Cashing out is a service now offered by almost all of the big bookies and provide you with an opportunity to relieve yourself from last minute nail biting by taking some or all of your winnings early. It presents punters with a cruel decision, hold on for the win that you previously predicted, or save yourself the worry and take a large percentage of your winnings early. The problem that can be presented is that if you take your money early, let’s say you take 80% of your winnings early, and then the team or teams go on to win after all it leaves you kicking yourself for being such a scaredy cat.
To Cash Out or Not to Cash Out
This is indeed the question, so how the hell do you approach it. Well you have a few options, you can ignore it in it’s entirety, go old school and place your bets and then don’t even look at the option of cashing out, if they come in they come in, if they don’t then they don’t. I’ve always approached the amount I stake based on how much I am ‘happy’ to lose, this way leaves you with no inner turmoil whatsoever.
You can also fully embrace the cash out, keep your eye on it, this works best in individual selection betting. If you have a team to win and they are leading 1-0, my advice would be to watch the game intently and cash out at the first sign of trouble, not too early of course or you’ll not get a great cash out offer, if it is still 1-0 after 75/80 minutes and the opposition are knocking on the door then take that money and run!
If you are betting on an accumulator then it adds a real trickiness to the cash out process, my advice would be to keep an eye on all of the games on a live update website if all your teams are 3-0 up then you’d be foolish to cash out, keep an eye and hang on for the win. If your selections are taking place at different times and let’s say 4 horses are racing an hour apart, I wouldn’t even consider the cash out until the first 3 have ran. This presents you with a monster problem. If the first 3 horses win and you placed, let’s say £10 with a total return of £1500, you may be offered a cash out of £400-£500 before the last horse runs. My attitude here is always, £500 from £10 is pretty good going, I’m happy with that and I’ll take the money. Of course £1500 would give you immense pleasure if the last horse wins, but sport is fickle and the devastation I would feel if it lost and I missed out on £500 would hurt me more than the £1500 would please me.
Always take the risk versus reward view, I’ve seen quite a few huge dilemmas online where a punter has a potential return of say £40,000 with one selection left and they have a cash out opportunity of £6,500, all from a £10 stake or less. When the potential return is this big then you may consider letting it run, if you do this then before deciding, I would analyse in fine detail the game/horse that is about to make or break you, how much do you honestly believe that it will win and consider whether it is worth staking £6,500 on doing (or whatever your cash out option is.) Remember that you are essentially placing that stake on your final outcome and only then can you rest easily.
One key point to remember is that bookies don’t want you to cash out if they feel that you’ll ultimately lose anyway and very often suspend your cash out at key points in games, notably in the last 5 minutes and after someone has scored, especially if your team is 2-0 up and then the opposition score, they love to take the cash out away at this point, so be smart and good luck out there.