We’ve all seen the adverts on the television – loud repetitive jingles being played with flashing lights, celebrities offering great free bet offers across a wide variety of sporting markets and images, of punters spending all the money they’ve won through these great deals. Seems easy to get free cash out of these companies doesn’t it? Well, sometimes it certainly is; sometimes, however, the deals aren’t quite what they seem. This article will aim to ensure you don’t get caught out by marketing campaigns that can lose you more than you could ever wish to gain.

I became interested in gathering up and using as many free online bets as I could when given a guide by a friend as how to ‘off-set risk’ by using a popular trading company, and it worked successfully for me. In that time I visited around 20 websites and used their special introductory offer each time to make some money.

Certain companies appeared instantly to be more generous than others, allowing new customers to put free wagers on up to £200 a time it appeared. This seemed very good when compared to those offering ‘just’ £50 to new customers or less. As with everything that seems too good to be true though, it became clear that there was a catch.

Many new customer offers have certain terms and conditions that, whilst they are not trying to catch people out so they lose money, do tend to ask customers to gamble more than they initially intended.

For instance, the following conditions will typically be requested before the amount of money offered as a free wager can be given, or before the user can withdraw any profits from the site:

• Typically the minimum odds for activating or using a free bet will be evens, or 2.0. Ensure you check this out, as this automatically means that your opening gamble is going to have to be on an event that is by no-means guaranteed.
• An amazing ‘£200’ offer may be split across a number of wagers. For instance, they may give you a £50 free bet but then ask you to gamble the same amount 5 times before you can have another ‘free’ wager of the same value. This could prove to be exceedingly expensive if you end up losing a lot of these!