If you are not familiar with the concept — casino bonus hunting takes advantage of lucrative free cash offers from casinos. These offers require you to place a certain number of bets before you can cash out the free money. As long as the free cash is greater than the amount you give back to the casino during the wagering requirement then you will make a profit. The casinos actually want you to take their money – these bonuses are designed as loss-leaders and they hope to recoup their losses from future play.

The key is to avoid the mistakes that regular gamblers make.

- Don’t play slots as these have a high house edge. Play a low house edge game like blackjack.
- Stop playing when the bonus is withdrawable. Each extra bet you place is giving money back to the casino. The cash is yours now.

How does this work in practice?

Let’s take the current Gamebookers casino bonus as an example: deposit €100, receive €50 bonus then wager €1000 before cashing it out. The expected profit on blackjack is €45 but that doesn’t tell you anything about the risk.

By using the blackjack bonus simulator (at http://www.casibot.com), we can determine that the probability of making a loss with €1 bets is about 9%.

Gamebookers have tables as low as €0.1. Playing that low could raise suspicion with casino managers but a bet of €0.5 would be reasonable. So, what is the probability of making a loss now? By using the simulator we can see that the probability of making a loss is less than 3%. This is a very low risk offer.

The problem is that if you bet this low, it’s going to take forever to clear the bonus. Even at €1/hand you may be looking at 3 hours to clear the wagering requirement. At other casinos with larger wagering requirements you may be looking at over 30 hours of monotonous clicking to clear the bonus at £1/hand.

The first solution is to up your stakes. Let’s say you get bored grinding away at £1/hand for hours (who wouldn’t?) and want to finish the Gamebookers bonus in the next half an hour so you up your stakes to €5/hand. The bonus simulator now tells us that we have a 28% chance of making a loss and a 5% chance of losing our whole €100 deposit. Risking €100 for a €45 expected profit doesn’t sound like such a great offer.

The second, more popular, solution is to get an autoplayer or blackjack robot to do it for you. A few casinos do have autoplay on their blackjack tables (Intercasino, 32Red, Ladbrokes for example). It is usually not available on the lowest house edge games but it will get the job done. If the casino doesn’t have in built autoplay then you will need to use an external robot. This plays just like a human with the benefit that you don’t have to be at the PC while you are clearing the bonuses. The disadvantage is that it is going to cost you money upfront but in the long run you will recoup this many times over.

The cheapest and most popular blackjack robot is Casibot (http://www.casibot.com) which starts out at £40 for a single PC license blackjack bot with about £500 worth of bonuses supported (at the time of writing this article).

Once you have mastered blackjack bonuses and built up your bankroll then you may want to move onto their Video Poker bot where much greater returns are possible. This comes with a greater risk and is not suitable for beginners.

It is important to remember that bonus hunting is gambling. Even with the odds stacked heavily in your favour, it is still possible to lose money and you should not gamble with money that you can’t afford to lose. However, if you follow the tips here you should be able to greatly reduce your risk of making a loss.

Visit The Casibot Website

Casino games are created with a house advantage and no betting strategy will overcome this. However, you can make money by bagging the free cash handed out by online casinos to new players. Casinos entice players by offering bonuses which come with attached “wagering requirements”. Provided your expected loss to the casino due to the house advantage is less than the total free money offered by the casino, you can make a profit.

A real example

Party Casino offered a £200 bonus with a £8000 wagering requirement. Their “Single Player Blackjack” game has a house edge (the amount of each bet you lose to the house) of about 0.5% if you play perfectly. If you were to place £1 bets on 8000 hands until you clear the bonus you would expect to lose £8000*0.5/100 = £40 of your original deposit. After being credited with a £200 bonus you will expect to net on average a £160 profit.

The Casibot blackjack bot is ideally suited to both new bonus hunters and experienced pros. New bonus hunters should check the How It Works section before starting to play. You can easily turn £100 into £500 with only a few mouse clicks and minimal risk. Setting up the bot is simple, in many cases you just need to press “Play”. In the long run Casibot will save you hundreds of hours of time.

Casibot offers a Free Trial to get you started. There’s no need to provide any details. Try it out now and discover why Casibot is the most popular bonus hunting bot!

Visit: The Casibot site and claim your free trial

After yesterday’s balls up with the radio show (Sorry Jon, I’ll ring you after this post) I have now had a chance to put some of my considered settings in to InPlayMaster. If you fancy a laugh click the TalkShow play button on the right. InPlayMaster is now set for today’s racing and my settings are on the left. The settings are pretty self explanatory but if you have any questions please comment below.

The software downloaded and installed without difficulty and there is a well written, comprehensive InPlayMaster bot manual which you can download.

The Inplaymaster Scalping Bot

InPlayMaster is an in running bot for UK horse racing. It takes you into the final furlongs, the closing stages of EVERY UK horse race. It’s largely automated and will jump onto the next race without any interference from me but I do have to enter the races manually using control and left click to select and then okay when done. It took a few minutes but I would have liked to see them loaded and ready.

This bot can back or lay based on horses that are lagging behind. It has safety triggers so it won’t just bet on one price alone. It is only concerned with the final stages of a race and when the leading horse gets to between 1.02 and 5 it will look at the other runners. If it then finds the second and third are between those settings also it will lay the worst horse between 5.00 and 20.00 for a stake of £10. These are my settings and I have also set it to only leave the bet up for 10 seconds.

The in play delay is set to 20 seconds because like the software’s developer, Nick, I’ve found betfair can go a little haywire when it goes from “suspended” to “in-running” and this delay settles the odds so the bot does not fire wildly. This means the race will be underway for 20 seconds before it can fire a bet into the market.

Ladies and gents, it should be an interesting first day with my settings for InPlayMaster and I wish you all good luck, as always.

You can get the InPlayMaster Scalping Bot by clicking here, Your first months subscription to Inplaymaster is just £14.99.

Win A copy of BetBotPro: BetBotPro Competition

During the month of October 2008 I had the opportunity to use BetBot Pro to fully cover a mix of UK, Irish, US and South African horse racing and UK greyhounds. The selections have been made using a recovery staking plan of between 60% and 80% over two races where there is a loss. I have currently settled for a recovery of 70%.

I have found the software to be stable and on the couple of occasions where there were CPU challenges because I have several applications running I have been able to close it during racing and it magically takes up where it left off when started again. This is because it writes the daily data, after you have made your selections, in to its own folder.

Regular readers will know that Bet Bot Pro waits to see if a recovery is needed by waiting for Betfair settlement. This will always raise the potential for unnecessary recoveries and this is, indeed, what happens. A fault of the software? Of course not. That is the only way it can operate to be 100% accurate.

The Initial stake I used was £1.00 with a bank of £10,000. I was aiming for a daily return of 1% which was exceeded and I had a stop loss of £4000. The minimum number of runners was 6 and that has been changed to eight for the last week.

One of the most attractive features I found was the Back/Lay Ratio % which I had at 10%. It helps avoid lays where the market is thin and bad value. This is essential for non UK horse racing.

I found Bet Bot Pro very easy to use. There is a free three day trial and there were no problems in set up – it took less than 5 minutes. I set up BetbotPro to run from mid day to midnight and it did its stuff, day in, day out.

There are many “edges” you can get in this and other financial markets. The traditional way to get an edge in horse racing is to study the form and career stats for horses, jockeys and trainers and research course stats by meeting for jockeys and trainers with runners at the relevant meeting – and loads, loads more.

BetbotPro will not, of course, do any of that for you. It’s simply a mechanism for placing bets, either on your specific selections (where hopefully you’ve done some of the above) or going against or with the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th favourite.

Bet Bot Pro can automatically place Back OR Lay bets on UK, US, AUS, RSA Horse & UK, AUS Greyhound races depending on your criteria. It’s a massive timesaver. It takes just 5-10min to make your daily selections if you choose that option.

It’s got a minimum and maximum odds range filter so it only places bets if they’re within your limits.It can place bets 1sec – 10min before the race starts and has a minimum or maximum number of runners filter.

If you want to focus just on a staking plan which is what I did for this month’s review then there are several. You can go with level stakes, % bank stake, fixed liability, % bank liability or % recovery staking.

It has a stop loss and profit target to ensure you limit losses for the day and stops when your profit target is hit. This is a great safety feature and one I use every day. It also has a trailing stop feature to protect profits already won.

There is an unsettled bets allowed filter which stops betting until last x bets have been settled. Mine was set to 3. And BetbotPro runs while you’re away at work or doing other things.

So that’s it for this month’s software review. My conclusion is that, in the right hands, this is a bot that does exactly what is says on the can. The permutations you can use to extract a profit from the markets above are substantial. I liked it. Yes, it made a profit. Will it for you? No idea. It depends on what you do with it.

Now I move on to the only negative which does impact on the profit. After several hard days of recovery stakes BetbotPRO decides enough is enough and stops recovering and just goes in to level staking. I first reported that here and it happened again yesterday. I came back and noticed several missed recoveries so I downloaded another BetbotPRO and ran the two applications side by side and checked and double checked all settings as they were running. They were identical.

I really don’t know what is causing this but in terms of risk the problem is minimal. It’s just a shame that several recovery opportunities were missed for a couple of hours which reflects in a lower profit. The stakes therefore increased during racing yesterday but with recovery only on half the stake the exposure was still well within limits that I find comfortable. I only posted the new BetbotPRO results in the daily results section. The failed recovery bot lost £9.86. Neither are included in the summary below.

Well that’s it from MOM Towers in Malta for today. Stay safe wherever you are and good luck to you all as always.

Try for Free

Grab yourself a copy of Bet Bot Pro Here, there is even a free trial available! And with stakes as low as 10 pence you can try new stategies with real results for little risk. A summary of my daily results until Tuesday, 28th October 2008 is below.

See the full results at BetBotPro Daily Betting Result.

Currently during in running your bets will be placed with a delay if there are bets in the market to match you or else your bets will be placed immediately with no delay. This will be confusing to people moving over from Betfair. This allows a bot that is currently being run in certain markets during in running Betdaq matches to compare the price you offer versus the prices in Betfair and checks if it can offer a slightly better price than you yet lower than Betfair’s. There may be many bots appearing soon on Betdaq because bets can be immediately placed during in running at certain prices.

There is also currently no keep bets facility on Betdaq for manual players. You have to re submit your bets when the race is turned in-play. But you can perform a Betfair type ‘keep bet’ if you use the API. Interestingly, you can use expiry time as well, so if you use the API you can keep a bet for the first 30 seconds of the race.

Liquidity on in running for most markets isn’t great right now, but Betdaq’s matching delay for non bot clients isn’t helping much. I’ll do my little bit to help shortly. A bot? Of course!

On a final note you can now see the liquidity increasing pre race in the example above. Great news.

Ladies and gents, have a great day and good luck to you, as always.

The Grey Horse Bot

This betfair in running software replaces the first Greyhound bot the Grey Horse bot allows you to now use the Greyhound Horse & Football markets on Betfair.
The Improved built in staking plan has added new features that substantially increase the range of scenarios that the user can now use the bot for.

Automatic under £2.00 betting

The GHB (Grey Horse Bot) has automated under £2.00 betting. Simply add your selections, set the odds range (eg 1.50 to 4.00) insert the stake size (0.50) and let GHB do the rest.

But GHB is far more sophisticated than just an under £2.00 betting bot.

GHB allows you to set up specific scenarios to suit you. In manual mode you select the runners you want to bet on, which you can back up with a number of configurable options. NR’s or Market value.
In auto mode GHB allows you select 1 or multiple runners based on price, movement of price, matched volume to name a few of the features.

Inplaymaster

A Pure in running Scalping bot that can give you fantastic results if you bet “In Running” on horse racing.

Developed specifically for Nick Owen this bot really does show off where a bot beats humans hands down. This bot is specifically for the “in running” market on betfair and although it’s possible for human to bet exactly at the right time during a race you have to be very, very quick.

Inplaymaster takes all the stress out of betting so quickly but even more it can monitor other runners and their prices to pick the exact best time to bet, which would be almost impossible for a human to do.

UltraXtrader

UltraXTRADER is one of the first Betfair X-Games bots to give you full automated betting. In fact, it has 3 unique modes so that you can bet easily the way you prefer.

Manual one click betting. You can simply click to place a bet. The bot will tell you if there is a profitable trade available and if there is you can simply click again to trade out.

uto Mode. In this mode you can simply click to make a bet, but ultraXTRADER will trade out automatically.

Full Auto. This is one of the most exciting features of ultraXTRADER, and allows you set up simple or very complex rules that tell ultraXTRADER when to make a bet and when to make a trade.

Visit Now to find out more:

The Grey Horse Betfair Bot

In Play Master

Ultra Xtrader