In other words, you have matched betting to thank for this blog and everything else I have done since. But a lot has changed since those early gold rush days, so does matched betting still work in 2017? I sat down with my fiance, who has never done any gambling before, to find out. We would try a few different offers and hopefully make her a bit of money. If you want to learn the basics about matched betting and how to make money from free bets, check out this post:. I wrote it a couple of years ago but all the information is still accurate, and the Bet365 offer I go through can still be done now. The first thing we did is sign-up to or rather log-in, as I already had an account. Back when I first started matched betting I had to find all these offers myself. I used to spend literally most of my day reading terms and conditions and typing into spreadsheets. Now you can just log in and start working your way through the curated list of offers. As of 24 January 2017, there are 127 guides, and 35 reload offers just for today. Plus over 200,000 posts in their thriving forum. Does the Concept Still Work? It became quickly obvious from looking at that there are £1,000s worth of offers available. But before diving in head first I wanted to make sure that the bonuses worked the same way they used to. We picked a fairly straightforward one for her to begin with. To make the most money out of it the free bet needs to be bet on higher odds. They explain why a lot better than I can. The process to make money out of this bonus was simple. Lay off at a betting exchange to hedge the bet. The lower the odds at the exchange the better. Lay off at the betting exchange. The higher the rating, the less more money you will make. To work out how exactly how much to lay off, you can use one of the calculators on Oddsmonkey. SNR stands for stake not returned : She signed up to Betway and placed the following bets. After each bet, she went over to Betfair and placed the hedge. Both bets won at Betway. Which was lucky, because my bad guessing meant that was the better outcome for her. So does matched betting still work? My fiance just made a very easy £53. Not only that, but the offer had exactly the same terms as those I remember doing nine years ago. How Hard Is It To Make £500? But maybe there are only a few offers as easy as Betway, and then everything dries up. To find out I went through the list of offers on Oddsmonkey to work out how hard it would be to raise her total winnings to £500. WARNING: These are not all beginner offers, I have a lot of experience matched betting and so am comfortable doing complicated offers. If you are just starting out I strongly suggest working through. Expected profit: £485 My aim when picking offers was to try and minimise the number of sites she needed to sign-up to. Bet365, Sportingbet, and X-Tip all have quite large bonuses. William Hill and Ladbrokes have smaller bonuses, but you can claim both the sportsbook one and casino ones without needing to sign-up multiple times. And Betfair and Matchbook are both betting exchanges, so can be combined them with any of the other bookies. Total sign ups needed: Seven. Tackling The Offers I am not going to go into the exact details of how to tackle each offer. You can either sign-up to and view their how-to guides, or you can research them yourself. I did cover the. But in brief: William Hill, Ladbrokes and Betfair Sportsbook were almost the exact same type of bonus as the Betway one above. The only slight difference was that at Ladbrokes she had to wait until the bet settled before the free bet was added. Once again, provides pretty detailed step-by-step guides to doing each offer. The other sports bonuses were slightly different. Cashable and not SNR. They are similar to the Bet365 one I. I highly recommend making sure you completely understand what is going on before trying them. I wrote a post about. How Much Can You Make From Matched Betting? After completing those bonuses, Oddsmonkey reckons she is 12% through the new account offers. I reckon there is probably a straightforward two or three thousands pounds that can be made just from working through the sign-up offers. But what do you do once you have an account at every bookmaker? That brings us on to the area where I think is most worth the £17. Every day there are time-sensitive bonuses that anyone who has an account at the bookie can do. These are called reload offers. Each morning you can log in and work your way through whatever the day has to offer. Here are the offers available for today. Prepare yourself for a bit of scrolling! But as they only take a few minutes to do, that money really starts adding up. Unfortunately, there is a maximum to how much you can make from matched betting. Eventually, the bookies will start closing your account or disallowing you from claiming bonuses. How long this takes seems to be pretty much down to luck. But until that happens there is still plenty of money to be made. So, Does Matched Betting Still Work In 2017? It has changed since I first started. The bonuses are smaller. And there are a lot less bookies around. But a lot of that is offset by just how good the tools are for the modern bonus hunter. I used to spend 90% of my time on research. Finding offers, hustling my way into private matched betting chat rooms, and trying to get my head around the complex maths of different bonus types. Now you can pay a monthly subscription and have someone else do all the hard work. So on average, I would say that matched betting is probably easier to get into now and is more accessible than ever. But for the professional or seasoned matched better, there is much less potential out there. Gone are the days when you could go into matched betting with the intention of making a career out of it. There are still professionals out there, but they are becoming increasingly scarce. If you are thinking of starting out, I suggest you go in with the intention of grabbing a few thousand pounds of easy money and moving on. I know some of my readers are more familiar with the current state of matched betting than I am. Does my analysis sound about right? Do you agree, does matched betting still work? Please let me know in the comments and I will continually update this article.
