Promo Recommender: Which Sportsbook Promo to Take First

The SmartStake Promo Recommender answers one question that no calculator answers: of every sign up offer open to you right now, which one should you do next. It is at /app/promo-recommender, it reads your region, your bankroll and the books you have already opened, and it puts a single Recommended Promotion at the top of an ordered list.

The surprising part is that the number printed largest on each card plays no part in that order. Sign up offers are for new customers only and each carries its own terms, so treat the board as a to do list you clear once per book.

Try it: one promo queue

Drag the bankroll and watch two things: which promotion is crowned, and how much of the board is still out of reach. The order never changes, because the order does not depend on your bankroll.

At the default $500 the queue puts a $35 promotion first and a $750 one last. That is not a bug, and the rest of this guide is why.

Every promotion, price and dollar figure on this page is a made up example on a made up board, not a live offer. Each converted figure is a long run average over many conversions rather than a result you should expect from one, and a conversion can lose money outright if a price moves before you get the hedge down, a leg is voided, or the book limits the stake.

The number on the card

Every card shows a dollar figure in the largest type on the screen. That figure is not the advertised offer. A book that shouts "Bet $5, Get $300" gets a card reading $210.

The screen computes it as the face value multiplied by a conversion rate that depends on the promotion's structure:

$\text{expected value} = \text{face value} \times \text{multiplier}$

There are exactly three structures and three multipliers:

So a $300 bet and get is worth $210, a $1,500 no sweat bet is worth $750, and a $1,000 deposit match is also worth $750. A free bet is not cash, because it returns your winnings without returning the stake, and the multiplier is the share of the face value that a competent conversion actually leaves in your account. Free Bet Converter covers that arithmetic in full, and /tools/freebet-calculator runs it on a live pair of prices.

These are long run averages across many conversions rather than a promise about any one of them.

What the order really is

Here is the part worth internalising. The recommender sorts the board on four keys, in this order:

1. Promotions at books outside your plan sink to the bottom.
2. Difficulty, easy before medium before hard.
3. An internal difficulty ranking within that tier.
4. Face value, ascending.

Expected value is not on that list. It is computed, printed in the biggest font on the card, and then ignored by the sort.

The fourth key is the one that catches people out, because it sorts the smallest offer to the front. On the example board above, the $50 Caesars offer leads and the $1,500 no sweat bet trails, even though the first is worth $35 and the last is worth $750. Note also that the $300 FanDuel offer sits ahead of the $150 bet365 one: the internal ranking outranks face value, so the ascending rule only decides ties inside a tier.

The screen is a queue, not a leaderboard. It is answering "which one next", and "next" is the cheapest, easiest thing you have not done.

Why smallest first is right

The instinct is that ordering by size leaves money on the table. It does not, for a reason specific to promotions: a sign up offer is a one time backlog, not a competitive market. You are not choosing between the $50 and the $1,500. You will take both. The total is fixed the moment the board loads, and the only thing an order can change is how quickly you reach the rest of it.

That is where the bankroll rule comes in. A promotion only gets crowned once your bankroll covers three times what it puts at risk:

$\text{bankroll} \ge 3 \times \text{amount at risk}$

A conversion needs the qualifying bet and the hedge live at the same time, on two different books, and it needs to survive the swing between them settling. Three times the exposure is the working floor the screen uses, so your real ceiling is your bankroll divided by three. At $500 you can reach a $166 promotion and nothing larger.

Now the ordering makes sense. Each conversion returns cash, that cash raises the bankroll, and the raised bankroll lifts the ceiling. Walk the example queue once from $500 and the widget shows it: the $50 offer clears and returns $35, the $300 one is still blocked at a required $900, the $150 one clears and returns $105, and you finish the lap at $640 with the two four figure offers still out of reach.

That is the honest version, and it is why the ceiling matters more than the ordering. Going smallest first is the fastest route up the ladder, but from a small bankroll a single lap will not clear the board. See Bankroll Management for Sports Bettors for the general version of this rule.

What the multipliers assume

The three multipliers look like round numbers picked by feel. Invert them and each turns out to encode a specific assumption about how well you convert.

Take the bet and get rate of 0.70. A free bet returns winnings only, so the share you keep after hedging at decimal odds $o$ against a market with hold $h$ is $(1 - 1/o) - h(o - 1)$. That expression peaks at $o^* = 1/\sqrt{h}$ and is worth $(1 - \sqrt{h})^2$ there, a result derived in full in the Matched Betting Canada guide. Setting that peak equal to 0.70 and solving backwards gives a hold of 2.67% at a price of about +512.

So the 0.70 is not a typical outcome. It is the best case: it assumes you find a hedge pair costing under 3% and place the free bet near +500. Convert at +150 on a 4% pair and you will keep noticeably less. How To Convert Bet & Get Promotions walks the actual steps, and Low Hold Betting explains why the hold on your chosen pair is the whole game.

The no sweat rate of 0.50 falls out of the same number. A no sweat bet only pays you a free bet when the qualifying bet loses, so its value is the chance of losing multiplied by what a free bet converts at. Solve $(1 - 1/o) \times 0.70 = 0.50$ and you get $o = 3.5$ exactly, which is +250. The two multipliers are consistent with each other: a no sweat bet is a bet and get that only fires when your qualifier at +250 goes down. The table does not say this anywhere. It is what the numbers imply, and it is a good reason to place a no sweat qualifier long rather than short. How To Convert No Sweat Bet Promotions and /tools/no-sweat-bet-calculator cover the mechanics.

The deposit match rate of 0.75 does not invert the same way, and it should not. A deposit match is not a free bet: it is bonus money released against a rollover requirement, cleared with a series of low hold bets that each shave a small percentage. Its 0.75 is a rollover cost estimate, not a hedge optimum. That is also why the card shows you a Rollover figure in dollars, computed as the rollover multiple times the promotion value. How To Convert Deposit Match Promotions and /tools/low-hold-calculator are the pair to read there.

The book it never offers you

Every region in SmartStake carries a default hedge book, and the Promo Recommender filters that book's promotions out of the recommendation list entirely. It will never be your Recommended Promotion and it will never appear as a card.

This looks like a bug and is not. The default hedge book is the one you place the opposing side of your conversions at, so you will open it during your very first promotion regardless. Recommending it as a promotion would be recommending a step you are about to take anyway.

There is a visible consequence worth knowing. The headline at the top of the screen sums every uncompleted promotion in your region, and it does not apply that filter. So the total at the top can be larger than the cards beneath it add up to. On a region carrying a $300 offer, a $50 offer and a $500 deposit match at the hedge book, the headline reads $620 while the two visible cards total $245, a $375 gap. The money is real, the filter is deliberate, and the two numbers are simply counting different sets.

The same thing happens as you progress. Books you have marked as opened, plus every book you hold a promotion at, are filtered out of the list, so the board shrinks as you work. When it empties, the screen sends you to the Arbitrage Finder, since the promo backlog is a one time list and the tools that keep working after it are elsewhere.

When nothing is recommended

If your bankroll cannot cover the top of the queue, the screen shows a "We recommend a larger bankroll" panel instead of a crowned card.

Read that panel carefully, because it is narrower than it sounds: the crown only ever inspects the first promotion in the queue. It does not scan down the list for the best offer you can afford. So a board whose head is a $300 offer needing $900 will show that panel to a reader with $200, even when a $50 offer needing only $150 is sitting at position two, perfectly affordable, one row below.

The fix is to scroll rather than to raise your bankroll. Every card carries its own requirement, and any card not greyed out is one you can take today. Note also that the crowning rule and the per card rule measure slightly different things: the crown uses three times the promotion's face value, while each card uses three times its maximum bet size when the promotion caps one. A "Bet $500, Get $50" offer can therefore be crowned at the top of the board while its own card asks for a $1,500 bankroll.

What Get Started does

Pressing Get Started on a card does more than open a guide. It marks every promotion at that sportsbook as in progress, marks the region's default hedge book promotions as in progress as well, and then routes you to the step by step walkthrough at /app/promo-guides/.

That is why the board can shrink by more than one card after a single press. It reflects the real shape of a conversion: you are opening a book and its hedge partner together, not taking one isolated offer.

If you have never converted a promotion before, read Sportsbook Sign-Up Promotions 101 first, then set your region and bankroll in Preferences and let the queue order the rest. The two sibling product tutorials, the Odds Screen and Insiders, cover where your converted money goes next.

FAQ

What is the SmartStake Promo Recommender?

The SmartStake Promo Recommender is a screen that turns every sign up offer available in your region into an ordered queue and tells you which one to take next. It scores each promotion by the cash a well executed conversion typically leaves behind rather than by its advertised face value, hides the ones your bankroll cannot safely cover yet, and crowns a single Recommended Promotion at the top. Sign up offers are for new customers only and each carries its own terms.

Why is the recommended promo not the biggest one?

Because the Promo Recommender is a queue rather than a leaderboard. Its order is decided by difficulty first, then by an internal difficulty ranking, and only then by face value, and that last tie break sorts ascending, so the smallest promotion in a tier comes first. The advertised expected value is printed on every card but is never used to sort them. Promotions do not compete with each other, so taking the small ones first costs you nothing and grows the bankroll that unlocks the large ones.

Why does the Promo Recommender ask for three times the promo value?

A conversion needs enough bankroll to place the qualifying bet and the hedge on the other side at the same time, and to survive the swing while both are pending. The screen uses three times the amount the promotion puts at risk as a working floor, so a $300 offer wants about $900 behind it. Your effective ceiling is therefore your bankroll divided by three.

Why does one of my sportsbooks never appear in the recommendations?

Every region has a default hedge book, and the Promo Recommender filters that book out of the recommendation list on purpose. You need it as the opposing side of your conversions, so you will open it during your first promotion anyway. Its own offer is still counted in the total at the top of the screen, which is why that number can be larger than the cards below it add up to.

What happens when I press Get Started on a promotion?

Pressing Get Started marks every promotion at that sportsbook as in progress, marks the region's default hedge book promotions as in progress too, and then routes you to the step by step guide for the offer you picked. Those books drop off the board from then on, which is why the queue gets shorter rather than longer as you work through it.

The short version

The Promo Recommender is a queue. Its cards are priced by structure, its order is set by effort and then by the smallest face value, and its bankroll rule gates access rather than value. Take the top card, or scroll to the first one that is not greyed out, and let each conversion fund the next.