StakeOut monitors South African bookmakers in real time, identifying arbitrage gaps, mispriced odds, and value bets — before they close.
Six steps from signing in to placing your first bet. Each step shows the actual screen you will see, with every control explained.
The Scanner and Calculators tabs require an account. Home, How It Works and Knowledge are open to everyone.
Click Login in the top-right corner. If you were invited to the beta, use the link in your invitation email first — it will ask you to set a password, then sign you in automatically. After that you can log in normally with your email and password.
Your session persists between visits — you will not need to log in every time unless you click Logout.
One live view of every opportunity found across South African bookmakers, refreshed continuously.
The scanner connects to a live feed the moment you open it. The bar along the top carries the controls that affect everything below it, and the four boxes underneath summarise the current state of play.
The single most important screen on the site. Every card tells you what to bet, where, and how much.
Each card is one opportunity. The coloured stripe down the left edge tells you the type at a glance: green for arbitrage, blue for +EV, amber for a middle. The rows in the middle are the individual bets — the legs — that make up the opportunity. Place every leg, at the stake shown, at the bookmaker named.
Odds change constantly. Open both bookmakers, confirm the prices still match the card, and place the legs as close together in time as you can. A card outlined in red has gone stale — treat its prices as expired.
Filters let you cut hundreds of opportunities down to the handful you can actually act on.
The left sidebar controls which kind of opportunity appears and which bookmakers are included. The row above the cards controls sport, minimum profit and stale results. On a phone the sidebar is hidden behind the ☰ button and the opportunity types become a scrolling row of chips.
Alongside the sidebar, a row sits directly above the results: Sport narrows to football, tennis or basketball; Min profit hides anything below your threshold, useful for skipping margins too thin to be worth the effort; and Hide Stale removes opportunities whose odds have not refreshed recently. At the foot of the list, Per page sets how many cards show at once.
Start by unticking every bookmaker you have not signed up with. Everything left on screen is then something you can genuinely place today.
Mark a bet as placed and StakeOut keeps a running tally of your expected return.
Once you have actually placed every leg of an opportunity at the bookmakers, press Mark as placed on that card. It is added to your Placed Bets list and its expected profit is added to your running total. Click the Placed Bets box in the stats strip to open the list, review what is outstanding, or remove an entry.
This is a record of what you told StakeOut you placed. It does not connect to your bookmaker accounts and cannot confirm a bet was actually accepted — always check your bet slips as the source of truth.
Two tools for situations the scanner alone does not cover.
The Matched Betting calculator turns a bookmaker free bet into cash: enter the free bet amount, which bookmaker gave it to you, and whether the stake is returned, and it finds the best live opportunity to convert it. The Dutch Betting calculator splits a fixed stake across several selections so that whichever one wins, you get the same return.
That is the whole tool. If something here does not match what you see on screen, or a step is unclear, use the Feedback button in the top bar — it goes straight to us.
Three distinct strategies, one shared foundation: bookmakers price the same event differently, and those differences create exploitable gaps. Understanding exactly how each gap works determines when to act, how much to stake, and what risk you carry.
Every bookmaker builds a margin (also called the vig or juice) into their odds — the sum of implied probabilities across all outcomes exceeds 100%. A bookmaker offering Home 1.90 / Draw 3.50 / Away 4.00 implies a total probability of 114%, meaning R114 of implied bets return only R100. That 14% is their edge.
Arbitrage exists when, across two or more bookmakers, the combined implied probability drops below 100%. The surplus — however thin — belongs to you, locked in regardless of who wins.
The arb sum is the key figure: add 1 ÷ odds for the best available price on each outcome across all bookmakers. If the result is less than 1, you have an arbitrage.
Not every mispriced line creates a full arbitrage. Sometimes only one outcome at one bookmaker is significantly off, while the other outcomes are priced normally. That single mispriced outcome is a +EV (positive expected value) bet.
The fair price is derived by stripping the margin from every bookmaker covering the same event, averaging their implied probabilities for each outcome, and converting back to odds. Any bookmaker offering better odds than the fair price on a given outcome is offering you value.
Each bookmaker's odds imply a probability. Those probabilities sum to more than 100% due to the margin. Stripping the margin (dividing each implied probability by the total sum) gives that bookmaker's best estimate of the true probability. Averaging these estimates across all bookmakers yields the market consensus — the fair price.
A single +EV bet can lose. The edge is a long-run statistical advantage, not a certainty on any individual wager. Over hundreds of bets at a 5% edge, the law of large numbers ensures the edge converges — but your bankroll must be sized to survive the variance along the way.
Middles exploit line discrepancies — situations where two bookmakers offer different numbers for the same market type on the same game. They are most common in totals (Over/Under goals) and Asian handicap markets, where the line itself is a number that can vary between bookmakers.
Unlike arbitrage, middles do not ensure profit. The structure is: likely small loss on most outcomes, large profit if the result lands in the gap between the two lines. If the probability of hitting the middle is high enough to justify the downside, the bet has positive expected value.
Bookmaker A offers Over 2.5 goals @ 1.91. Bookmaker B offers Under 3.5 goals @ 1.91. There is a one-goal gap between these two lines: a game finishing with exactly 3 goals satisfies both conditions simultaneously.
| Goals scored | Over 2.5 | Under 3.5 | Net result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0, 1, or 2 | LOSE −R 100 | WIN +R 91 | −R 9 |
| Exactly 3 | WIN +R 91 | WIN +R 91 | +R 182 ← the middle |
| 4 or more | WIN +R 91 | LOSE −R 100 | −R 9 |
In Premier League football, roughly 11–14% of matches finish with exactly 3 goals. The expected value of this middle at equal R 100 stakes:
AH middles work the same way. If Book A offers Home −1.5 and Book B offers Away +2.5, the middle is a Home win by exactly 2 goals — both bets win. The downside on other outcomes is again a small net loss.
The current scanner does not detect middles. There are two reasons:
over_under_2.5 only matches over_under_2.5. A middle requires comparing over_under_2.5 from one bookmaker against over_under_3.5 from another, which the grouping algorithm never does.Detecting middles requires a separate grouping pass: match by event and market type only, then scan adjacent lines for gap opportunities. This is planned but not yet implemented.
| Arbitrage | +EV Betting | Middles | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profit certainty | Expected | Long-run only | Not certain |
| Markets needed | All outcomes, multiple bookmakers | One mispriced outcome, one bookmaker | Same market type at different lines, two bookmakers |
| Typical edge | 0.5 – 3% | 3 – 10% per bet | 5 – 15% EV when middle hits |
| Opportunity frequency | Rare | Frequent | Uncommon in SA |
| Capital required | Must cover all legs simultaneously | Single bet, flexible sizing | Two legs, capped downside |
| Account risk | High — consistent winners flagged quickly | High — bookmakers limit value bettors | Medium — harder to detect from bet history |
| Execution speed | Critical — all legs must be placed fast | Not critical — single placement | Moderate — two books, not time-sensitive |
Tools to extract maximum value from every opportunity