When it comes to bookies offers, it isn’t only free bets that you should be looking at – plenty of sites also offer enhanced betting odds or ‘price boosts’ on popular markets, giving you better odds than you’d normally get. As with bonuses, the best price enhancements tend to go to new customers, but there are still plenty you can claim even if you already have accounts with all the bookies.
Existing Customer Offers
These offers are intended to reward loyal customers rather than attract new ones and can normally be claimed by any eligible account.
Ladbrokes offer odds boosts each day on a range of sports to both new and existing customers. When a boost is available it can be selected from your betting slip, and can also be found from the Odds Boosts section of your account page. These will increase the price you can have on that bet. A maximum stake of £50 per boost applies.
Each day, three Uniboost will be available to use on horse racing, greyhound racing and trotting. These can be selected when placing single bets by clicking on 'Uniboost' shown in your betting slip to enhance your odds on that selection.
How Do Odds Boosts Work?
Regular odds boosts work in two different ways. Some sites boost prices on specific bets – so you could get 2/1 instead of 6/4 for a favourite to win a big race, or 10/1 instead of 8/1 for a certain player to win a golf tournament. These bets are fixed meaning that you can choose to take the enhanced price (or not) but you can’t get the same increase on an alternative bet instead. Whilst these promotions are quite restrictive if you wanted to place that bet anyway it seems like a no brainer to take the bigger odds.
The second type of price boost is more flexible and allows you to choose the bet that you want better odds on. Normally you’ll be limited in the number you can receive whilst some enhanced odds tokens may be limit to specific markets or matches.
In the above example we had five boosts available:
- General Football Acca – available on any football accumulator with five or more legs.
- Daily Odds Boost – a flexible token which can be used on pretty much any sport and bet.
- Champions League Boost – limited to a handful of markets in a specific Champions League semi final match.
- Horse Racing Double – moving over to racing we have a token for a horse racing double.
- Horse Racing Single – and finally any horse to win from the days racing.
These offers are just to illustrate the kinds of things you’ll find as they change on a daily basis and will vary from bookmaker to bookmaker.
How Generous Are the Price Boosts?
The generosity of the promotions varies and generally speaking you’ll find that the more restrictive offers on a set market will normally offer bigger boosts than the free for all boosts, although that’s not always the case.
Taking the Champions League match mentioned earlier there is a fixed price boost offer for the Win + BTTS market that turns 5/1 into 6/1. When using a boost token at same bookmaker on the same match we can take the odds of a draw from 3/1 to 31/10 which is clearly a much smaller increase.
The reason for this should be fairly obvious. For defined bets they can calculate their exposure ahead of time whilst the general boost tokens are more of a wild card and as we all well know, bookies don’t like to get caught with their pants down.
What About Enhanced Odds Sign Up Offers?
The world of online betting is constantly evolving, and the betting landscape you see today is quite different to how it looked 10 years ago. Increased competition from new betting sites has challenged the older more established bookies, and forced everyone to up their offers in order to attract new customers and keep them betting.
One of the things that’s changed quite a lot over the years is how new customer sign up offers work. In the early days it was all about matched bets, with a straight £10 for £10 or £25 matched the norm. These days if you take a look at our free bets table you’ll notice that most now offer bonuses worth three or four times the deposit.
So where next? Recently we’ve been noticing more and more bookmakers offering significantly enhanced odds either as an alternative to their regular welcome bonus, or instead of it. Sometimes this is a fix multiple – such as 3x any bet – whilst other times it’s time sensitive and limited to a specific bet, such as Arsenal to beat Man United.
Most of these offers tend to be for football, with the occasional horse racing enhancement thrown in for good measure. You do sometimes see offers for other sports around big tournaments, but these are less common.
For the biggest tournaments all of the stops come out and we’ve seen some truly ridiculous offers in the past. Coral’s famous ‘2/1 for Brazil to wear Yellow’ during the World Cup cost them an arm and a leg, but delivered far more in press exposure than they paid out in winnings.
There are also tax changes afoot that could see bonuses taxed as if they were real money. This would mean that the £10 free bet the bookies has credited to your account will cost them money even if you lose it back. The new rule hasn’t worked it’s way into law yet so there’s still plenty of time for it to change, but if it stays in it’s current form we may well see more enhanced odds and less ‘traditional’ bonuses.