Horse Racing Refunds: Simple Regular Profits

Horse racing refunds are extremely worthwhile if you’re looking to enhance your long-term Matched Betting profits.

They are super simple, quick to do and available through the week. On certain days such as Saturdays, there are more opportunities available for horse races shown live on ITV.

These races typically have a lot of free bet incentives associated with them as different bookmakers compete for your custom.

In this article, you’ll learn what horse racing refunds are, how to find them and how you can add them to your routine to maximise your returns.

What Are Horse Racing Refunds

A horse racing refund is when a bookmaker offers to refund your bet stake as cash or a free bet if your horse meets certain criteria, typically if your horse wins or finishes in a specified position.

There are different racing refunds available each day, here are a few examples of the types of variations you’ll see:

• Refund if your horse finishes 2nd (Or sometimes 2nd/3rd or 2nd/3rd/4th)

• Free bet if your horse wins

• Refund if your horse doesn't place

• Refund if your horse finishes 2nd to the SP favourite

• Refund if your horse is beaten by a specified distance

• Refund if your horse fails to finish

Horse Racing Refund Matched Betting Example

A common horse racing refund you can take advantage of is a refund if your horse finishes in a certain position, typically anywhere from 2nd to 4th.

Sky Bet frequently run the best “cash back” version of this offer. Here is a horse racing refund offer they have stating they’ll give you money back as cash if your horse finishes 2nd or 3rd.

The simplest way to complete this offer when Matched Betting is to do a normal qualifying bet on any horse which will give you the smallest qualifying loss - if your horse finishes in 2nd or 3rd position in this instance, you’ll get £10 cash.

For this offer, close to the start of the race there was a good opportunity available on the horse “Le Cameleon”, that gave a qualifying loss of around 30p for using a £10 back stake.

As a general rule - aiming for a qualifying loss of around 50p per £10 stake is suitable so this cheap 30p qualifying loss is ideal.

This is the simple way to complete horse racing refund offers, take a small qualifying loss and move to the next offer.

If the horse “Le Cameleon” finishes 2nd or 3rd, you’ll get £10 cash leaving you with around £9.70 profit (£10 cash minus the qualifying loss). If “Le Cameleon” finishes in any other position, you’ll make the small 30p loss.

The key aspect to these horse racing refund offers is keeping the qualifying loss to a minimum and to remember it’s a long-term strategy. One winner will cover many of yoru small qualifying losses and over time you’ll be handsomely in profit.

How To Lock In A Profit From Horse Racing Refunds

Most Matched Bettors will use the method explained above and simply place a back and lay bet on a horse to take a small qualifying loss and move to the next offer - it’s efficient and effective.

However, it’s possible to lock in a small profit from some horse racing refund offers.

The alternative way to complete these offers is to use a “racing refund calculator” and extract a profit regardless if your horse comes in the correct position or not.

Here’s an example of how the racing refund calculator works on the same offer as above:

The first step would be to choose the type of refund offer you’re doing which in this case, you’ll get cashback if your horse finishes in 2nd or 3rd place.

The next step is to input the back and lay odds of the selected horse as you would for any qualifying bet.

As Sky Bet are giving you £10 cashback. The bonus amount is therefore 10, and the retention is 100% (you get to keep all of the £10 amount as it is full stake cashback and not a free bet).

If the offer had been for a £10 free bet, you cna change the bonus retention amount here to 80%, as you know that you can extract around £8 (80%) profit from any £10 free bet you receive.

Finally, you need to input the lay odds for your selected horse in the “3 Place” market as shown on the racing refund calculator.

The racing refund calculator then tells you what lay stake amounts you need to use at the exchange (Matchbook in this instance – as you can claim 0% commission).

The key thing to note is that you’re placing one back bet on the horse to win at the bookmaker (Sky Bet in our example), then two lay bets at the exchange.

One lay is against the horse to win, and one lay bet against the same horse in the “3 Place” market.

Once you place these bets you can expect to make a profit of £1.70 no matter if “Le Cameleon” finishes in 2nd or 3rd or not.

This is typically quite a high profit to be able to lock in from this particular offerso the choice is yours if you prefer to lock in small amounts for slightly more effort or take the more efficient long term apporcah of simple back, lay and move on to the next offer to enable you to take more volume.

How To Find Horse Racing Refund Offers

Most bookmakers promote any horse racing refund offers on their promotion page or as a banner on the top of their site.

You can also use a Matched Betting service such as Outplayed where all the best horse racing refund offers available each day are listed for you.

Each offer listed has a guide showing the key terms of the promotion and explains how you can complete the offer.

How To Find Suitable Bets For Horse Racing Refund Offers

There are a number of ways in which you can find suitable horse racing bets for refund offers when Matched Betting.

Search Manually

You can use a free odds comparison site such as Oddschecker to compare odds between different websites.

If you spot any odds that are close between the bookmaker that has a horse racing refund offer and a betting exchange you can use that horse to lock in a small qualifying loss.

The downside to this method is that odds comparison sites are often slow to update live odds and you’ll find by the time you get to the bookmaker site or betting exchange, the odds will have changed and the opportunity will have gone.

Odds Matching Software

A more efficient and accurate way to find suitable horse racing refung bets is using odds matching software.

Odds matching software will automatically compare the odds between bookmakers and the betting exchanges to help you quickly see the best available bets at any given bookmaker.

You can use the filters to help you find specific bets for any bookmaker running a refund offer.

In this example, we’ve filtered the sport to horse racing, the bookmaker to Sky Bet and entered “16:10” in the search bar so the odds matching software only displayed bets for that specific race at Sky Bet.

This will help you find the best qualifying bets for any race using any bookmaker.

Match Catcher Software

The Match Catcher is available with an Outplayed membership and is specifically designed to help maximise profits from horse racing refunds.

Match Catcher is similar to odds matching software but only shows results from bookmakers that currently have horse racing refunds available to help save time and keeping qualifying losses as low as possible.

Instead of searching through odds manually, up-to-date prices are available in one place and the optimal lay stake is included when you open the integrated calculator, so a separate Matched Betting calculator is not needed.

You can also use the bookmaker and exchange links on the calculator to go directly to the horse racing market with the associated refund offer.

Summary

Horse racing refund offers are a great introduction to horse racing betting as well as being easy to do and profitable.

When you've mastered them and built your bankroll you'll be ready to begin learning about a more advanced horse racing offers.