Cashing out a football bet can be very tempting when there’s already a decent profit on offer and the chance to take it early.
The team you have bet on might still be ahead, but with time left on the clock and the opposition pressing, that guaranteed profit can suddenly look very appealing.
But is cashing out actually a good idea?
In most cases, I would avoid using a bookmaker's cash out button. It gives you a quick and easy way to settle a bet early, but that convenience usually comes at a cost.
The amount offered is often lower than the actual value of your bet, particularly once the bookmaker's margin has been factored in.
There are other ways to reduce your risk or lock in a profit, including laying the same selection on a betting exchange such as Betfair.
In this article, I'll explain how football bet cash outs work, whether they're worth using and look at some examples.
What does cash out mean in betting?
Cash out allows you to settle a bet before the event has finished.
Instead of waiting to see whether your original bet wins or loses, the bookmaker offers you an amount of money to close the bet immediately.
For example, imagine you place a £20 bet on Crystal Palace to win at odds of 3.00.
Your potential return is £60:
- Stake: £20
- Potential profit: £40
- Total return: £60
Crystal Palace then take the lead and their odds shorten considerably.
Because your bet is now much more likely to win, the bookmaker might offer you £35 or £40 to cash out.
Accept the offer and the bet is settled there and then. It no longer matters what happens during the rest of the match. You have banked a profit, but given up the chance of collecting the full £60 return.
Cash out can also work in the opposite direction.
If Crystal Palace go behind and their odds drift, you might only be offered £8 of your original £20 stake back.
You could take the £8 and accept a £12 loss rather than risk losing the full £20.
The exact amount offered will change throughout the match as the odds move.
Is it worth cashing out a football bet?
In my opinion, usually not.
The problem isn't the idea of closing a bet early. There are plenty of perfectly good reasons why you might want to reduce your risk, lock in a profit or change your position during a football match.
The problem is the price you're being offered to do it.
When you press a bookmaker's cash out button, you don't get to choose the odds that your bet is effectively being closed at.
The bookmaker does that for you, and unsurprisingly, the offer generally isn't designed to give you the best possible value.
It might seem fairly insignificant on an individual bet, but if you regularly cash bets out early those small differences do add up.
There is also a psychological side to cashing out.
Once you see a figure such as £75 Cash Out on the screen, it is very easy to start thinking of that £75 as money you already own.
Suddenly you're no longer thinking:
"Is £75 a good price for this bet?"
You're thinking:
"Do I want to risk losing my £75?"
They're very different questions.
That's why I prefer to look at the current odds and the value of the position rather than automatically reaching for the cash out button.
That doesn't mean you should never cash out.
There may be occasions where reducing your risk matters more to you than getting the absolute best possible price, particularly if you don't have access to a betting exchange or don't want to place another bet manually.
But you should at least understand what you're giving up before accepting the offer.
Why is the cash out offer usually so low?
Bookmakers build a margin into their prices and the cash out feature provides another opportunity for that margin to work in their favour.
Let's say the fair value of your bet at a particular moment is around £50, but a bookmaker offers you £45 to cash out.
That £5 might not seem like too bad a deal. You've still made a decent profit and you've removed the risk of the bet losing.
The problem is that you're effectively paying £5 for the convenience of pressing the cash out button.
If you do that repeatedly, it becomes another cost eating into your betting returns.
The size of the difference varies between bookmakers, markets and circumstances, so there isn't a fixed percentage that you always lose by cashing out.
The easiest way to see whether an offer represents good value is to compare it with the current market odds. That's where betting exchanges become really useful.
Cash out betting examples
Let's look at a couple of examples.
Example: Cashing out a winning bet
Imagine you back Wolves with the following bet:
£20 @ 3.00
If Wolves win:
£20 × 3.00 = £60 return
That gives you a potential profit of £40.
Wolves take the lead and the odds shorten significantly.
The bookmaker now offers you:
Cash out: £32
If you accept it, your original £20 stake plus £12 profit is returned to you and the bet is finished.
But is £32 actually a good price for giving up your original bet?
To answer that, we need to look at what the position is worth based on the current odds.
Let's say Wolves can now be backed or laid at approximately 1.50.
At those odds, your original £20 bet at 3.00 has become considerably more valuable.
If you were able to hedge the position at exactly 1.50, you could lock in approximately £20 profit, before any exchange commission.
That would leave you with your original £20 stake plus around £20 profit, rather than the bookmaker's £32 cash out offer.
In this example, pressing cash out has effectively cost you around £8.
Example: Cash out vs laying the bet on Betfair
Now let's use the same bet but close it manually on the Betfair Exchange.
You originally backed:
£20 @ 3.00
Your potential outcomes are:
- Wolves win: +£40
- Wolves don't win: -£20
Wolves score and the lay odds fall to 1.50.
Instead of pressing a cash out button, you could place a lay bet.
If you're not familiar with lay betting, our guide to back and lay betting explains how both sides of a Betfair market work.
To approximately equalise the profit on both outcomes, you would lay £40 @ 1.50.
The liability on the lay bet is:
£40 × (1.50 - 1) = £20
Now look at what happens.
If Wolves win:
Original back bet: +£40
Lay bet: -£20
Overall profit: £20
If Wolves don't win:
Original back bet: -£20
Lay bet: +£40
Overall profit: £20
You've effectively created a guaranteed £20 profit regardless of the final result, before Betfair commission.
Compare that with our hypothetical bookmaker cash out offer of £32, which only gave us £12 profit.
The cash out button is doing this process for you, but by hedging the bet yourself you can see the odds you're getting and decide whether you're happy with the price.
What about partial cash out?
You don't necessarily have to choose between closing the whole bet or leaving all of it running.
If your selection is available to lay on a betting exchange, you can close part of your position instead.
Going back to the Wolves example above, let's say this time instead of laying £40, you lay £20 at 1.50.
Your lay liability would be:
£20 × (1.50 - 1) = £10
If Wolves go on to win:
- Back bet profit: +£40
- Lay bet loss: -£10
- Overall profit: £30
If Wolves fail to win:
- Back bet loss: -£20
- Lay bet profit: +£20
- Overall result: £0
You have effectively removed the risk of losing money, while still leaving part of the original bet running for a larger profit.
You could lay more or less depending on how much risk you want to remove.
This gives you far more flexibility than simply choosing between leaving the whole bet open and closing the whole position.
Football trading gives you another option
This is where football trading gives you a bit more control.
You don't even have to place the original bet with a bookmaker at all.
On a betting exchange such as Betfair, you can both back and lay football selections, which means you can open and close a position in the same market.
For example, you might back a team before kick-off and then lay them later if their odds shorten, or use a first half goals trading strategy and trade out after an early goal.
You are not relying on a bookmaker to decide what your cash out is worth, and you don't need to wait until the final whistle to find out whether the bet has won or lost.
This is one of the main ideas behind football trading.
If you're new to it, take a look at our guide to football trading, where I explain how it works in more detail.