LadBet Price Boosts

A price boost is straightforward in substance and easy to over-read in practice. We take a market, raise the price above where the model puts it, cap the stake, and put it on the front of the coupon. There is nothing hidden in that, and there is also less in it than the presentation suggests.

Where a boost comes from

Boosted prices are a marketing cost, and they are set deliberately rather than found.

The model price and the offered price

Every market has a price the trading model produces, including a margin. A boost offers something above that, which means the margin on that specific bet is reduced or reversed. We accept the cost because a boosted price gets attention, which is exactly the reason the stake cap exists alongside it.

Why the cap is there

Without one, a price offered above its true value would be taken for as much money as anybody could get on, and the cost would be unbounded. Capping at a modest amount makes it a promotional expense rather than an open liability. The cap is printed on the boost itself and is usually somewhere between £10 and £50.

Reading a boost properly

A boosted price is only worth taking if you wanted the selection at the original price, and that is a harder test than it sounds.

The question to ask

Would you have backed this at the unboosted price? If yes, the boost is straightforwardly good and you should take it up to the cap. If the honest answer is that the selection only looks interesting because the number has been raised, the boost has done its job as marketing and the bet is a worse one than it appears.

Boosts on long shots

A move from 25/1 to 33/1 sounds dramatic and changes the implied chance from about 3.8 per cent to about 2.9. In absolute terms that is a small shift on an outcome that was always unlikely. Boosts on short prices move the implied chance far more, and they get a fraction of the attention because the number looks less exciting.

What can and cannot be combined

Boosts sit alongside other promotions with some restrictions, all of which are on the boost itself.

• Free bets are generally not eligible on a boosted price. A boost is already a promotional cost and stacking a second one on top is not something any book offers.
• Acca insurance usually accepts a boosted leg, but the boosted selection has to meet the same minimum price condition as everything else.
• Best odds guaranteed does not apply to a boosted racing price, because you have already taken an enhanced price rather than a board price.
• Cash out is normally available, calculated against the boosted price rather than the original.

Where boosts appear

Concentrated where the audience is, which is honest rather than coy.

Football and racing

The bulk of them. Weekend football, major race meetings, and the occasional midweek European night. These are the markets with enough liquidity that a boost is noticed and enough coverage that customers can judge it.

Event-driven boosts

Fight nights, a darts major, the first day of a Test. These tend to be on higher-profile novelty-flavoured markets — a named player to score first, a specific finish — which is where a boost has the most visual impact and where the underlying price is hardest for a customer to check.

Boosts and the rest of the coupon

One practical point that gets missed because the boosted market sits away from the main list.

A boosted price is the same market as the unboosted one, so backing both is backing the same thing twice rather than covering two positions. Where a boost is capped at £20 and you wanted £50 on the selection, the sensible construction is £20 at the boosted price and £30 at the standard one, which the slip will hold as two separate bets. Doing it the other way round — taking the standard price for the lot because the cap is annoying — gives away free value for no reason at all.

A word about how they are presented

It is worth being direct about this, because a page written by the company offering the boosts has an obvious conflict.

A boost is designed to draw attention to a market you were not otherwise going to back. That is what promotions do, across every industry. The defence against it is not cynicism but a simple habit: decide the selection first, then look for a boost on it, rather than reading the boosts and picking from them. The first order produces occasional free value; the second produces a coupon chosen by our marketing team.

Everything else about offer mechanics, including the vocabulary that appears in the terms, is on the offer terms page.

The session clock in the app is worth a glance now and then. Somebody will answer on 0808 8020 133, free of charge, at any hour you ring it. You have to be 18 to bet at all.