BR - Bonus Rugging 101
Discover more from BowTiedBettor
Do you have a friend who likes betting and would like to sharpen his/her action? Help them on their path by sharing the BowTiedBettor Substack. Win and help win!
Welcome Avatar!
Betting is as we all know widely regarded as a thing reserved for retards, especially in midwit circles, since “the house always wins”. As for all 100 IQ statements, there is of course much more to it. There are countless ways to prove the assertion wrong, and one of the simplest ones will be discussed today. With this post we will present our most popular betting strategy (in particular for newcomers) which by itself will make you enough money to cover a couple years of Jungle subscription expenses.
Is this your first time reading about betting? Consider having our Betting 101 open in another tab to be able to look up terms and concepts you have not heard of before.
What is bonus rugging?
Bonus rugging is a betting strategy that allows you to benefit from bookmakers’ free bet bonuses, offers and incentives to make risk-free profits. Unlike traditional betting, where you take on risk trying to predict an outcome, BR cleverly neutralizes all risk by taking advantage of multiple incentives across bookies and hedging your positions with counter bets, thereby guaranteeing profit.
The common theme of bookmakers’ welcome offers are that they are intended to acquire new -EV gamblers rather than for you as a customer to ‘abuse’ and make risk-free returns on. However, since their marketing departments are not sophisticated enough to distinguish between a shark and a fish, oftentimes there are lots of free money sent your way even if you know what you are doing.
A rudimentary implementation
To execute a bonus rugging strategy, you simply place a bet with the bookmaker who offered you the free bet/sign-up bonus and then bet against the same outcome with a different bookie. This allows you to cover all potential outcomes, eliminate your risk, and lock in a profit irrespective of the final result of the game.
In our basic example, we will take advantage of the welcome offer at Unibet and hedge it using DraftKings.
Step 1 - Find a suitable offer
We begin by locating a suitable opportunity. The easiest way to do this is either by visiting our website or by simply searching the web.
In our case Unibet offers to “double your deposit up to 250 USD”. Hence the right choice is to deposit $250 and thus receive an additional $250 in bonus money, resulting in an account balance of $500.
Note: This balance is not withdrawable until fulfillment of the wagering requirements connected to the offering.
Step 2 - Place a qualifying bet
When placing our qualifying bet we are looking to find a market where the odds at Unibet and DraftKings are “good enough” to avoid high friction costs. This can be done either manually or by using online scraping services and a complete description of how to perform this step can be found in our practical post.
At the time of writing, we have found that the moneyline market in the football matchup San Francisco 49ers @ Atlanta Falcons [San Francisco 1.49 (-205) at DraftKings, Atlanta 2.85 (+185) at Unibet] offers a decent take for our purposes. Hence, to complete step 2, we wager our full Unibet account balance of $500 on Atlanta Falcons 2.85.
Step 3 - Place a counter bet at DraftKings to neutralize your position
In order to hedge our current $500 Atlanta Falcons position we have to get money down on the other outcome, something that can be done by betting “just the right” amount on San Francisco 49ers. To find this amount, we navigate to the Qualifying Bet Calculator and feed it the information for our unhedged bet. The calculator then performs a computation and returns the below output.
We proceed by navigating to DraftKings and deposit $956. To finalize step 3, we then place the recommended bet of $956 on San Francisco 49ers at an odds of 1.49.
Step 4 - Post-game
As the game ends there are now two possible scenarios.
Case 1: San Francisco 49ers wins the game.
We now possess $0 on our Unibet account and $1 422 (956 × 1.49) on our DraftKings account, funds that are withdrawable since we have not utilized any bonus offer at DraftKings.
Net profit = $1422 - $250 (Unibet deposit) - $956 (DraftKings deposit) = $216. Not bad for 20 minutes of work.
Case 2: Atlanta Falcons wins the game. We now have 2.85 × 500 = $1 425 on our Unibet account and $0 on our DraftKings account. The funds on our Unibet account are not yet withdrawable and a portion of them need to be wagered a second time. Unibet has a rollover requirement of 4 × the bonus amount, meaning that in order to request withdrawals we would need to bet another $500 to meet the required $1 000 threshold.
Net profit: No locked in profit *yet* since a second bet is necessary. However, since our Unibet balance is $1 425 and our deposits amount to $1 206 → currently +$219, we can expect something along the lines of $180-190 in net profit after the next bet has been settled.
A couple of notes
We have deliberately chosen to keep this introductory discussion on the subject *extremely* simple to get everyone on board. Discussions on more involved topics such as,
Rugging multiple offers at once to minimize turnover & maximize profits.
Optimal strategies for different propositions.
Minimization of friction costs.
Acquiring VIP status at sportsbooks to generate a greater stream of promotions/offers.
will follow in coming posts.
If you are from Europe/Australia and have access to a betting exchange [Betfair, Smarkets etc.], the process can be simplified even further. This case will be covered thoroughly on the Substack in due time.
There will be comprehensive guides for the most popular sportsbook offers out there.
Commonly these kinds of propositions range between $80 and $800 in value post ‘fees’ while requiring ~ 30 minutes of your time.
Access to all further non-101 posts on the subject will be restricted to paid subscribers.
As you all notice this scheme is *very straightforward* and since you are on this side of the web we would be hugely surprised if you do not manage to get this done after having spent some time with the rest of our BR-material. However we do realize that new ideas often cause confusion initially and if you feel disoriented right now you should know that you are in good company. If you have questions, please do not be afraid of asking them either in the comments section below, on Twitter or in our Discord server!
A closing note worth mentioning since this is applicable once per ID and is, at least in some parts of the world, highly lucrative:
One could *easily* turn this into a business where you help friends, friends’ friends and so on turn their offers into cash. If you are a true grinder, congratulations on just having bumped into what in hindsight might evolve into one of the most impactful readings of your life (go ahead and do the math, back in the days we used to clear ~ 60-70 persons/identities per month). Just make sure to check tax and betting rules in your jurisdiction before you jump straight into it.
What is next?
Our BR-material has been updated extensively since this BR 101-guide was first released. Continue your BR-adventure by reading the following free 101’s (cursorily if pressed on time), then go straight to our practical post, read it thoroughly, and begin executing!
All of our free bonus rugging material is available on the website as well.
Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of mathematicians who moved into betting.
BR - Bonus Rugging 101
Awesome post.
Hello need a bit of advice, I am not based in America or NY state anymore. Would this be possible to do from abroad if I buy a personalized IP address on a VPN that no one else uses?