Bonus bet value table: what a bonus bet is worth

Why one offer needs two tables

The first table is arithmetic and never changes. A bonus bet pays the profit leg and keeps the stake, so its value as a share of face is one minus the reciprocal of the decimal price, divided by one plus the market margin. At −200 that is 31.82%. At even money it is 47.73%. At +500 it is 79.55%. Nothing about any particular offer affects those numbers.

The second table is the part that moves. It takes each sportsbook’s advertised welcome offer, works out the face value its structure actually delivers, and applies the conversion. An unconditional $200 in bonus bets delivers $200 of face. A $1,500 first-bet offer taken by someone risking $50 delivers about $24, because the refund only arrives if the bet loses and only ever returns what was risked.

Put the two together and the advertised figure stops being the interesting one. A book offering $200 outright is worth roughly eight times a book offering $1,500 as a first-bet ceiling, for a bettor placing $50. The headline is seven and a half times larger in the other direction.

What narrows the range in practice

Three rules sit in the terms of nearly every offer and all three push realised value below the table.

Increments decide how the face value is released. An offer paid in fixed slices restricts which prices each slice can reach, so the upper end of the conversion range is often unreachable even in principle. Minimum odds conditions set a floor on the price, which sounds generous and mostly removes the cheapest, safest options. Expiry windows are the sharpest of the three: a token that has to be used this week gets spent on whatever the board offers that week.

There is also variance, which the table cannot show at all. A conversion figure is an expected value across many placements. One token used at +500 pays $500 or nothing, and it pays nothing roughly five times out of six. The average is real and it is not what happens on any given Saturday.

How to use the two tables together

Find the offer structure in the second table, then read across to see what the conversion does to it. If you already know roughly what prices you bet at, look up that price in the first table and substitute its ratio: a bettor who lives at −150 should be using 40.9% rather than 47.7%, and a bettor who takes long shots should use something nearer 70%.

The comparison that follows is the only one worth making between welcome offers. Two books advertising similar headlines rarely deliver similar value once structure, increments and expiry are applied, and a smaller advertised figure with clean terms regularly beats a larger one with restrictive terms. The bonus bet calculator takes your own price and face value if the table does not cover your case.

There is a structural point worth drawing out of the second table. Offers that pay regardless of the qualifying bet’s result deliver their whole face value, so their expected figure equals the headline. Offers contingent on something happening deliver the headline multiplied by the chance of it happening, which at a standard price is roughly half. That single distinction separates the top of the table from the bottom more sharply than any difference in advertised size.

It also means the two structures respond differently to how much you bet. An unconditional bonus is fixed: the same $200 whether you stake $5 or $500. A first-bet offer scales with what you risk, so its value to a $1,000 bettor is twenty times its value to a $50 bettor, and the ranking flips somewhere in between. Anyone comparing offers seriously should decide what they intend to stake before reading a table of this kind, including this one.

Finally, a caution about what a conversion ratio is. It is an average over many placements, and almost nobody places many. A single token used at a long price returns nothing far more often than it returns anything, so the figure describes the offer rather than the evening. Treating it as what you will get is the one way to misread every number on this page.