The days of traditional loyalty schemes are behind us, but bookmakers have found new ways to reward regular customers.
Say hello to free bet clubs.
If you thought free bets were reserved for new customers you were wrong. These long running promotions are designed for existing customers and usually credit qualifying accounts on a weekly basis.
Bettors love them because they add regular extra value to their betting spends. The fact that most free bet clubs are established promotions also allows bettors who strategize to plan ahead. Perhaps they will use their bet to hedge against something else, for example.
These clubs also allow punters with a portfolio of betting accounts to double, treble or even quadruple the benefits. If you bet with three different sites that all have free bet clubs and regularly wager enough to cover the qualifying requirements of all three, you can split your wagers across each site accordingly and bag all three free bets.
You don’t want to bet more than usual just to trigger the promotion though. This is all about making smart decisions. The idea is to find a club (or two) that works for you within the parameters of your regular responsible betting activity.
I will explain everything you need to know about them below, as well as recommending a few of the best.
Current Free Bets Clubs
Place a £5+ accumulator on any sport, pre-match or in-play, and you can get an Acca Loyalty Stamp. Once you have collected five of these stamps you can get a free £5 bet to use on another acca. To qualify your bets must have at least five legs, with combined odds 3/1 (4.0) or greater. Applies to first settled accumulator each day only.
How Do They Work?
There is no one size fits all answer to this question. Each site has its own terms and conditions.
However, while the specifics may vary, the general idea is the same industry wide.
The three main things to consider are:
- Time period
- Real money value of bets required to qualify
- Free bet value
The free bet club will run for a set period of time – let’s say from 00:01 on a Monday morning to 11:59pm on Sunday evening. A punter can join the promotion at any time during this period, but only bets made within it will count.
Those bets will also have to hit a minimum requirement in order to trigger the free bet. Sometimes it is one set amount, perhaps £50 worth of qualifying bets on all sports; other times it may be a set amount on specific sports, so only bets on football would count, or horse racing, or whatever the terms stipulate.
Provided you make the minimum required bets within the set time frame, you will be credited with a free bet.
The free bet might be worth a percentage of the bets you made or it may be a set amount regardless of how much you spent on your bets over the minimum amount. You may be able to break it down into multiple smaller free bets, you may have to use it all in one go, you may only be able to use it on specific markets. It depends on how the bookie has structured the offer.
At the end of the week the promotion resets and you can do it again.
Common Terms and Conditions
You should always read the terms and conditions specific to the promotion you are interested in, but I will talk about the most common ones here.
First, some of these free bet clubs automatically enrol customers, others need you to manually ‘opt in’. This is just a case of clicking a button on the promotion page, but if you don’t do it your bets won’t count so do check.
Another thing to be careful of is the date your bets will settle. Usually, the bets must be placed and settled within the set time frame. So if you make a bet that settles a few days after the cut off point it may not count towards your total. If you were relying on that bet to meet the minimum bet value cap, you’re going to be disappointed when your free bet isn’t credited.
Minimum odds is another common one. These often apply to the qualifying bets and the terms of your free bet. You might need to make bets of evens or greater in order for them to qualify towards the promotion, and once your free bet lands, you may have to wager it on a market with odds of evens or greater too. The specific minimum odds will vary, but I would be amazed to find a free bet club that didn’t mention them at some stage.
A less common one, but in my view something that sets good free bet clubs apart from bad ones, is wagering requirements. These are also called rollover requirements. It’s when a bookie states that any bonus (free bet) needs to be wagered through a set number of times before any winnings can be released as cash. It might be: £10 free bet with 3x wagering. So you would need to wager £30 in real money before the free bet winnings became withdrawable. It makes it harder to win money from your free bet basically.
Last but not least, free bets expire. It’s common to see expiry periods of 7 days so you would need to use them before then or they would disappear. You can’t stockpile them for weeks then go on a free betting spree I’m afraid.