Whichever way you look at it, bookmakers love their loyal customers. Of course all bookies wants every punter on the market to place their bets with them, but if you asked them whether they’d prefer the business of ten people who place a £5 on the Grand National every year or one person who placed a wager every day then they wouldn’t take long to answer.
That’s why bookies look for new and inventive ways to reward their loyal punters. The last thing they want is for you to disappear off to another bookmaker once you’ve taken advantage of their introductory offer, so they have things like betting clubs, loyalty bonuses and mobile deals to keep you interested. Here’s a little bit of information on the sort of thing I’m talking about.
Best Free Bet Clubs
What Are The Best Free Bet Clubs?
Everyone likes being part of a club, don’t they? You can wear matching clothes and get a cool nickname. Now that may not be the case with a betting club, but there are other advantages that make it a thing worth making use of.
In most instances a Free Bet Club is a recurring offer where bookmakers ask you to ‘Opt In’ to a weekly betting reward. Bet a certain amount and you’ll then get something like a free bet if you place a given number of bets with certain minimum odds during a specific period of time. Here are some examples:
The Pools - Sports Plus
The Pools free bet club will give you a £5 free bet for every week that you bet £30+ at Evens+ on any markets other than virtual sports. The period runs from Monday to Sunday with £5 free bets awarded the following Monday.
Horse racing is included in this offer too. Cashed out bets are excluded, however. Free bets are then valid for one week and can be used on any sports. Of course the free bet stake itself is not returned but any winnings that result from the free bet are given in cash.
BetVictor - BetVictor Loyalty Club
There are now quite a few free bet clubs to choose from across the various bookies so what makes the BetVictor loyalty club special? Well, it is not so much the club itself, which gives you a £5 free bet if you opt-in and place 5 x £5 (1/2+) bets on any sports markets each week (Monday-Sunday), it is more the fact that it is backed up by one of the best sportsbooks in the world.
Often when we use loyalty club offers we are trading better odds value elsewhere, this is simply not the case with BV. They already have great odds, big markets and personal offers and now they have added a loyalty club they deliver an all round package. If you only wanted to choose one bookie to bet with it would simply now have to be BetVictor.
Customers can choose also whether they want to get a £5 free bet or £5 casino bonus (1x wagering), there are two clubs available. Again emphasising how well this brand understand betting and their customers.
Racing Free Bet Offers
Plenty of different bookmakers have decent offers in place for their loyal customers when it comes to racing. The sort of deal you can expect to take advantage of are the likes of a free bet if you place a wager on a horse with odds of 3/1 or 4/1+ and it wins. Similar offers are in place on greyhound races, too. Click to read about racing free bets for winners.
There’s also the likes of William Hill’s High Five offer. That specifies that if you place a winning bet on a horse race and the horse wins by five lengths or more (during the jump season) then you’ll get a 25% boost added to your winnings. If your horse comes second, losing to a horse that wins by five lengths or more, then you’ll get your stake returned as a free bet. During the flat season with their 2 Clear offer you will also get a 15% bonus if your horse wins by 2 clear lengths. They’re cracking value offers if you were going to place such a bet anyway.
Loyalty Points and Reward Schemes
I go into this in a bit more detail on the Loyalty Points page but it’s worth mentioning whilst I’m on the subject.
Some bookies offer loyalty point schemes. You earn points by doing pretty much anything, from depositing money into your account to placing a bet. Points, as they say, mean prizes and often have a shop were you can exchange your well-earned points for things like lottery tickets and even real cash.
Given that you’re going to be using the site if you’re planning on placing a bet then it’s great that you can earn something for your troubles.
Making Best Use Of Your Free Bets
Whilst it’s always lovely to be given something for free, how you treat it is what dictates whether it will be useful or not. Whilst it’s not technically true to talk about bets for loyalty being ‘free’, given the fact that you’ve had to place a certain number of bets to earn them, making use of what you’re offered is key to getting the most out of the promotion in question. That’s why it’s important to think on the best way of using free bets.
Some people will choose to treat them as a free hit, betting on whatever they fancy with abandon. Obviously, this is a perfectly valid thing to do with your free bet, but the reality is that you’re going to be kissing goodbye to it if you act without any forethought. The best thing to do is to use the bet as if it is real cash that you’ve deposited into your betting account, studying the bet that you’re going to place seriously.
Betting In-Play
If a bookmaker has put forward an offer that gives you a free bet In-Play or requires you to bet in-play to get a free token, it is really important that you know what it is that you’re wagering on. That is to say, don’t login to your account whilst you’re out shopping with your partner and are waiting for them, placing a bet on whatever football game is taking place or tennis match is underway, caring not a jot for who or what you’re betting on.
Instead, use it on an event that you’re actually watching, preferably on a sport that you understand and care about. If you’ve never watched a game of darts in your life, for example, then throwing your free bet onto a darts encounter is the equivalent of lighting a match underneath a £10 note and hoping the flame doesn’t take hold. In most instances, you’ll have had to bet In-Play to begin with to get the offer, so you’ll have some idea what you’re doing.
The important thing is to ensure that you carry on with that In-Play betting knowledge with your free wager, doing the same amount of research and reading the event in question as well as possible. This will increase your chances of the free bet becoming a winning one, which will then see you make a profit. Any win on a free bet is immediately profit, so don’t be afraid of opting for a market with odds close to Evens if you fancy.
Bet On What You Know
It’s such a simple concept, but betting on something that you know and understand will increase the chances of you turning your free bet into cash that you can withdraw. Most offers from bookmakers around free bets will give you the option to bet on numerous different sports and in several different markets, so make sure that you choose the ones that play to your strengths, rather than ones that you’re uncertain of.
To put it another way, if you never bet In-Play then don’t use your free bet on an In-Play market if you’ve got the option to bet on something else. Likewise, don’t be betting on cricket if you don’t know your Yorkies from your silly-mid-offs. You’re being given the chance of placing a free bet, but that doesn’t mean that you should be risky with your chosen markets and the type of bet that you would normally place.
Don’t Bet To Win Loyalty Bonuses
One thing that is really hard to resist is the urge to place bets in order to be given the loyalty reward from a bookmaker. If you’re the sort of person that only tends to bet £5 a week, don’t suddenly start betting £50 because you’ll get a £10 free bet if you do. Loyalty bonuses are there to reward customers that would be placing the bets anyway, but bookies obviously hope that they’ll entice others into betting more. Don’t be that person.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t place a bet that you were contemplating anyway. If you normally spend £5 a week but won your wager and have spotted another bet that you think might be a winner, it’s entirely up to you whether you should place it or not. It’s just that placing additional bets that might see you lose much more money than you can afford in order to win a £10 free bet is not a healthy approach to betting at all.
That being said, once you’ve earned your free bet and placed it, don’t lose sight of the fact that it was free in the first place. That is to say, if you lose your free bet then wave goodbye to the money with good grace and remember that it wasn’t real in the first place. The thing that bookmakers want you to do and you need to work hard to avoid is a temptation to throw good money after bad in order to ‘win it back’, but you can’t as you never had it anyway.
Make Sure You Understand The T&Cs
Free bets are awash with terms and conditions from the bookmakers that offer them, so making sure that you understand what is being asked of you is vitally important when you’re looking to get the most out of your free bet offers. The key thing that you’ll need to look out for is whether or not there are minimum odds in place on both the bets that you place initially to earn your free bet and the bet you place with your free wager.
Even things like the deposit method that you use to get money into and out of your account can result in your free bets becoming invalid or not even awarded in the first place, so don’t fall foul of something like that when it means that you’re likely to miss out on your free wager as a result. Similarly, the markets that you’re allowed to bet on and the sports that you can place it on are dictated to you, so keep an eye out for this information.
