10 Beginners Tips For Making Money From Extra Place Offers

 Reading Time: 8 minutes

Josh Hughes
Head Of Content

Extra place offers are a must if you’re serious about maximising your long term matched betting profits. But, they’re an advanced offer and it can take a bit of time to get familiar with completing them. 

To help you smash extra place offers and maximise your profits, we’ve compiled our 10 beginner tips. If you haven’t already, we’d recommend first checking out our Extra Places guide before discovering the 10 tips. 

Note: there are lots of different strategies and approaches to extra places. These tips are intended as a starting point. Over time you may deviate from some of these points as you find the strategy that suits you. 

1 - Take Your Time To Learn And Ask Questions

If you’d like to start profiting from extra place offers, then it’s important to first spend some time understanding exactly how they work. Invest the time now in learning how they work and it will make the process of starting so much easier. 

Give our Extra Places guide another read, play around with Outplayed’s Extra Place Catcher, and contact us or ask in our Facebook Group if you have any questions!

2 - Use Outplayed's Extra Place Catcher

It’s impossible to predict which horses are going to finish in the extra places. So, we maximise our profits by finding the horses which have the lowest qualifying losses and highest potential profits. 

Finding these horses manually would be extremely time-consuming. It would mean spending loads of time trying to compare the odds between the bookies and the exchanges and you would almost certainly end up missing out on lots of opportunities. 

That’s where Outplayed’s amazing Extra Place Catcher comes in. The Extra Place Catcher constantly compares the odds for all the day’s extra place offers. It then shows you exactly which horses have the lowest qualifying losses and highest potential profits. 

This makes finding extra place bets SO easy. You open up Outplayed’s Extra Place Catcher and the best bets are displayed right there on your screen. No need to waste your time trying to compare the odds yourself. 

If you're new to Outplayed, grab a 7 day trial here.

3 - Start With Small Stakes And Build Up Slowly

Whilst the big profits come from using larger stakes, it’s important to start slow and gradually build up the stakes as you get more experienced. 

We would recommend starting with £2 each-way stakes at first until you get the hang of things and can quickly place your bets.

On Outplayed’s Extra Place Catcher, you can use the Filter option to set your preferred each-way stake to £2. Then you can adjust this over time as your experience and bankroll grow. 

4 - Keep Your Qualifying Losses Low (But Look At Potential Profits Too)

Qualifying losses are just one of the factors to consider when looking at extra place offers. But, for the beginner they are an excellent benchmark for ensuring you are taking suitable bets. Although this isn’t set in stone, we’d recommend starting off by working roughly on the following qualifying loss amounts:

  • £2 each-way stake: A maximum £0.25 QL per horse
  • £5 each-way stake: A maximum £0.60 QL per horse

But remember that whilst small qualifying losses are very important, potential profits are a key consideration too. For example a total of £5 QL for a potential profit of £40-£70 on 5 horses in a race is much better than a total of £5 QL for a potential profit of £10-£40 on 5 horses in a race. 

As you get more experienced, you can start to consider Implied odds and the Value Betting strategy, which are covered in detail over on Outplayed

5 - Always Double Check Your Extra Place Bets

This may seem like an obvious one, but as a beginner it can be way too easy to make mistakes when placing your extra place bets. Particularly if you’re in a hurry to place your bets. 

Little mistakes can happen, like not ticking the each way box at the bookmaker, laying the wrong amount or laying the wrong horse. These common mistakes are easily done, but potentially quite costly. 

For this reason, you should always make sure that you double check each bet that you place and try to avoid betting whilst in a hurry or distracted! 

6 - Filter Out Horses That Are Strong Favourites Or Big Outsiders

Whilst starting out, it’s generally best to avoid horses that are either strong favourites or big outsiders in a race. These horses are thought to be much less likely to finish in the extra place position so this is why we recommend excluding them initially.

To do this, you can use the filters on the Outplayed Extra Place Catcher. We would recommend setting the minimum odds to 3.0 and the maximum odds to 25.0. This way the Extra Place Catcher will not show any horses that are strong favourites or big outsiders. 

Once you get more experienced, you could consider increasing the maximum odds limit that you follow to include outsiders with larger odds. Whilst these horses are often unlikely to finish in the extra places, they can sometimes offer very large potential profits for small qualifying losses. However, they do require a large liability so you should always consider if they are suitable for your bankroll. 

7 - Don’t Worry If There Are No Suitable Bets - Be Patient!

The best extra place opportunities tend to be on ITV Racing days and during major racing festivals. Whilst there are extra place races every day, if you don’t have lots of time then some days you may struggle to find any horses with suitable qualifying losses. 

When this happens, make sure you stick to the plan and ensure you are only taking bets with very small qualifying losses. Don’t be tempted to take larger losses simply to ensure you can get some bets on. These could be -EV and so you’ll probably end up regretting it. 

If you can’t find any suitable bets, either focus on some other offers and check again later on in the day. Or if you don’t have any spare time later on, just wait for tomorrow’s offers instead. 

8 - Identify Which Races Are Best For Extra Places

It can be a very good idea to be picky about which races you are going to focus on for extra places. Typically we want to focus on races where there are fewer runners, or where the bookies are offering more than one extra place. This way we can increase our chances of landing the extra place. 

For example, if we are comparing two horse races. One has 7 runners and the other has 12 runners. The bookies are offering 1 extra place on both races. All other things being equal, or chances of picking the horse that finishes in the extra place will be much higher in the race of 7 horses than in the race of 12 horses. 

Sometimes, the bookies will pay out more than one extra place. There will be some races where the bookies are paying two, maybe even three extra places. These are definitely races to focus your attention on, because these additional extra places significantly increase your chances of making a profit. In these cases, we can often accept slightly higher qualifying losses, and potentially bet on more horses in a single race than we might normally, because we know we have a much better chance of hitting an extra place.

9 - Keep A Record Of Every Extra Place Bet

We always recommend using some kind of profit tracker to record your overall profit/loss from each offer that you complete. This could be our Matched Betting Spreadsheet, or once you’ve signed up to Outplayed, they have a fantastic integrated profit tracker. 

But, it’s also a good idea to set up a separate spreadsheet where you can record all the each-way bets that you make. This is a really useful way to keep track of your results and will help you to refine your strategy over time. 

We would recommend creating a spreadsheet with the following columns: 

  • Race Time 
  • Horse Name
  • Back Odds
  • Win Lay + Place Lay Odds
  • Implied Odds
  • Qualifying Loss 
  • Potential Profit 
  • Overall Result - did you make a profit or just a qualifying loss? 

Whilst this may seem time-consuming at first, the information is all displayed on Outplayed’s Extra Place Catcher and you should become quick at copying it across to your spreadsheet. 

10 - Don’t Expect Big Profits Right Away

If you’re in our Facebook Group, you may have seen posts about members making thousands of pounds profit from extra place offers. And there is no reason why you can’t do the same. 

But, it’s important to understand that the big profits don’t happen overnight. It takes time to get comfortable with regularly completing extra place offers and to refine your strategy. And you should only increase your stakes gradually as you grow in experience and bankroll. 

So don’t expect big profits right away and don’t be put off if you don’t see immediate profits. Extra place offers are an advanced strategy that should be completed regularly over the long term to see the best results. Invest the time in learning and practicing extra places and over time you should see fantastic results. 

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Got Questions?

Be a part of our awesome Matched Betting community!

Join our Facebook group now, home to over 35,000 Matched Bettors!

It's the perfect place to ask questions and get help!

Facebook Group

New To Matched Betting?

We can't wait to help you start making tax-free cash from Matched Betting!

Head over to our free Tutorials to get started!

Free Tutorials!