”) to the Price Boosts – No Chat thread in the Oddsmonkey Community where there are at least 10 price boosts posted daily.
Price Boosts that are a bit different
Before we end this guide I just thought I would mention some slightly different price boosts in the form of SportPesa and Kwiff listed above.
Firstly, SportPesa offer their price boost as a free bet rather than a fixed odds boost. What this means is fairly complicated. This is because you are only going to roughly keep 80% of your free bet.
Time to get your calculator out (or am I only one who can’t do this in their head?).
The sums work as follows:
((boosted odds – original odds) x 0.8) + original odds
Let’s say you have odds that have been boosted to 3.25 and the current odds at SportPesa are 3.1. The maths looks something like this:
3.25 – 3.1 = 0.15
0.15 * 0.8 (80% free bet retention) = 0.12
0.12 + 3.1 (original odds) = 3.22 boosted odds to use.
Get it? Don’t worry if not. Neither do I really!
I hardly do these boosts, but some people swear by them so have a go if you understand what you are doing.
Secondly, Kwiff has one selling point. It’s random boosted odds. The catch? You don’t know until after you’ve placed the bet whether you are going to get boosted or not.
The tactic for this one is find as many close matches as possible, take a qualifying loss that you are happy with and then pray it gets boosted. Sometimes their boosts are astronomical, I’m talking from 4.0 to 15.0 and even higher!
The idea is you take a few pounds’ loss here and there on the bets that aren’t boosted and then take the huge profits on the ones that are, far outweighing the losses. There are people who make £100s using this method and there are dedicated threads to this in the Oddsmonkey forum.
William Hill Flash Odds Tutorial
Well done if you are still with me, you’ve read over 2,000 words on price boosts already so I thought I would give you a rest and add in a video tutorial on perhaps the most common boost the William Hill Flash Odds Boost.
As you can see I would have made a pathetic guaranteed profit but this wasn’t typical. You usually make £2-£3 a day on these which over the course of a 30-day month adds up nicely to around £60-£90 for a few minutes work a day. Not too shabby.
Conclusion
Hopefully you’ve found something useful in this guide that I’ve put together. I will come back and revisit it once I become more experienced and add anything else that I think you will find useful.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this, you may want to have a quick look at my ultimate anti-gubbing guide which should hopefully help you to stay in this game a little bit longer than most. Or perhaps you may want to have a look at my post on how to deal with the nightmarish situation of dealing with unmatched lay bets.