Placing Small Bets at Betfair (Under £2)

One of the many minor annoyances with Betfair is the minimum stake of £2 per selection when placing a bet. Fortunately 99.9% of the time this isn’t really an issue but occasionally if you want to have a small bet on a long shot you might find yourself stuck when using Betfair!

Of course you could just go to any bookie and place your bet of 50p or £1 but as anyone reading this blog will know you must accept terrible odds for the privilege of doing so. There is however an alternative – a little known trick for getting a small bet of under £2 on at Betfair!

Step 1 – Select the Market

Here I am looking at the Belgium Grand Prix winner market, I want to have a small bet on Valtteri Bottas at odds of 55 so I place the selection in my bet slip:

Step 2 – Increase the Odds and Place the Minimum Bet (£2)

Next with the selection in the bet slip we must increase the odds of the selection to above the market price and enter the minimum stake of £2. I would advise increasing the odds a long way above the current market price to reduce the risk of it being matched!

Step 3 – Adjust the Bet

Now our bet is on the market we must change the stake size so that it totals the previous stake size (£2) plus our desired final stake size. For example if we want to bet 25p and our order was for £2 we must change the total stake to £2.25:

Once changed confirm the changes by re-submitting the bet.

Step 4 – Cancel the Original Bet of £2

At this point we will have two bets in the market, one for the original £2 and the other for our smaller stake of 25p, at this point we should cancel the larger £2 bet leaving just the smaller 25p line in the market:

Once the cancelation has taken place we will be left with just the smaller 25p bet in the market (NB this line will still be above market price).

Step 5 – Reduce the Odds of the Smaller Bet

Finally we can reduce the odds for the remaining 25p line to the current market price and get the bet matched immediately:

This might seem a little long winded at first but once you get to know the process it becomes easy to get small bets of under £2 on at Betfair, much better than taking poor odds from the bookies any day!