Free bet
A free bet is a bookmaker token that places a bet without your own stake. It usually pays the winnings but not the stake.
The common form is stake not returned, SNR for short. A winning SNR free bet pays its profit and keeps its stake, so a 10-unit free bet at 6.0 pays 50 units where a cash bet would return 60. A stake-returned free bet behaves like cash and is laid like a qualifying bet, which is why oddsmatchers treat the two as separate modes.
For an SNR free bet, lay stake = free bet stake × (back odds − 1) ÷ (lay odds − commission). Laying that free bet at 6.2 at 2% commission (use your own rate), gives 10 × 5 ÷ 6.18 = 8.09 units.
If the selection wins, the free bet pays 50 and the lay costs 8.09 × 5.2 = 42.07, leaving 7.93. If it loses, the lay wins 8.09 less commission, 7.93. Either way 7.93 units of the 10 are kept, about 79%.
Longer prices keep more. The same free bet backed at 2.0 and laid at 2.04 keeps only 4.85 units, because a winning free bet at evens pays just its own size. That is why a free-bet search sorts towards higher back prices, where a qualifying-bet search sorts towards the closest pair.
The feed does not know which free bets a user holds or their terms, such as minimum odds and eligible markets. Those are set by each bookmaker, which can also restrict free bets on an individual account.
In the OddsRelay feed
In the feed, the inputs are the ones any matched bet uses: back[].price from the bookmaker that issued the free bet, lay[].price and lay[].available from the exchanges, and the customer's own commission. A tool filters GET /v2/odds/standard with bookmakers set to that bookmaker, works out the amount kept on each outcome and sorts on it. At long odds the liability grows, 42.07 units in the example above against a 10-unit free bet, so a tool shows it beside each line.
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