Converting a promotion with the Promo Optimizer
What a specific token at a specific book is worth in withdrawable cash, and the two wagers that realise it.
The screen, annotated
Every column, and what its number actually means.
The headline figure: withdrawable profit once both wagers settle, whichever way the game goes. A $100 bonus bet converting well shows around $70 here. On the forecast offer types this label changes to Projected value, which is a different kind of number.
That cash as a percentage of the token's face value — $70.59 from a $100 bonus bet is 70.6%. It never reaches 100% because the hedge is placed into a market that carries a book's margin, and that margin is what the missing 29% mostly is.
Profit divided by your own money at risk, which is a different question from conversion and often reorders the list. The 70.6% plan above is a 13.3% return on the $529 of cash it ties up.
The most of your own money committed at any one moment — the hedge stake. This is the binding constraint on most plans: a conversion you cannot fund is not available to you, however well it ranks.
The pill at the top-right of the card, and the most important word on it. Locked means both wagers are placed and the figure is arithmetic. Live quote means it becomes arithmetic once you place at these prices, and prices move. Projected means it depends on a reward that does not exist yet converting at an assumed rate — an expectation, not a guarantee.
The three rows inside each wager panel, one panel per leg. The stakes are not equal and are not meant to be: they are sized so both outcomes leave you with the same cash.
The funding chip on each panel, saying which pocket that wager comes out of. It travels with the wager into the Bet Tracker, so a token is not recorded as cash you spent and a bonus bet's result is not reported as a mediocre cash bet.
Appears when the hedge book will not accept the exact stake the plan wants. The figures above this line are the executable ones; the theoretical number is what a book accepting any stake would have paid.
When the ranking was computed. It turns orange past a minute. Refresh re-prices against the board as it is now rather than the cached copy — worth pressing immediately before you place.
The settlement table under the two panels: every way the game can end, and what each book pays you in that case. Reading one row per outcome is the fastest check that the plan really does pay the same either way.
The three controls that matter
Ignore everything else on a first read.
2 · Token type
The single choice that moves the answer most. A bonus bet does not return the stake and converts around 70%; site credit does return it and converts close to face value. Naming the wrong one does not produce a slightly wrong plan, it produces the wrong plan. Read the one-line description under the pills before searching.
Odds (under Advanced)
Bounds the PROMO side's price; the hedge side has its own range in the Hedge group. A lower bound of +250 keeps only longshot promo legs. That raises conversion and raises the cash you must have on hand — the trade-off in the example below. Once a setup works for you, save it as a preset from the same panel, and it comes back in one click.
Hedge amount (under Advanced)
A max here hides plans whose COVERING leg costs more than you want to lay, rather than merely ranking them lower, so the board you read is the board you can place. It is the hedge alone, not the plan's total outlay — on a staked offer your own stake is on top, and Peak cash needed is the figure for that. Without it the top of the list will sometimes be conversions requiring several hundred dollars you do not have. Stake increment, Min conversion and the market scope can all be left alone on a first pass.
A worked example
From a real row to a placed bet, including the stake.
The two halves of this example are the whole optimisation. The long price keeps $15 more of the same $100 and asks for $435 more cash to do it, which is why Peak cash needed sits beside Conversion rather than below it. And note what neither figure can be repeated on: a signup offer is once per book. There are perhaps a dozen books you can open in a given state, so the whole signup round is worth roughly $700-900 in conversions and then it is finished. Reload and recurring promotions keep arriving afterwards and are smaller. Treat the signup money as a one-time float that funds whatever you do next, not as an income.
When it goes wrong
The price moved, a leg was voided, the row vanished. What to actually do.
The card greys out and says "A price in this plan just moved" or "A line in this plan is no longer available" while you are reading it.
Place nothing from that card. A re-search is already in flight and will replace it within a second or two; if you are impatient, press ↻ Refresh. Then read Locked cash again before acting, because the figure that made the plan worth doing was computed against the price that has gone. This banner exists precisely because the alternative — walking a dead price to a sportsbook — is how a planned conversion becomes an unhedged bonus bet.
The promo leg is placed and the hedge price moves before you cover. The $100 bonus is on at +600 and the -750 cover is gone; the best remaining is -900.
Cover anyway, and do the arithmetic first so you know what you are accepting. At -900 (decimal 1.1111) the cover is $600 / 1.1111 = $540.00, and the plan pays $600 - $540 = $60.00 either way — a 60% conversion instead of 70.6%. You are giving up $10.59 to keep a locked outcome, against the alternative of leaving the bonus unhedged, where six times out of seven you finish with nothing at all. Re-run the search with the promo leg's book and price if you want the best remaining cover across every book rather than the one you were watching. Place the promo leg first because it costs no cash. An unplaced hedge is a decision you still get to make. An unplaced promo leg on a placed cash hedge is a real loss.
The book will not accept the plan. The bonus bet carries a minimum odds requirement, the market is excluded from the offer, or the token expires sooner than you thought.
Read the token's own terms before searching, then encode them as filters rather than remembering them. A minimum-odds rule goes into the Odds filter's lower bound; an excluded category goes into the market scope under Advanced. Most minimum-odds rules sit around -200 and a +600 promo side clears them comfortably, so the rule usually bites on site-credit plans placed at short prices, not on bonus bets. If the token expires today, turn on Main lines only, set a short Max quote age, and take a slightly lower conversion on a liquid main line: an expired token converts at zero.
Common mistakes
The specific ways people lose money with this tool.
Using the bonus bet on a team you fancy, at a short price, without hedging — or burning three signup offers in a weekend to see what happens.
A $100 bonus bet on a -200 favourite pays $50 if it lands and nothing if it does not, which is worth about $33 on average and is never guaranteed. The hedged plan above pays $70.59 every time. That is roughly $37 given away per offer. A signup offer is once per book, so there is no second attempt there. Across a dozen books, that is about $450 you cannot win back.
Work through the offers one at a time: claim one, convert it with a plan the screen has priced, log both legs, then move to the next book. The Bet Tracker's funding chip keeps the token separate from your cash so you can see what the round actually produced.
Reading a Projected card as though it said Locked, and planning around the headline figure on a second chance or bet & get offer.
Projected value assumes the future reward converts at the rate in the Reward converts at box — 70% unless you changed it. A bet & get showing $32.60 of projected value is a $2.40 hedged qualifying loss plus $35 of assumed reward value. If that $50 reward actually converts at 55% because the prices available when it lands are worse, the plan returns $25.10 and the $2.40 was real cash already spent.
Treat the orange Projected pill as a flag to lower the assumption rather than trust it. Put the rate you have actually achieved on past rewards into the Reward converts at box, and rank forecast offers below locked ones of the same size.
Placing the promo leg on the highest conversion on the board without checking Peak cash needed.
The 70.6% plan needs $529.41 in the hedge book's balance at the moment you cover. If it is not there, you hold a $100 bonus bet on a +600 longshot. It wins once in seven. The other six times, the conversion you counted on is $0, not $70.59. A pending transfer does not count as available.
Put what you are willing to lay in the Hedge amount max, so plans needing more are gone before you read them, and read Peak cash needed for the plan's total. When the cash is short, the shorter-priced plans convert lower and tie up far less — 55.6% of a token you can actually convert beats 70.6% of one you cannot.