The World Cup starts Thursday, so of course I have been perusing all the sportsbooks looking for anything interesting. A promo over at DraftKings caught my attention as something many of you may want to grab. But for me, I wanted to break it down and see what I’d need for it to be profitable even if the main bet loses.
The Offer
So the offer is that you get a bonus bet of $2 for every goal your team scores, if you place a minimum bet of $10 on them to win it all.
They hilariously use $5 bonus bets in their explanation of how it would be paid out:
For example, and for illustrative purposes only, if a customer places a Qualifying Bet on England to win the World Cup and the promotional offer is $5 in a Bonus Bet for each goal scored, the customer would receive a $5 Bonus Bet for each goal England scores during the tournament. If England scores 8 goals by the end of the Group Stage, 5 additional goals by the end of the Quarterfinal stage, and 3 additional goals by the end of the tournament, England would have scored 16 total goals. The customer would receive a total of $80 in Bonus Bets. In this example, $40 in Bonus Bets would be awarded after the Group Stage, $25 in Bonus Bets would be awarded after the Quarterfinal stage, and $15 in Bonus Bets would be awarded after the Final.
How many goals do we need?
On its face, that seems like a simple equation: $10 in, 5 goals = $10 in bonus bets, done deal. But bonus bets are freeplay, you can’t just cash that out. You have to bet it again.
What we can do is bet the freeplay on one site and make a real bet on another site, playing the opposite side. One of them will win and we’ll have extracted some real money. However, not the full amount. To figure out how much we’ll make, you can use a freeplay calculator like this one: https://www.sportsbookreview.com/betting-calculators/freeplay-calculator/
As you can see in this example, you’re getting about 43% of that $10 back. We can likely do better than -110 on both sides, but let’s for the sake of round numbers consider that we cannot. In fact, we can only extract about 40%.
In that case, you need about $25 freeplay x 40% = $10 cash. That means 13 goals needed. Definitely not a sure thing, but let’s keep going.
You can improve that by finding better odds to hedge with, for example +100 at one site and -105 for the opposite side at another. Or from a straight expected value standpoint, just betting one side at -110 (no guarantees on that outcome though).
Who am I taking?
I want to consider a few things: a team likely to advance (more games more opportunities), a team that scores a bunch, and a group that will give up some goals.
You end up with mainly Spain and France as they’re heavy favorites, even to make it to the round of 16 where they are -375 and -377 respectively at a market maker site. With Spain’s group probably being a little less defensively inclined and my heritage pulling me towards them, that’s where I’ll lay my $10. I know they’re the tourney favorites, but who cares, the bonus bets are not decreased any based on their likelihood to win.
All that said, this is a fun bet if you already have someone you wanted to lay money on as it’s just a little bit extra for every goal. But it is interesting (at least to me) to run through it and see just how much you’d need to squeeze out a profit, even in a loss.
-Chorizy-E
