What is a Bonus Bet?
A bonus bet — sometimes called a free bet or bet credit — is a staked wager gifted to you by a bookmaker. Instead of using your own cash, you place the bet with bookmaker-issued credit. If the bet wins, you collect the winnings. If it loses, you've lost nothing of your own. Bonus bets are the single most common promotion in Australian sports betting and the foundation of matched betting as a strategy.
The crucial detail almost every beginner misses is stake-not-returned, or SNR. With a normal cash bet, a winning $100 bet at $3.00 returns $300 — $200 profit plus your original $100 stake. With an SNR bonus bet, you only get the profit portion back. The same $100 bonus bet at $3.00 pays $200 instead of $300. The bonus itself disappears once the bet is settled. A small number of bonus bets are stake-returned (SR), which behave like cash, but SNR is the Australian default.
Because bonus bets are SNR and must be used on selected markets, they're not worth face value. A $100 bonus bet isn't $100 in your bank account. Depending on the odds and how you extract value, it's usually worth $60–$80 in real cash. That percentage — called the conversion rate — is what matched betting is all about maximising.
The standard matched betting approach: place the bonus bet on one side of a market at the bookmaker offering the bonus, then lay the same outcome at a betting exchange or hedge it at a second bookmaker. No matter which side wins, you extract a known, calculable portion of the bonus as real cash. Higher odds on the bonus bet generally give a better conversion rate, because more of the bonus value ends up in the profit-only portion.
Australian bookmakers issue bonus bets constantly — on signup, on ongoing promotions, on loyalty programs, after certain bet types lose, as apology credits, and during featured events. PuntLogic members average hundreds of dollars a month in ongoing bonus bet conversions after the initial signup offers are exhausted, because promotions never stop running.
Our Conversion Finder scans every Australian bookmaker and pairs each bonus bet with the optimal hedge across the market, showing the exact stake, the exact lay odds, and the exact profit. Manually hunting for the best conversion can take an hour per bonus. The software does it in under a second.