Enhanced Smarkets Sign-Up Offer & Making the Most of It

Smarkets are currently running an enhanced offer, with additional ‘refer-a-friend’ bonuses, on their site.

Their previous offer awarded customers with a £10 cash refund on their first losing £10 bet. This meant that you could keep betting £10 until you eventually lost! The winnings were essentially freerolled. 

The new Smarkets enhanced sign-up offer is now even better, giving users the £10 cash refund and the ability to claim more £10 refunds for each friend referred.

To take advantage of this offer, you need to complete the following steps:

Offer Instructions

1. Sign up to Smarkets via this link
2. Deposit and bet at least £20
3. Verify your account
4. You will receive up to £10 ‘risk-free’ refund on your first losing bet

Full terms of the offer can be found here: https://help.smarkets.com/hc/en-gb/articles/115000844052-Refer-a-Friend-bonus-terms-conditions

We advise that all users check terms as you are responsible for ensuring you abide by them at all times. 

How to Make the Most Profit from this Offer

The first recommendation would be to refer as many friends as you can. Each user is limited to 50 referrals, but that adds up to £1,000 in free bets – not a bad figure!

Please note: this guide was written for the enhanced £20 offer. The steps are the same, but please note that you should swap £20 for £10 (and halve the profit/stakes) where appropriate. 

Let’s look at how we can lock in profit on the other part of the offer; the £20 refund.

We can do this by using another site in addition to Smarkets – either a bookmaker or an exchange – to make sure we have all of the outcomes covered for a sporting event. Let’s say it’s a football match.

All we have to do is find any football match on a bookmaker site and then search for that match on Smarkets too.

Above we can see the odds on England vs Belgium. They’re decimal odds, as we always use in matched betting.

Now we can compare those odds with the odds on Smarkets:

Unsurprisingly, if you know anything about bookmakers, the difference in odds between the bookie (William Hill) and the exchange (Smarkets) is very high.

This essentially means you’re getting a much less fair price when using William Hill in this instance.

However, we can make use of William Hill (or any other bookmaker) to make a profit on the Smarkets enhanced new customer offer.

Alternatively, a method that should be more profitable – and the method we’ll show here – is using another betting exchange. We’ll use Betfair Exchange for this example (sign up here if you don’t have an account already).

Firstly, we load up the matched betting calculator.

We input our stake, odds and commission into the calculator. Let’s say that, for this example, we’re betting on England.

The odds to back England on Smarkets (the green box) are 2.86.

The odds to lay England on Betfair (the red box, on Betfair) are 2.88.

The only other things we’ve needed to add to the calculation is 2% commission on our ‘back’ bet, as Smarkets takes 2% commission, and 5% commission on the ‘lay’ bet, as that is what Betfair take.

We’d also need £37.51 in our Betfair Exchange balance (shown as ‘liability’ in the image above) to be able to afford to lay this bet off; you’ll need less if you choose a bet with lower odds.

Usually we break these bets into two stages – a qualifying bet and a free bet – but this isn’t required here…it’s profit from the get-go!

After entering the figures into the calculator, you can see we’re supposed to lose £1.05 by placing this bet.

But, remember:

We’ll have a £20 cash refund bet to come when our bet loses.

We calculate our profit on this offer by taking our £20 stake and then subtracting the qualifying loss (£1.05 in this example). Our profit for this offer is £18.95…so far.

Once this match finishes, we may have the chance to make the same amount again…and again…and again…you get the point.

If your bet with Smarkets wins, we have the option to bet again using exactly the same strategy and calculations as above.

This is because this offer refunds your first losing £20 – a lot of bookies will simply offer a refund if your first bet loses, rather than when like Smarkets do.

Every time you win at Smarkets, you’ll have the chance to profit around £18 until you eventually lose.

Alternatively, if you don’t like this low-risk assured profit, you could just gamble your ‘risk-free’ bet over and over again.