How to Choose a Hedge Book (and What a Bad One Costs)

A hedge book is the second sportsbook in a matched bet, the one taking the opposite side of the wager you placed at the book holding your promotion. The hedge book is the only leg you choose, and you pay its price on every conversion you ever make. The promo book is handed to you by whoever is running the offer. The hedge book is a standing decision, so a price six points wider costs you on the tenth conversion exactly as much as on the first.

The widget below is the whole argument. It reads the trusted-book list straight out of SmartStake's fair odds engine, sizes the hedge leg with the same function that seeds a real matched bet slip, and tells you which promo price your hedge book makes worth taking.

Every figure on this page is an illustrative example built from one set of prices, not a typical result and not a forecast. Sportsbook sign-up offers are new-customer-only and cannot be reclaimed once an account exists. Hedging both sides reduces how much one result swings your balance, but a matched bet is never truly without risk: prices move between the legs, a stake can be rejected or capped, and a leg can be voided or push. Any bet can still lose, so use disposable income only.

The Only Leg You Choose

Every guide to converting a sign-up promotion treats the two books symmetrically. They are not symmetric. You hold a free bet at DraftKings because DraftKings gave you one, and when that free bet is gone, DraftKings is out of the picture. Your hedge book is still there for the next one.

That asymmetry shows up in the product too. SmartStake stores exactly one default_bookmaker per region, a single standing hedge book rather than a list, and prefills your hedge book filter with it plus every book you have already signed up at. The Promo Recommender then removes that default from the offers it recommends, on the assumption that you will open it during your first conversion anyway.

It also shows up in what the filter does to your board. When you name hedge books in the Promo Converter, the query does not filter offers, it filters pairs: a row survives only if the promo book sits on one leg and one of your hedge books sits on the other. Narrow the list and you lose the intersection, not a slice. Leave it empty and any book can take the other side, which finds more rows and quietly includes books you would never actually fund.

What a Wider Price Costs

Take a $100 free bet at +200 and hedge the other side. The hedge stake is sized so both outcomes land in the same place, so the only question is what that place is worth. This worked example assumes both legs are accepted at the prices shown and settle against each other, which is the assumption doing the most work in it.

free bet   $100 at +200 (decimal 3.00)
hedge      $137.50 at −220 (decimal 1.4545)
promo leg wins   $300 − $100 stake not returned − $137.50 = $62.50
hedge leg wins   $137.50 × 1.4545 − $137.50        = $62.50

You keep $62.50, so this free bet converted at 62.50%. Now move only the hedge price, to −300, and keep everything else identical. The hedge stake rises to $150.00 and what you keep drops to $50.00, a rate of 50.00%.

That is one in five dollars of the free bet's value, decided by nothing but which book took the other side. Across ten free bets that size it is $625 against $500. Both figures are illustrative, from one pair of prices; change the promo leg or the market and they move.

The mechanism is the two-sided hold, the amount by which the two prices add up past 100%. At +200 against −220 the pair holds 2.08%. At +200 against −300 it holds 8.33%. Line shopping is usually pitched as a way to find a better bet; on the hedge leg it is a way to stop paying for the same bet twice.

The Amplifier on Your Promo Price

Write the free bet's retained rate out and something useful falls out of it. With p as the promo leg's decimal price and h as the hold on the pair:

$R = \left(1 - \frac{1}{p}\right) - h\,(p - 1)$

The first term is the ceiling: what a free bet at that price would return if the two books priced the market with no margin at all. The second term is what the margin takes, and it is multiplied by p minus 1.

So the hold is not a flat toll. One point of hold costs you p minus 1 points of the free bet. At +200 that is 2.00 points. At +500 it is 5.00 points. The longer the promo leg, the harder a wide hedge price hits.

This cuts against the advice everyone gives about free bets. Converting at long odds is genuinely better, because you are not getting your stake back and a longer price recovers more of it. But the same lengthening multiplies your hedge book's margin. Both effects are real, and they cross:

Below a 5.56% hold, the long promo leg keeps more. Above it, the short one does. Which side of that line you live on is a property of your hedge book, not of the promotion.

Your Hedge Book Picks Your Promos

Push the same formula one step further and it names the promo price you should be hunting. The retained rate peaks at

$p^{*} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{h}} \qquad R^{*} = \left(1 - \sqrt{h}\right)^{2}$

That second expression is the same optimum the Canada matched betting guide arrives at from the other direction, which is a good sign the model is the right one. What it adds is the first expression: the price to aim at, and the fact that your hedge book sets it.

Read the middle column again. A tighter hedge book does not just pay you more on the bets you were already making. It changes which bets you should make, pushing the promo leg you hunt for from around +246 out to around +593. A reader hedging at a wide book who has been told to convert free bets at long odds is following advice calibrated for somebody else's second book.

These are illustrative figures derived from one set of prices, holding the hedge book's margin constant across the board. Real books do not hold a constant margin, and no price is worth anything if the bet is not available or not accepted. Price your own offer in the widget above or in the free bet calculator rather than lifting a number from this table.

Which Books Price Fairest

A book that posts a fair price is exactly the book whose price you would trust to tell you what the market really is. SmartStake has to answer that question anyway, because the fair odds engine has to decide whose numbers to average when it builds a de-vigged line. That ranking is a hedge book shortlist that nobody publishes as one.

The engine's default weighting, and the important detail that it is per market:

Three things worth pulling out of that table.

There is no single best book to hedge at, and the engine says so in code. FanDuel is a reference price on props and is not consulted on main lines. BookMaker and BetOnline are the reverse. Ask "what is the best hedge book" without naming a market and the honest answer is that the question is underspecified.

The four exchange-style books carry a liquidity floor of $300. Sporttrade, Novig, ProphetX and 4caster only count when there is real size on the market, because a thin book can post a beautiful number it will not honour at your stake. That is the same reasoning behind account limits: a price you cannot get filled at is not a price.

Weight is a statement about pricing, not about you. Pinnacle carries the top weight on both markets, and SmartStake's own MLB player prop study still found it soft on baseball props specifically. Aggregate trust and per-market sharpness are different claims, which is why the engine keeps league and sport overrides at all.

Sharp Is Not the Same as Usable

Pricing fairly is one of three tests, and it is the only one this article can settle for you. The other two are about your account, not the book's model.

Will it take the stake? A hedge leg is usually larger than the promo leg, and it grows as the promo price lengthens. In the worked example above the $100 free bet needed a $137.50 hedge, and at +500 it would need more. A book that shows you its maximum before you confirm matters here, because discovering the cap after the promo leg is already down leaves you unhedged. Check your figure against the hedge bet calculator before you place the first leg, not after.

Have you already collected its offer? Hedging at a book with an unclaimed new-customer promotion spends the account without collecting the promotion, and these offers are new-customer-only and do not come back. Convert the offer first, then the book joins your hedge rotation. This is why SmartStake prefills the filter with books you have already signed up at.

There is a third thing worth saying plainly. Hedging both sides reduces how much a single result swings your balance, but it does not remove risk. Prices move between the two legs, a leg can be voided or pushed, a stake can be rejected or capped, and a market can suspend after the first bet is down. Matched bets are never truly without risk, and every one of them can still lose. Size them against a real bankroll and only with disposable income.

What SmartStake Fills In for You

You do not have to assemble this from scratch. Each region carries a default, and the tools prefill from it.

In Canada the default is Pinnacle. It runs no sign-up promotions to burn, takes larger stakes than most, and shows its maximum before you confirm, which is the whole checklist above in one book. In markets where every book is running an offer, the default is FanDuel, on the logic that its qualifying wager carries no minimum-odds condition, so the bet you were placing anyway can double as the qualifier. Terms change constantly and by state; read the current ones before you rely on either.

From there the rest of the toolchain assumes a hedge book and prices against it. The Promo Converter pairs your promo book against the hedge books you have named. The low hold calculator prices the cheap-turnover version of the same pairing, which is what you need when a rollover requirement is what you are clearing rather than a free bet. The free bet converter does the arithmetic in this article on a single offer.

Pick the hedge book once, deliberately, on the market you actually convert. It is the input you will reuse the most.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hedge book? A hedge book is the second sportsbook in a matched bet, the one where you take the opposite side of the wager you placed at the book holding your promotion. The promo book is fixed by whoever is running the offer. The hedge book is the leg you choose, which is why its price matters more than any single promo does.

What is the best book to hedge at? The best book to hedge at is the one posting the fairest price on the market you are hedging, that will take your stake, and that has no sign-up offer of its own left unclaimed. SmartStake's fair odds engine weights Pinnacle and Circa highest on both main lines and player props, and treats FanDuel as a reference price on props only, with BookMaker and BetOnline on main lines only.

Does the hedge book matter more than the promo? Over a backlog, yes. Each promotion is converted once, but the hedge book prices every conversion you make. On ten $100 free bets at +200, hedging at −220 keeps $625 and hedging at −300 keeps $500, an illustrative $125 gap created entirely by the second book.

Should I hedge at a book that still has a sign-up offer? Usually not. Using a book with an unclaimed new-customer offer as your hedge book spends the account without collecting the promotion, and those offers are new-customer-only and cannot be reclaimed later. Once you have converted that book's offer it becomes available as a hedge book like any other.

Why does a cheaper hedge book change which promos I take? Because the value you keep from a free bet is the vig-free ceiling set by your promo price minus the hold multiplied by that price. A tighter hedge price lowers the hold, which raises the promo price worth chasing. At a 2.08% hold the strongest promo leg is around +593; at 8.33% it falls to around +246. These are illustrative figures from one set of prices, not a forecast.

The Bottom Line

The hedge book is the one input in a conversion that you set once and then reuse forever, so price it like a subscription rather than like a bet. A wider price does not cost you a little on this offer, it costs you the same amount on every offer after it, and it quietly shortens the promo odds worth chasing.

Pick it on the market you actually convert, check it will take a stake larger than your promo leg, and collect its own sign-up offer before you start using it as the other side. Then run your next offer through the widget at the top of this page and let the Promo Converter pair it against your board.