A bookmaker hands you a $50 bonus bet. It sits in your account looking like $50, but you cannot withdraw it, you cannot split it, and if the bet loses you get nothing back. Promo bashing is the practice of covering the other side of that bet somewhere else, so that whichever way the game goes, you finish with real cash instead of a coin flip.

None of it is free money. You are trading the chance of a big win for a smaller, steadier result, and you only keep part of the bonus. How big that part is depends on the odds you can find, and that is the bit this site helps with.

First, work out which kind of bonus you have

Almost every Australian promo is one of two shapes, and the difference changes the maths a lot.

SNR (Stake Not Returned)

You get the winnings only. Back a $50 bonus at odds of 4.00 and a win pays you $150, not $200. This is what most AU bonus bets are.

SR (Stake Returned)

You get the winnings plus the stake back, exactly like a normal cash bet. Rarer, and worth noticeably more, so it converts higher.

If the terms do not say, assume SNR. Getting this wrong is the most common way people end up with a hedge that is the wrong size.

How the hedge works

You place the bonus bet on your selection at the bookmaker. Then you cover the same selection somewhere else, either by laying it on the Betfair Exchange (betting that it will not happen) or by backing the opposite result at a second bookmaker. One side wins, the other loses, and the gap between them is what you keep.

A real example, start to finish

Say you have a $50 SNR bonus bet with Neds, and a Betfair account paying 6% commission. The scanner finds a match where you can back your selection at 4.00 with Neds and lay the same selection at 4.20 on Betfair.

It works out a lay stake of $36.23, which means you need $115.94 sitting in Betfair to cover the liability. That money is not spent, it is held while the bet runs and comes back either way.

Both columns land on the same number, which is the whole point. That $34.06 out of a $50 bonus is a 68% conversion. The other 32% is what it cost you to make the outcome certain, and it goes to the gap between the two prices and to Betfair's commission.

Using the Bonus Basher

The scanner does the hunting. It pulls live prices from eleven Australian bookmakers plus the Betfair Exchange, tries every market on offer, and ranks what it finds by how much of your bonus you would keep.

Reading a result card

The big badge on the left is the estimated conversion. Green is 70% or better, amber is 50% to 70%, red is below that. Underneath, the card names both legs, the exact lay stake, the liability you need available, and the estimated return.

Two tags are worth slowing down for. Push risk appears on whole number lines and totals, where the game can land exactly on the number and both legs are refunded. That usually means the bonus is simply gone, so the quoted conversion is optimistic. Fair odds is the average price across every book quoting that selection, which gives you a sense of whether the price you are taking is genuinely good or just an outlier that is about to be corrected.

Deposit offers and turnover requirements

Sign-up and reload offers usually pair a deposit with a bonus. Deposit $100, get $100 in bonus bets is the classic. Two separate things are going on there, and it helps to keep them apart in your head.

The $100 you deposited is your own cash. It is not at risk unless you bet it, and the goal for that part is simply to get it back out again. The $100 in bonus bets is the part you convert, using exactly the method above.

Where it gets sticky is a turnover condition, something like "turn over your deposit once at odds of 1.50 or greater before withdrawing". Now your own money has to go through a bet before it is free. Betting it and hoping is a coin flip on your own cash. Hedging it costs a small, known amount instead, and that is the job the Low Loss tool does.

Offers this approach does not cover

Not every promo is a bonus bet, and a few common ones need different handling.

• Money back if your runner finishes second. The refund only lands sometimes, so a simple two leg hedge does not lock anything in. These are played for long run value, not for a certain result.
• Odds boosts and price bumps. These are worth taking when the boosted price beats the fair price, which is really an expected value question. There is a page on that.
• Deposit matches with a rollover measured in multiples. Read carefully. Ten times turnover on a $100 bonus means $1,000 through the book before anything is withdrawable, and the small cost per cycle adds up.
• Anything requiring you to place bets in a particular market at short odds. Check the minimum odds clause first. A bet placed at 1.20 when the terms said 1.50 does not qualify, and the bonus quietly disappears.

Keeping a record

The part people skip, and later regret, is writing it down. A bonus that converted at 68% is only worth 68% if the second leg actually got matched, and the only way to know your real strike rate is to log every one.

Your Dashboard reads from the same data. It shows realised profit, what is still running, how much cash is sitting in each account, and the last few results, so you can see at a glance whether the money is where you think it is.

Set it up once

Rather than retyping your commission and bonus size on every visit, put them in Settings. The scanners then open with your commission, your usual bonus amount, your preferred hedge mode and your markets already filled in.

Two settings there do more than save typing. The bet timing window hides anything jumping too soon to get both legs on, and anything so far out that your money would be tied up for a week. The bookmakers to ignore list drops books you cannot use from every result, which keeps the board honest once a few accounts have been restricted.