What cash out costs you

Two different things are called cash out

In Ghana the phrase does double duty. On a bet slip, cash out means settling before the event finishes. In a cashier, cash out means moving money to your MTN Mobile Money, Telecel Cash or AirtelTigo Money wallet. This guide is about the first.

The second has limits of its own and the tighter one is set by the Bank of Ghana rather than by any bookmaker. That is covered in why your mobile money wallet caps your withdrawal.

The fair price, and the price on your screen

Work the fair price out in one line. Take the return the slip is still playing for and divide it by the current odds of everything that has not settled.

Fifty cedis on a treble at 2.00 a leg is odds of 8.00 and a return of 400 cedis. Two legs have landed. The last one is trading at 2.00 right now. Fair value of that position is 400 divided by 2.00, so 200 cedis. If the offer on screen is 180, the buy-back has cost you twenty, which is a tenth of what the position is worth.

The price that matters is the current one, not the one you took. If the last selection has shortened to 1.50, fair value moves to about 267 cedis and the offer moves with it. If it has drifted out to 3.00, fair value drops to about 133. Nothing about your original slip changed. The market did.

The margin is charged twice

Every price a bookmaker publishes already carries its margin. Add up the implied chances across a full match market and they come to more than one hundred per cent. The amount above one hundred is the book's edge, and you paid it when you placed the bet.

Cash out adds a second one on the way out. None of the fourteen operators in our Ghana file publishes the margin it applies to a buy-back. Not one figure, on any of them, anywhere we could read. So the only way to see it is to price the position yourself and compare.

Early payout is a different thing, and it is free

SportyBet's 2UP settles a football bet early once your team goes two goals clear, at the full price. betPawa runs 1UP and 2UP the same way. Nothing is deducted, because the book is not buying anything back. It is settling on a stated condition it published in advance.

Those are worth knowing precisely because they look like cash out on the screen and cost nothing. If a slip qualifies for one, taking a buy-back price instead is paying for something you were about to get free.

Four things to settle before you press it

None of this takes more than a minute, and the minute is best spent before the match rather than during it.

• The offer against what the position is worth. Do the division. A gap under five per cent is a different decision from a gap over twenty.
• Whether a partial cash out is available, and what price the remaining stake keeps.
• What it does to an acca bonus. The Ghanaian ladders do not publish an answer, so get one from support in writing before you need it.
• Whether the market is live. A price that will not accept usually means it moved while you were looking at it, and the next one offered may be lower.

In Aviator, cash out is the whole game

There is no buy-back price in a crash game and no margin on the exit. You take the multiplier on screen or you take nothing that round. The house edge lives in the return the game is configured to run, which is a separate number and a more useful one.

That figure, and what it costs over a session, is set out in what Aviator's 97 per cent means.