What’s the difference between a bonus and a promo?

A promo is an offer that can take many shapes and forms. One of those forms is as a bonus, meaning that in effect, receiving a bonus is a type of promo. But it’s not the only one. Let’s have a look at the different types of offers available.

The Welcome Bonus

Each and every online betting site worth its salt will offer a welcome bonus. There’s a huge amount of competition among betting sites focused on the Indian market like 10CRIC, Betway and Pure Win to get new customers through the (virtual) door, which is the hardest part.

So they need to have welcome offers- rewards for new customers for opening accounts with them- that are at the very least competitive with what other sites are doing.

Or even better: more generous than what their competitors are offering. Here you can easily see what the betting sites in India are currently giving out as a welcome offer.

Normally, a welcome offer will mostly be made up of a big deposit bonus on your first (or first three) deposits. It may then also include something else like a free bet. Or if the site also has a casino, some free spins on a particular slot.

What are decimal odds?

Decimal odds were introduced in the early 2000s to replace the traditional fractional odds that had been used mostly by UK-based betting sites up to that point.

They’re now the type of odds used by the vast majority of betting sites, though in most cases you can convert odds shown on a betting market to fractional or american odds if users prefer to use those instead.

How to use decimal odds

As we said above, your starting point should be the number 2.0. Bigger and it’s odds-against, smaller and it’s an odds-on chance.

One of the reasons decimal odds were introduced is that they already include your stake when calculating how much you can win from the bet.

If you bet 100 Rupees on something at 5.0, then your payout would be 500 Rupees. Customers should be aware that this means you get your 100 Rupees back, while the other 400 Rupees would be profit.

So a 5.0 chance is actually a 4/1 shot, a 10.0 shot is 9/1, a 25.0 bet is at odds of 24/1 and so on.

In other words, you need to subtract 1 (which represents your stake) from the decimal odds to get the number you’ll win at.

Not all decimal odds are nice, round figures, though. But the principle is the same; If you placed a bet at 2.8 for 100 Rupees, you’d win 180 plus of course, your initial 100.

What is betting value?

Imagine a coin toss where you and a friend are betting on the outcome of it. Odds of 2.0 on either outcome are exactly what they should be.

Odds of say 1.9 are too short because after all, there’s no reason why you should be paid at less than 2.0 when it’s exactly a 50/50 chance. Also known as getting poor value.

But if your friend for some reason offered you odds of 2.1, that would be an example of betting value: getting paid out at higher odds than the mathematical probability of that event happening.

Bookmakers occasionally offer betting value on all manner of markets, including cricket betting ones and football. You just need to know how to recognise it.

How to find betting value

This isn’t easy to do but the best way to find betting value is to work out yourself what the odds should be on a particular outcome.

And you need to do this before you actually see what the genuine odds are.

Let’s say that after studying all the possible factors such as recent form, head-to-head records, team news and the conditions, you decide that India should be 1.7 to beat Australia in Bangalore.

This isn’t an exact science but as long as you trust your methods and are confident you’ve worked out the odds accurately yourself, then that’s good enough.

If when you look, India are 1.85, then that can be considered betting value: the odds are higher than they should be.