Can't complain at a free money promo three weekends in a row. This time I couldn't even wait for the weekend after checking the terms: it's valid from 00:00am on Thursday!
It's the same deal as last time, with net losses of up to £30 refunded provided you make at least 5 bets. So I placed the same bets as last time: £6 on red all the way to qualify for the offer, then betting a 2-1 shot to try and win something serious.
After the five spins I was two for five: 19, 2, 8, 2, 5. One more try to get back even (followed by doubling up to chase my "losses" if this failed) brought 12 and I was in business. I stuck to lumping £30 on the first dozen for a risk-free chance of £60, not paying attention to the fact that the last five numbers would all have been winners on that bet and, naturally, it landed right in the middle of the table on 23. But if they keep offering this freebie, one day I'll hit it... it's worth having a Sporting Index account just for these deals!
I looked back at the calculation from my last post where I thought I'd figured out that laying black had a much smaler house edge than betting on red. The software tries to be clever and keep its bet increments in whole numbers although it doesn't quite work. The closest you get to a £6 bet is selling at 0.94 for £5.67 per point, making it a £6.01 proposition to win £5.33.
The expected value with these figures over 37 spins is therefore (18 x £6.01) - (19 x £5.33) = -£6.91. That's less than 19p per £6.01 bet, or about 3p in the pound - not too different from the normal 2.7% house edge in roulette. So I was wrong in thinking this could possibly be the best roulette bet on the planet. Nobody noticed though, did they...
