Cycling betting odds 2026: reading the price behind the peloton

Updated October 2026

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Data current as of October 30, 2026 · checked against the Gambling Commission’s public register and each operator’s own published terms.

The legal frame: what a UK-licensed bookmaker actually is

In Great Britain the regulator is the Gambling Commission, a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The framework is the Gambling Act 2005, which covers England, Scotland and Wales; Northern Ireland sits outside that Act under its own older law, so a “GB licence” regulates Great Britain only and a Northern Irish customer is on different ground. Since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014, any operator whose remote facilities are reached from Great Britain needs a Commission licence wherever the company itself is based. A Curaçao, Maltese or Gibraltar licence is not a substitute for customers betting from a British address.

There is no state monopoly and no cap on the number of licences. The Commission’s public register, searchable by business name, trading name, domain or account number, is the whole test of who holds one. Brand domains tell you nothing: a licensed operator may run a .com from abroad, and an unlicensed one may mimic a .co.uk. Quote no count of licensed brands without an access date, because the register changes week to week.

Identity is checked before the first deposit. Name, address and date of birth must be verified, including when the first product is a free bet or bonus, and that obligation has been in force since 7 May 2019. Anonymous play does not exist on a GB-licensed site. The minimum age is 18, GAMSTOP enrolment is automatic for online play (mandatory since 31 March 2020), and credit cards have been banned for gambling in Great Britain since 14 April 2020, including credit-card-funded payments made through an e-wallet. Debit cards and bank-based payments are not covered by that ban.

A note on a wider confusion: Spreadex is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority for spread betting and by the Gambling Commission for fixed-odds betting on the same app, and the spread side carries a specific risk that fixed-odds does not — spread losses can exceed the deposit. The two products sit on different licences for a reason, and the distinction is worth keeping.

Responsible gambling: the limits a British bettor actually meets

GAMSTOP is the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme. Exclusions run for six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal, and after the minimum period the exclusion stays in place for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. It covers online sites and apps; high-street betting shops use a separate service. Every brand named on the public register takes part, which is one of the few operational points where a licence shows up in the punter’s daily life rather than in a footnote.

Two further checks sit on top of identity. A financial vulnerability check, in force since 30 August 2024 under Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice clause 3.4.4 and triggered since 28 February 2025 when a customer’s deposits minus withdrawals exceed £150 in a rolling 30 days, runs a public-record check (bankruptcy, county court judgments and the like) — it is not an income check and not a credit reference check. Financial risk assessments, the affordability measures widely discussed in the press, were announced in a staged Commission plan of 7 July 2026 with no start date set. Treat them as announced and staged, not in force.

A statutory deposit ceiling does not exist. Operators must offer a gross deposit limit on a fixed time frame under the Remote Technical Standards; the first changes applied on 31 October 2025, a second phase was postponed to 30 September 2026, and whether that second phase is live is not established. The state sets the menu; the customer sets the number. Staking and loss limits are the operator’s own, and operators may also restrict individual customers.

Help lines sit alongside the regulatory machinery. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline. GambleAware funds treatment and education. NHS gambling clinics are available through the health service. Gamblers Anonymous runs peer-led meetings. A fitzwilliam-class operator with instant deposits, fast withdrawals, timeouts and deposit limits will typically surface those four organisations in its safer-gambling footer; that is the editorial norm, not an exception.

On advertising, the Commission does not license marketing. Non-broadcast ads run under the CAP Code and broadcast under the BCAP Code, both enforced by the ASA. CAP Code section 16: marketing must be socially responsible, must not strongly appeal to under-18s, and no one who is or seems to be under 25 may feature gambling or play a significant role, with an exception for ads placed where a bet can be made directly. Since 19 January 2026 wagering requirements on bonuses are capped at 10x: a £10 bonus at 50x wagering needed £500 of qualifying bets, and under the cap that ceiling falls to £100. Mixed-product promotions that compel gambling across two or more product types (a football bet to unlock free spins, for instance) are banned. Whether the cap reaches free bets with no wagering condition, and any ceiling on the bonus’s money value, are not established.

The sport: how a Grand Tour actually prices

The UCI, the Union Cycliste Internationale, sits in Aigle, Switzerland, has governed road cycling since 1900, and runs the men’s and women’s road world championships every year. The UCI WorldTour was created in 2005 as the ProTour and renamed the WorldTour in 2011; it bundles the Grand Tours with the other major stage races. The three Grand Tours are the Giro d’Italia (first held 1909), the Tour de France (1903) and the Vuelta a España (1935), and UCI rules allow them to run 15 to 23 days. Grand Tour leaders wear pink in the Giro, yellow in the Tour, red in the Vuelta, and a Grand Tour normally includes two rest days.

The 2026 Tour de France ran from 4 to 26 July 2026, starting with a team time trial in Barcelona and finishing on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, over 21 stages and 3,245 km with 23 teams. Tadej Pogačar, riding for UAE Team Emirates, won it — his fifth Tour victory. That run of form does the work of a market preview: when a bookmaker prices the next Tour, the favourite is a five-time winner, and the second tier of contenders is the length of the startlist behind him. Cycling is one of the few sports where a single rider’s recent record dominates a market the way it does.

The market structure inside cycling is unusually rich for a non-team sport. The first split is head-to-head: which of two named riders finishes higher on a stage or in the general classification, with stakes refunded if neither finishes or if both finish on the same time. The second is the three-way: outright stage winner, with the field treated as a third outcome and the bookmaker’s margin a touch higher to cover it. The third is the general classification at prices that move all summer, ante-post on the eve of stage one settling only after the final time trial in Nice, Paris or wherever the race ends that year. Fourth, the prop markets: King of the Mountains, points classification, young rider, team classification, and the stage-by-stage match-ups inside the same race. Each of those has its own margin and its own cut of the field, and a bettor who watches only the outright price is reading one column of the form.

The reason the margin matters more in cycling than it does in football is the field size. A Premier League match is a three-outcome market priced on a 90-minute result. A Grand Tour stage is a market with 150 to 180 riders, a third of whom have a plausible shot at the win on a flat or breakaway day and perhaps a dozen of whom have a real shot on a mountain stage. The bookmaker’s payout share has to absorb that width, and the price the favourite carries reflects both the favourite’s chance and the long tail of riders behind them.

The ten: a shortlist of UK-licensed bookmakers that price cycling

The shortlist below is built from the Gambling Commission’s public register: every brand listed is a remote general betting standard (real events) licensee, and Matchbook additionally holds a remote betting intermediary licence for exchange play. No single brand is the only licensed one, a place in a comparison is not a licence, and offers are described only as each operator’s own terms state them.

The column on the right is what each brand’s own terms state about the relevant subject — a market, an offer, a payment rule. The phrase “as the operator’s own terms state” matters: a brand’s terms page is the only document a regulator will hold against it, and it is also the document a bettor should read before staking. The licence column is the register record, not a recommendation.

A few patterns emerge. The exchange mechanic on Matchbook gives a different answer to the question of “what is the price”: a backer’s price is the lay price minus the platform’s commission, and a layer’s liability is set by the price they offer. For outright markets on the three Grand Tours, exchange liquidity peaks during stages and thins outside them, which is the reverse of a fixed-odds book where the outright General Classification market is live for three weeks. Spreadex’s spread product treats the margin between two riders as a quoted spread rather than a price; the financial-spread regulator (the FCA) and the gambling regulator (the Commission) are different bodies, and Spreadex is the only one of the ten that publishes prices under both umbrellas at once.

The welcome-offer terms, where they apply, are heavy on conditions. A 100% matched free bet of up to £25 sounds generous until the qualifying bet is read: a first bet of £5 to £25 with at least three selections each at 3/5 (1.60) or higher means the qualifying bet is an accumulator of three short-priced favourites, and the free bet stake is the part most punters misread. Hollywoodbets refunds a losing first accumulator as a free bet rather than as cash, and the cap (£30), the minimum odds (4/1) and the seven-day settlement window are the three points that decide whether the offer is worth claiming. The cap on bonus wagering introduced in January 2026 — a 10x ceiling — applies to offers that carry a wagering requirement; whether it reaches a free bet with no wagering is not established, and a bettor checking the terms should look for “wagering”, “rollover” or “playthrough” before reading the headline number.

What the price actually contains: the arithmetic a cycling price hides

A bookmaker’s price on a stage is a margin plus a price. The price is what a winning bet pays back, and the margin is the slice the bookmaker keeps of every pound staked, regardless of which runner wins. Decimal odds make the arithmetic clean: the return on a winning bet is the stake multiplied by the odds, and the net profit is the stake multiplied by the odds minus one. A £10 stake at decimal odds 4.50 returns £45, of which £10 is the original stake and £35 is profit.

Fractional odds are the British form. 5/1 means a £1 stake returns £6 (£5 of profit plus the £1 stake); 11/4 means a £4 stake returns £15 (£11 of profit plus the £4 stake); “evens” is 1/1, and “odds-on” prices sit below 1/1 — 4/6, for instance, is fractional odds below evens. The conversion is mechanical: a/b in fractional form becomes a ÷ b + 1 in decimal form. 5/1 → 5 ÷ 1 + 1 = 6.00; 11/4 → 11 ÷ 4 + 1 = 3.75; 4/6 → 4 ÷ 6 + 1 ≈ 1.67.

The margin is the harder part. Take an illustrative two-way market at decimal odds 1.90 / 1.90 (fractional 9/10 each side). The payout share — the slice of every pound staked that comes back to bettors in the long run — is 1 ÷ (1/1.90 + 1/1.90) = 1 ÷ (0.5263 + 0.5263) = 1 ÷ 1.0526 = 0.95. The margin is 1 minus the payout share, here 0.05 or 5%. That is the bookmaker’s expected take from this market, in either direction, every time the race is priced. A 5% margin is the lower end of a stage-winner market, and what looks like a fair price at 1.90 is in fact 1.90 against an underlying probability the bookmaker has assessed closer to 1.95, with the difference being the margin.

For a cycling outright market the headline margin runs higher. A three-way stage winner — the favourite, the second favourite, and the field treated as a single outcome — needs a longer tail, and bookmakers price the field as a third arm with a margin baked in. The same arithmetic applies: 1 ÷ (1/odds₁ + 1/odds₂ + 1/odds_field) gives the payout share, and 1 minus that share is the margin. A typical stage market sits between 6% and 8% margin, and the General Classification outright of a Grand Tour — where the favourite is a five-time Tour winner — runs tighter on the favourite and wider on the field, so the overall margin is the weighted average of the two parts.

The reason cycling prices move the way they do during a stage is that the bookmaker’s book re-prices itself in real time, and an in-play price reflects both the live state of the race and the margin the bookmaker wants to carry through the final kilometre. A pre-match price on the favourite is normally tighter than an in-play price, partly because the bookmaker’s risk is concentrated at the start of the stage and partly because the in-play product has a higher margin to cover the cost of the trading operation. The Trade-off is a familiar one: a backer who waits for the breakaway to settle before staking pays a wider margin; a backer who strikes early on the favourite takes the tighter margin and the risk that the favourite gets dropped on the first climb.

How a free bet actually pays: the offer behind the headline

A free bet is not a refund. The stake is usually not returned with a winning free bet, which is the single rule that decides what a free bet is worth. The arithmetic is: free-bet value equals the free-bet amount multiplied by the odds minus one, divided by the odds, then multiplied by the payout share of the market the free bet is placed on. A £10 free bet at decimal odds 4.50 on a market with a 95% payout share is worth £10 × (4.50 − 1) ÷ 4.50 × 0.95 = £10 × 0.7778 × 0.95 ≈ £7.39. That is the expected value, not the payout on a winning bet: on a winning free bet at 4.50, the bettor keeps £35 of profit (the £45 return minus the £10 free-bet amount not returned); on a losing free bet, the bettor keeps nothing.

The same £10 returned as cash would be worth £10. The same £10 returned as a free bet with a 4x wagering requirement is worth closer to £7.39 minus the expected cost of clearing the wagering, and the wagering expected cost is the turnover (the bonus base multiplied by the wagering factor) multiplied by the margin of the market the bonus is being cleared on. A 10x cap on bonus wagering, in force since 19 January 2026, limits the clearing cost by capping the multiplier, and that cap is one of the more consequential changes the Commission has published for bonus economics. The “risk-free” framing on offer pages is a marketing word: a refund as a free bet, with the stake not returned, is a partial refund at best, and a bettor who treats it as cash will misread the offer by the full value of the stake.

Operator profiles

DragonBet: a Welsh-flavoured sportsbook with a wider in-play list

DragonBet’s app is published by DragonBet Ltd, and the front of the product leans on Welsh football and rugby markets. The wider sportsbook covers racing, American football, in-play betting and bet builder markets, and the licence is a Gambling Commission remote general betting standard (real events) under account 64908. The brand is built around a regional identity rather than a deep market list, and cycling is one of the in-play sports rather than a flagship vertical. For a bettor who wants Welsh sport at the centre and cycling as a side order, the layout fits. For a bettor who wants the deepest Grand Tour outright market, the product is too thin to be the only bookmaker in the rotation.

Fafabet: a racing-led sportsbook with Best Odds Guaranteed

Fafabet’s Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish horse racing is the most concrete product feature in the operator’s own terms: from 9am on race days, if the starting price is bigger than the original price, the bigger odds are paid on win and each-way bets. The licence is held by Taichi Tech Limited under Commission account 57385, and the wider product is a fixed-odds sportsbook rather than an exchange or a spread product. Cycling sits in the same fixed-odds engine as the racing product, and a bettor who values the Best Odds Guaranteed mechanic on racing will find the cycling product familiar rather than exceptional. The each-way terms on cycling stage markets are the next place to look: each-way doubles the stake, and the place terms vary by race and operator, so the headline price is only one of three numbers that decides the cost.

Betboro: a matched free bet with a tight qualifying window

Betboro’s sports welcome offer is a 100% matched free bet of up to £25 on the first qualifying wager, requiring a debit card deposit of at least £10 and a first bet of £5 to £25 with at least three selections each at 3/5 (1.60) or higher. The licence is held by Webmedia Development N.V. under Commission account 44181, and the offer’s value sits in the qualifying bet: a £25 first bet on an accumulator of three short-priced favourites is the price of admission for a £25 free bet whose stake is not returned on a win. The arithmetic from the section above gives a free-bet value of around £18.50 on a 4.50 winner, before the 10x cap on bonus wagering is read into the small print. A bettor who can find three runners at 1.60 or higher with a clear edge can extract that value; a bettor who places a 1.60 acca for the sake of the free bet is paying the margin on three legs to claim an offer that, on a losing bet, is worth nothing at all.

Matchbook: an exchange for back and lay

Matchbook runs as a betting exchange where customers bet against each other rather than against the bookmaker, with Bet Builder, multiples, in-play betting and live streaming of horse racing and greyhounds. The licence is held by Triplebet Limited under Commission account 39504 and includes the remote betting intermediary category on top of the general betting standard. Exchange prices are mechanically different: a backer’s return is the backer’s stake multiplied by the back odds, minus Matchbook’s commission on net winnings; a layer’s liability is the layer’s stake multiplied by the lay odds minus one. For an outright Grand Tour market the exchange gives a different price to a fixed-odds book, and the difference is the platform commission versus the bookmaker’s margin. A bettor who can size a lay stake to lock a position — backing at a higher price earlier in the season, laying at a lower price the week before the race — is using the exchange as a trading venue, not as a place to place a bet. The trade-off is liquidity: exchange liquidity peaks during stages and thins outside them, and a position that cannot be closed is the practical limit of the strategy.

Spreadex: fixed odds and spread betting under one roof

Spreadex combines fixed-odds and spread betting in one app, with one-click, auto and partial cash out, Bet Builder across fixed odds or spreads, and live streaming of UK and Irish horse racing, greyhounds, tennis, NFL and selected football. The licence is held by Spreadex Limited under Commission account 8835 for the fixed-odds side; the spread-betting side is regulated by the FCA. The two products sit on different licences for a reason. A fixed-odds bet is a contract on a price; a spread bet is a contract on a margin between two prices, and the customer’s loss can exceed the deposit on the spread side. The cycling product on the fixed-odds side is a normal bookmaker’s offering; on the spread side the same race can be traded as a points spread between two named riders, with the stake multiplied by the spread width at settlement. A bettor who understands the difference can use both; a bettor who does not is the customer the FCA’s risk warning is written for.

DAZN Bet: a low-deposit sportsbook with named payment thresholds

DAZN Bet’s deposit schedule is the most concrete product detail in the operator’s own terms: deposits start at £5 by debit card, Apple Pay, Paysafecard, Trustly and Skrill, and at £20 by PayPal, with no processing fees. The licence is held by DZBT Limited under Commission account 48756. The lower threshold matters for a bettor running a small bankroll: a £5 deposit is the minimum to fund an account and place a bet, and a £20 PayPal minimum is the kind of detail that decides whether a payment method is usable at all. The wider product is a fixed-odds sportsbook with the same in-play engine most GB brands run, and cycling is one of the in-play sports rather than a flagship vertical.

Bet Ahoy: a £10-for-£15 welcome structure

Bet Ahoy’s welcome offer is a £10 sports bet plus a £5 acca when a new customer stakes £10, made up of a £5 sports bet and a £5 acca. The licence is held by Bet Ahoy Ltd under Commission account 100094. The headline is a £15 return on a £10 stake, but the shape of the offer is two free bets, both of which carry the same stake-not-returned rule as the wider market, and the £5 acca portion is itself a single price with three or more legs at a minimum odds the operator’s terms will name. A bettor reading the offer as a £15 cash bonus is misreading it by the stake-not-returned rule on both halves. The product underneath is a fixed-odds sportsbook rather than an exchange or a spread book.

London Bet: a multi-sport sportsbook with casino alongside

London Bet’s app combines sports betting across football, tennis, horse racing, greyhounds, darts, golf, cricket, NFL, NBA, MLB and snooker with Pragmatic Play casino slots and live in-play. The licence is held by Thistle Bet Limited under Commission account 66162. The product layout pairs a multi-sport book with a casino vertical, and the deposit and identity rules cover both products: the verification before first deposit applies to the sportsbook and the casino alike, and a single account funds both. A bettor who uses one product to fund the welcome offer of the other should read the wagering rules on each side, because the 10x cap on bonus wagering and the mixed-product ban apply across the offer as a whole.

10bet: a multi-sport sportsbook with cash out and live streaming

10bet’s sportsbook covers football, tennis and horse racing, with cash out, Bet Builder and live streaming. The licence is held by Blue Star Planet Limited under Commission account 43173. The product is a familiar fixed-odds layout rather than an exchange, and the cash out, Bet Builder and live streaming features are the standard three mechanics GB bettors expect from a sportsbook at this end of the market. Cycling is part of the in-play schedule rather than a flagship vertical. The cash out feature is a closing price, not a refund: a bettor who cashes out accepts the price on offer at that moment, and the difference between the cash-out price and the closing price is the bookmaker’s margin on the in-play book.

Hollywoodbets: an accumulator-insurance welcome offer

Hollywoodbets’ sports welcome offer returns the stake as a free bet of up to £30 on a first qualifying losing accumulator, with a stake of £10 or more, three or more legs, odds of 4/1 or greater, and settlement within seven days; one free bet per customer. The licence is held by Hollywoodbets International UK Limited under Commission account 53028. The offer is a partial refund in kind rather than a cash bonus: a £30 losing acca returns a £30 free bet, and the stake-not-returned rule applies on the free bet in turn. The seven-day settlement window is the practical limit: a stage race that runs over three weeks will not settle in seven days, so the offer is built for a weekend football or racing accumulator rather than a Grand Tour outright. A bettor who reads the offer as cash is misreading it by £30 of stake.

A cycling bettor’s working checklist

Start with the licence. The Commission’s public register is searchable by name, trading name, domain and account number, and a brand’s terms page will name the licence holder. If the two do not match, walk away.

Read the small print on the welcome offer. The headline number is the price of admission; the qualifying bet, the minimum odds, the wagering requirement and the cap on the money value are the actual cost. A free bet whose stake is not returned is worth a fraction of its cash value, and a refund as a free bet is not a refund at all.

Check the market margin before staking. The price on a stage winner is the favourite’s chance plus the bookmaker’s margin, and the difference is the slice the bookmaker keeps of every pound staked. A 5% margin is the lower end of a two-way market; a 7% to 8% margin is more typical of a stage winner with a wide field.

Decide the bet type before the price. A head-to-head on a named rider settles on a single result and the margin is lower; a three-way stage winner with the field as the third arm carries a higher margin; an outright General Classification over three weeks carries a different risk profile again. The price is the same shape; the cost is not.

Watch the in-play book. Pre-match prices on a favourite are typically tighter than in-play prices, because the in-play book has a higher margin to cover the trading cost. A backer who strikes early on the favourite takes the tighter margin and the risk of a crash on the first climb; a backer who waits pays a wider margin for the information the first hour of racing has produced.

A note on the field outside the ten

Unlicensed brands are reachable from a British address, and the legal frame treats the operator, not the customer, as the party the Act aims at. A customer who bets on an unlicensed site loses the protection of the British framework: there is no GAMSTOP coverage, no Commission complaints route, no approved dispute-resolution body, no British consumer redress if funds are withheld, and the offer is not bound by the 10x bonus cap or the £150 vulnerability check. The state has been given or is about to receive court-order DNS blocking powers, but the practical answer is disruption: cease-and-desist notices, search-engine referrals, work with registrars, hosts and payment providers. Never call an unlicensed site “legal to use”; the question the regulator has decided is whether the operator is licensed, and the answer for a British customer is whether they want the framework that licence brings.

The Commission’s enforcement work has been visible on the high street as well. Several operators have been fined for failures in safer-gambling and anti-money-laundering controls, and the fine is one signal among many. The deeper signal is whether the operator’s own terms hold up under the LCCP social responsibility code: the safer-gambling footer, the deposit-limit menu, the GAMSTOP enrolment prompt, the affordability-check trigger, the time-out, the self-exclusion route. An operator that puts those in plain view is doing the work the licence requires.

A short glossary for the cycling market

The pink jersey is the leader’s jersey in the Giro d’Italia; the yellow jersey in the Tour de France; the red jersey in the Vuelta a España. A head-to-head settles on which of two named riders finishes higher on a stage or in the general classification, with stakes refunded if neither finishes or both finish on the same time. An outright is the market on the winner of the general classification at the end of a Grand Tour, settled only after the final time trial. A stage winner market is a three-way market on a single stage, with the field priced as a single outcome. Each-way is two bets of equal stake, the first on the win and the second on a place, so the stake doubles and the place terms vary by race and operator. Ante-post is a bet placed before the final field is confirmed, with non-runner rules applying. A Rule 4 deduction is a bookmaker’s reduction of odds when a runner is withdrawn, applied to bets struck before the withdrawal.

A bet builder combines markets from one event into a single bet, available pre-match and in-play on most GB sportsbooks at this end of the market. A Super Boost, Winnings Boost or Daily Bet Boost is a price enhancement on a named market, with maximum-stake limits that vary by brand. Cash out is a closing price offered during an event, with the bookmaker’s margin baked into the difference between the cash-out price and the underlying price. An accumulator, or “acca”, is a bet on multiple selections, all of which must win for the bet to pay, and the odds of the legs multiply into a single price. Trixie (4 bets), Patent (7), Yankee (11), Lucky 15, Super Yankee or Canadian (26), Heinz (57) and Goliath (247) are named accumulators, with the total stake equal to the unit stake multiplied by the number of bets.

Frequently asked questions

How is the return on a cycling bet worked out from the stake and the odds?

The return is the stake multiplied by the decimal odds. A £10 stake at decimal odds 4.50 returns £45, of which £10 is the original stake and £35 is net profit. At fractional odds, 5/1 returns £6 per £1 staked (£5 profit plus the £1 stake), and 4/6 returns about £1.67 per £1 staked (67p profit plus the £1 stake). The stake is the bettor’s risk, and the return is the most the bet pays if the selection wins.

What is the bookmaker’s margin, and how is it visible in the odds?

The margin is the slice of every pound staked the bookmaker keeps on average, regardless of the result. It is visible in the price: an illustrative two-way market at 1.90 / 1.90 has a payout share of 1 ÷ (1/1.90 + 1/1.90) = 0.95 and a margin of 0.05, or 5%. A 5% margin is the lower end of a stage market; a 6% to 8% margin is more typical of a stage winner with a wide field, and the General Classification outright runs tighter on the favourite and wider on the rest of the field.

Can the bookmaker’s licence be checked before staking?

Yes. The Gambling Commission’s public register is searchable by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and the register record names the licence holder. A brand’s own terms page should name the same licence holder; if the two do not match, the safer course is to walk away. Quote no count of licensed brands without an access date, because the register changes week to week.

How do fractional odds such as 5/1 convert to decimal odds such as 6.00?

The conversion is a divided by b plus one. 5/1 becomes 5 ÷ 1 + 1 = 6.00, 11/4 becomes 11 ÷ 4 + 1 = 3.75, and 4/6 becomes 4 ÷ 6 + 1 ≈ 1.67. “Evens” is 1/1 in fractional form, which is 2.00 in decimal form. The decimal form is the easier number to multiply a stake by, and the conversion is the same in either direction.

What does “free bet” actually mean, and is the stake returned?

A free bet is a bet paid for by the operator rather than the bettor. The stake is usually not returned with a winning free bet, which is the single rule that decides what a free bet is worth. A £10 free bet at decimal odds 4.50 keeps £35 of profit on a win; a £10 free bet at the same odds is worth about £7.39 in expected value after the stake-not-returned rule and a 95% payout share. A “risk-free” framing is a marketing word if the refund is paid as a free bet rather than as cash.

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