Matched Betting Explained

Matched Betting

The principal to making money is to use the offers that Bookmakers give to new customer usually in the form of place a bet and then get a free bet.

Typically this would be deposit £10, place a bet of £10 and get a £10 free bet.

When you place a bet with a bookmaker you place a “back” bet, you want a particular event to happen, the Bookmaker who you place the bet with is “laying” the bet, they do not what that outcome to happen.

An example. You flip a coin and back heads to win, the other person wants tails to you, so:

  • You back heads to win and lay tails to lose
  • Your opponent backs tails to win and lay heads to lose

There are now a number of online betting exchanges available where you effectively can become the bookmaker, these include www.betfair.com, www.matchbook.com, www.smarkets.com and www.betdaq.com (it is worth having accounts with all four of these because prices do vary across the exchanges, in addition Paddy Power own Betfair so you avoid using Betfair to lay bets with Paddy Power)

Back to our scenario of the new account offer

You open an account, deposit £10 and bet £10 that heads will win at 2.0. If heads win you win £10, is heads loses you lose £10.

But rather than take the risk you go onto the Betting Exchange and you act as the Bookmaker and lay heads to win. This means to do the same bet but this time are backing tails to win.

The result of this is that when the coin is flipped whether it lands on Heads or Tails you win and lose nothing, so you still have your £10.

But what you also have now is a £10 Free Bet from the bookmaker.

You use that free bet to back heads again at 2.0, but this time only lay £5.00 on the exchange that Heads will lose.

Therefore:

  • If heads win I win my bet and £10, but lose £5.00 on the exchange but am £5.00 ahead
  • If Tails win I lose my bet which cost me nothing because it was FREE, and I make £5.00 on the exchange, so am still £5.00 ahead

So whatever the outcome of these two bets I end up with a profit of £5.00 guaranteed, no risk.

In the real world you will find that you lose around 5 to 10% of your money on the first bet (called “qualifying bet” loss) and make between 70 and 80% on the free bet.

So it is realistic to expect to earn between £6 and £7 on a £10 free bet offer.

There are over 100 online bookmakers most will have new account offers which will typically range from £10 to £30 Free Bet however some do offer more, at the time of writing (October 2021) Bet365 had a £100 Free Bet offer. you would expect to earn c£20 on average from new account offers.

Therefore if you complete 20 new account offers in your first month you would expect to make £600 to £700.

You will need a minimum of £200 to get started but ideally a fund of about £1,000 is ideal to maximise the money made on the Free Bets.   

I would suggest signing up for oddsmonkey or profitaccumulator to help maximise your profit for each offer  

This is NOT a get rich quick scheme, it does involve time however it can be very rewarding financially.