First of all, what I will be helping you out with is completely legal and 100% tax free. I guess a very minority would call it unethical from taking free money from bookmakers but then again they do the exact same thing to thousands of people a day so let’s just call it people finally getting even.
What is Matched Betting?
Matched betting is a technique that allows you to make a profit from the many free bet promotions offered by bookmakers.
Terminology used throughout this Guide:
Back Bet – This is the bet you will be placing on a bookmaker (Paddy Power, Bet365, Skybet, Coral, etc.) and betting for an outcome to come true. Eg “I bet Liverpool will beat Chelsea”
Lay Bet – This is the best you will be placing on a betting exchange (Betfair and Smarkets are the 2 I have experience with) and this is betting for a certain outcome to not come true. Eg “I bet England will not win” meaning if England lose or draw you then win your bet.
Trigger Bet – The bet that unlocks your free bet
Free Bet – This is a bet from the bookmaker that is just a bonus for usually signing up/betting with a certain bookmaker.
Liability – How much you need in your exchange to cover the bet
How does Matched Betting Work:
Matched betting works by using free offers and incentives given by bookmakers to new customers in the form of 'signup offers' (they also offer incentives to existing customers but I’m guessing you’re not up to that point yet if you’re reading this guide now).
An example would be:
Bookmaker X is giving away a £10 free bet if you place a £10 bet in the first place. You place your initial £10 on the bookmaker website (back bet)
You then place another bet covering the exact opposite result on a betting exchange at the same odds (lay bet). Once the two bets finish you will neither be up or down money, however, you will have qualified for the £10 free bet. You simply repeat the process again in order to cash your £10 up. If done correctly you should profit around £8 to £9.
Simple, right? It can be daunting at first but once you have completed a couple of offers you will get the hang of it. It's an alien technique at first but overall it's a very easy concept to learn.
How do I start?
This is a very basic guide on how to do it but almost nothing can go wrong, however if you do have any questions just contact me but I doubt you will.
Sign up to smarkets.com
Smarkets is the exchange I choose to use because it only has a 2% commission, which is lower than betfairs after the initial month on betfair, also on smarkets you can get a free £10 with my referral so just send me a message for that.
Sign up to coral.co.uk
Coral right now is offering a £20 free bet for a £5 deposit for new customers only which is really good too start with because it’ll be an ok amount of profit and if something did go wrong which it really shouldn’t you’d only be risking £5. So after you sign up just simply deposit £5.
As I said, always check the T&Cs.
Change odds format to decimals
Changing the odds format to decimals from fractions makes it a lot easier for the first few especially since on exchanges it’s decimals only. I know coral has this feature but if another bookmaker doesn’t just simply use this website - http://oddsconverter.co.uk/
Find and place your trigger bet
Ideally you want to find a sporting bet (I prefer doing Football or Horse Racing) which has the closest odds on both Coral (the bet to back) and Smarkets (the lay bet).
Lay odds on Smarkets are the blue boxes, not the green.
For this free bet offer, Coral's terms state you must pick odds of 1.5 or greater. It's better to choose a bet with low odds for this step, between 1.5 and 2.0 if possible
Walkthrough:
Step 1: https://prnt.sc/jsh3tt - Find your trigger bet, for coral this would ideally be inbetween 1.5 or 2.0 however I did because I didn’t want money in my coral account.
Step 2: https://prnt.sc/jsh4at - Go on smarkets and find the same event and look too see if the odds on the bookmaker and exchange are relitevely close together (exchange is usually always more)
Step 3: https://prnt.sc/jsh4l2 - Go on the website www.teamprofit.com/calculator and fill in the back stake (how much the bet on the bookermaker is) the back odds and the lay odds. Also make sure you put the 2% comission in.
Step 4: https://prnt.sc/jsh4z7 - How much it says on the calculator you should lay then goes into the back stake box on smarkets, in my example this was saying at 3.5 odds I could lay £4.67 so I put that into the box on smarkets, and then after that just double check that both liabilities add up (It can sometimes be 1p or 2p out, that’s fine)
Step 4: Place both bets on the bookmaker and smarkets.
Step 5: https://prnt.sc/jsh5o1 - Your coral free bet tokens should now be unlocked (Some bookmakers can take a lot longer than others, but coral was almost instant for me)
Step 6: https://prnt.sc/jsh9nz - Find another event to place the free bets on, with your free bets, the higher the odds usually the higher the profit, but this also means higher liabilty to cover the bet. In most cases the higher the odds you go the higher the gap will be on the exchange but that’s fine. For example a 1.00 odds gap between 10.00 and 11.00 isn’t too bad but a 1.00 between 1.50 and 2.5 is pretty bad and you would never take that bet (Should typically be looking for around 0-15% higher)
Step 7: https://prnt.sc/jsh9x7 - Place your free bets by clicking on the box highlighted, they will give you them in 4 x £5 bets, this is also good because if you don’t want to pay the high liability at once then you can do 4 different events and place a £5 bet on each, however in my example I just placed the bet 4 times on the same horse.
Step 8: https://prnt.sc/jshb02 - You will then find the same race again on smarkets and look to lay against what you backed on the bookmaker
Step 9: https://prnt.sc/jshbjp - Go back onto the calculator and change the bet type to free bet, put the stake in once again depending on whether you do the full £20 at once or do them seperately just enter how much of the free bets you’re using on that certain event/bet. Type in the back odds and the lay odds once again so that you can find how much you need to lay and what your liability will be (I know my example doesn’t add up since the odds changed but it only went up 0.1 odds so I still did this horse)
Step 10: https://prnt.sc/jshbt8 - Fill in the details once again like you did on the trigger bet so that it matches up with the numbers given on the calculator.
Step 11: Place bets once again
Step 12: https://prnt.sc/jshcae - Your bets are now all placed, now all you need to do is sit and wait for the bets too all settle.
Step 13: If either of your bets won on the bookmaker make sure to withdraw the funds from the account since you will no longer be using that bookmaker and if they both lost that means both your smarkets bets would of won so you can decide if you want to withdraw so that you can put it in the next bookmaker, or leave it in your smarkets account so that you will have a higher liability for the next one.
Now that I’ve done Coral what now?
Now is the time you rinse and repeat this across all the bookmakers, the simple Bet X Get Y offers are all done in the same way I just explained here.
At first this might sound all hard to grasp and you will probably be abit unsure of things, if you ever have any questions don’t hesitate to ask me but I promise after a few bookmakers done this will become second nature.
I’ve finished all of the bookmakers:
The profits don’t end here and good for you there’s still THOUSANDS to be made over time with offers like this - http://prntscr.com/jshsrq
On this example alone it’s an exsisting customer offer and that one offer is a free £38, by now you’ll have a lot of bookmakers always emailing you new offers like this one and you should try take advantage of all of them, some might take more creativity than others but that’s for you too figure out, or you could ask me once again if you’re not unsure but you think a certain offer could be worth your time.
Exsisting customer offers will always take more creativity than just Bet X Get Y but after finishing all of the new customer offers you’ll be more than capable to have abit of creativity to profit from these offers.
