The main types of sportsbook promotions, and what each is worth

Sportsbook promos come in five common shapes: deposit matches, bet-and-gets, no-sweat bets, boosts, and parlay insurance. Each one is priced the same way: what the bet itself is worth at the price you took, usually a little negative because of the vig, plus what the promo adds on top. None of them make the sticker number ("100% up to $200," "bet $5, get $200") the number you actually end up with. (Not covered here: early payout offers, which pay a moneyline bet as a win once your team's lead gets big enough — same math, a different and much rarer trigger.)

Deposit match

A deposit match credits you a percentage of what you deposit, often 100% up to a cap, as bonus bets or site credit. It almost always comes with a catch: you have to wager the deposit some number of times (the "rollover" or "playthrough") before the bonus unlocks, usually within a set window and sometimes only on bets above a minimum price.

Two costs sit between the sticker number and what you actually get. First, the rollover itself is real money at risk: wagering it through at a typical -110 price with no edge costs about 4.5% in vig (a $1 bet at -110 pays 1.909 on a win, so a break-even bettor loses 1 − 0.5 × 1.909 ≈ 4.5 cents per dollar risked). Second, the bonus arrives as bonus bets, which only pay winnings, never the stake back, so they're worth a fraction of face value once you use them.

Say a book offers a 100% match up to $200 with a 1x rollover. You deposit $200 and wager it once, which costs about $9 in expected vig if you're not finding an edge. The $200 in bonus bets that unlocks is worth roughly 70 to 75% of face value if you hedge it at long odds, about $140 to $150. Net of the rollover cost, that deposit match is worth something like $131 to $141, not $200 — still real money, but closer to two-thirds of the banner figure than all of it. The multiple does most of the work: raise it from 1x to 10x on the same match and the net value can drop to barely a quarter of the banner figure. Exact rollover multiples, minimum odds, and deadlines vary by book and change often, so check your book's current terms before counting on a number.

Bet-and-get

"Bet $5, get $200 in bonus bets" is a different shape: place one real-money bet at or above the minimum, and you get the bonus regardless of whether that first bet wins. The first bet barely matters to the math — at -110 a $5 bet's own expected value is around -$0.23 — so almost the entire offer's worth is in the bonus bets themselves.

Books often split the bonus into smaller pieces (say, eight $25 bonus bets released over a week) rather than one lump sum. That doesn't change what they're worth: conversion rate depends on the odds you place each piece at, not its size. Converting $200 in bonus bets at a typical 70 to 75% still lands around $140 to $150, minus the few cents the qualifying bet cost. A "$200" bet-and-get is realistically worth something in that same $140-to-$150 range once you do the work to convert it. Keep the pieces separate rather than combining a few of them into one parlay: parlaying a bonus bet raises its average value only up to a few legs, then starts giving it back.

No-sweat bets and first-bet insurance

A no-sweat bet refunds your stake as a bonus bet if you lose, and does nothing if you win. Its value is the bet's own expected value at the price you took, plus the refund's expected value: how often you lose, times what the resulting bonus bet is worth at the odds you picked. Longer odds get more from this offer twice over — you collect the refund more often, and each refund is worth more once you convert it. The no-sweat bet calculator works it out for your own price and stake, and hedging it across two books can turn that average value into a locked-in number instead.

Odds boosts and profit boosts

An odds boost swaps the price for a better one; a profit boost multiplies your winnings by a percentage instead. Either way you end up with an ordinary bet at some new effective price, and the only question that matters is whether that new price still beats the fair price with the vig removed. A boost on a bet that was already bad can still be a bad bet; the size of the boost doesn't fix that on its own, and the profit boost calculator shows whether a given boost clears fair.

Parlay insurance

Parlay insurance refunds your stake as a bonus bet if exactly one leg of your parlay loses (a partial, not the whole ticket). It's priced like a no-sweat bet with a narrower trigger: the probability that exactly one leg loses, times what the refund is worth once converted, weighed against the parlay's own expected value, which is more negative than a straight bet's because vig compounds with every leg.

As an illustration with made-up but worked numbers: three independent legs, each a fair coin flip, have a 37.5% chance that exactly one loses (3 × 0.5 × 0.5²). A $25 stake on that parlay, priced by the book at 6.50 in decimal odds against a fair 8.00, has an expected value of 25 × (0.125 × 6.50 − 1) ≈ −$4.69 from the vig alone. If the insurance refunds the $25 stake as a bonus bet worth about 65% once converted (roughly what a +200 bonus bet converts to), that adds 0.375 × ($25 × 0.65) ≈ $6.09 in expected value. Together the parlay is worth about +$1.40 despite its own negative vig — the insurance is doing all the work. Change the number of legs, the odds, or how the refund is capped, and that answer moves; run your own numbers rather than assuming insurance always flips a parlay positive. Add a fourth or fifth leg and the trigger gets rarer faster than the refund can make up for it, so more legs isn't automatically better.

The same test every time

All five promos reduce to one question: what does the underlying bet return on its own, and what does the promo add. Neither piece is optional. A promo can rescue a slightly bad price, the way a no-sweat refund covers ordinary vig, but it can't rescue a price that's far from fair, and a bet that's good on its own is worth even more once a promo stacks on top of it. Work both pieces out — with the devig calculator for the bet, and the math above for the promo — before deciding whether to use one. None of these repeat often enough, or hedge cheaply enough in most of the US, to add up to the steady income UK matched betting claims to be; treat each one as its own one-time calculation.

Read your book's current terms before you bet: minimum odds, rollover requirements, expiry windows, and eligible markets vary by book and change often. Betting is for adults 21+ where legal, with money you can afford to lose.