Hedging a bet is when you place another bet on the opposite outcome of your original bet to guarantee a profit or reduce losses.
To hedge a bet correctly, you can use our bet hedge calculator below:
Hedge Bet Calculator
Work out exactly how much to hedge to lock in a guaranteed profit
How does hedging a sports bet work?
Say you put $50 on a team to win a premiership at the start of the season at $15.00 odds with one of our top-ranked betting sites. That is a potential payout of $750. Fast forward a few months and that team has made the Grand Final.
Suddenly your bet is looking pretty good, but there is still one game to go, and anything can happen.
In this case, you would put a bet on the other Grand Final team so that regardless of who wins, you walk away with money in your pocket, or at least get your stake back – depending on how much you’ve chosen to hedge.
How much should you hedge?
The amount you put on the hedge bet depends on how much of your potential profit you are willing to give up in exchange for that safety net.
Some punters hedge to lock in an equal profit on both sides. Others hedge just enough to cover their original stake so they are freerolling on the original bet from that point onwards.
There is no single correct approach and it really comes down to your own appetite for risk and how confident you are feeling about the original bet getting up.
Can you hedge a multi bet?
This is where hedging comes up the most. Say you have a four leg multi and the first three legs have all come in.
You have got one leg left and the potential payout is sitting at $800 off a $10 bet. You could let it ride and hope the last leg gets up or you could hedge by putting a bet on the opposite result in that final game.
If you put $200 on the other side you are guaranteed a profit either way. If your multi wins, you win the $800 minus your $200 hedge, or the last leg of the multi loses, you get the win from your $200 hedge bet, minus the $10 original multi stake.
Either way you come out well ahead of where you started – how much ahead depends on the odds of the last bet, but you can use our hedge calculator to work this out.
Using a hedge bet calculator
The maths behind hedging is not that complicated but it does help to use a calculator so you can work out the exact amount to put on your hedge bet.
We have built one at the top of the page that does the hard work for you. Just enter your original bet details, the hedge bet odds, and it will tell you how much to bet to guarantee a profit either way.
When to hedge and when to let it ride
Hedging is not something you need to do on every bet. Most of the time you are better off just letting things play out. But when you find yourself sitting on a big potential payout with one result left to go, it is worth knowing that the option is there to lock in your profit.
Many punters (me included) have learned about hedging the hard way after their multi has lost on the last leg – when they could have locked in a profit no matter what the outcome was with a simple hedge bet.