During the Coronavirus Pandemic, we found ourselves short of income from our website business and the real necessity to find something we could do online to at least partly fill the gap with some extra cash. Trawling through the internet I came across Matched Betting. A little sceptical and with no betting experience I trod carefully as I researched the system in great detail …… After a couple of weeks of research I took the plunge with cash to fund my initial bets of just £50 ……
In just over 8 months I earned £5000 risk free and better still Tax Free!
If you’re interested in finding out how anyone can earn money from Matched Betting with as little as £50 start up costs, I’m happy to share my experience and give you all the information you need to start Matched Betting today and earn some extra tax free cash.
PLEASE READ THROUGH THE WHOLE BLOG POST BEFORE HAVING A GO AT MATCHED BETTING
What exactly is Matched Betting?
In simple terms Matched Betting (as the name suggests is where you match a bet to win with a bet to lose) resulting in a system of making money from free bet promotions offered by bookmakers.
To take the risk out of the bet (to guarantee you won’t lose) you do something called “Laying” the bet.
Don’t worry, if it sounds complicated ….. if I can do it anyone can!
In this blog I will explain as simply as I can exactly how it works, run you through an example and then take you through a real promotion that you can copy to make your first cash from a promotion and hopefully set you on the path to earning a decent amount of extra cash from Matched Betting.
Let Me Give You A Simple Example!
Let’s say that a betting shop has a joining promotion offering you a £10 free bet if you place a bet of £10 on any event. So, take a horse race for instance ……. if you were to place a bet on Red Rum to win. There are two possible outcomes, Red Rum will either win or lose, so you will either win some money or lose all of your money. But, if you place a £10 bet on Red Rum to win as well as a £10 bet on Red Rum to lose, you won’t win any money, but you won’t lose any either. The two bets would cancel each other out, but as a result you would have met the requirements to claim your £10 free bet without losing any money. Take a look at the diagram below ……..
Matched Betting In A Little More Detail!
Now we all know that in betting there is more than one outcome. For instance, on a football match there are three possible outcomes, a win, a draw or a loss. Because of this and the need to cover all outcomes on a bet in matched betting, we use something called an exchange. Now a normal bookmaker enables us to put bets on to win, but an exchange also gives you the option to put a bet on something to lose. So, to cover all outcomes of a football match ….. we can put a bet on the team to win with one bookmaker and put the same bet on the team not to win with the exchange (this part of the bet covers both a draw and a loss, as a draw still means the team hasn’t won the match). These two bets are called a “BACK” bet and “LAY” bet. A Back bet is the bet we place with the bookmaker on the team to win. A Lay bet is the bet we put on the same team to lose.
Below is another example using a football match between Burnley and Arsenal. We would be placing a £5 bet on Arsenal. So you can see we place our “BACK” bet with Coral on Arsenal to win at odds of 1.61 and to match the bet we would then place our “LAY” bet with Smarkets on Arsenal to lose at odds of 1.63.
Lets just familiarise ourselves with a few words that you’ll here often used in Matched Betting and exactly what they mean. You’ll come across them often so its worth having them here as a reminder.
“BOOKMAKER” – The bookmaker is where we will place our bet on an event to win!
“EXCHANGE” – This is a bookmaker who allows us to place the bet on an event to lose!
“BACK BET” – This is what the bet is called when you bet with the bookmaker on the event to win!
“LAY BET” – This is what the bet is called when you bet with the exchange on the event to lose!
OK, so now you have the basics of matched betting lets look at a real promotion.
We’ll Go Through Coral’s New Customer Promotion Making A
Guaranteed Profit of £15!
This is a new customer offer from Coral offering £20 in Free Bets when you bet £5. From this offer, we can make a guaranteed £15. This is a relatively easy offer to start with and more importantly you only need a small amount of funds to complete the offer.
First, You’ll Need To Open A Smarkets Account …… And Here’s How!
Smarkets is one of the best exchanges with more often than not good odds for matched betting. They’re also the largest of all the betting exchanges and its probably the best one to choose for those new to matched betting. Click below to go to the Smarkets website and follow the instructions to open a new account.
PLEASE READ THROUGH THE WHOLE BLOG POST BEFORE JOINING SMARKETS
Next, You’ll Need To Open A Coral Account …… And Here’s How!
We’ve chosen Coral as they are offering new customers £20 in free bets when they place a bet of £5. Now this certainly isn’t the biggest welcome offer out there, but its best to start small as this ensures you don’t need a large amount of cash to get started. click below to open the Coral website and follow the instructions to open a new account.
PLEASE READ THROUGH THE WHOLE BLOG POST BEFORE JOINING CORAL
Changing The Bookmakers & Exchange Odds To A Decimal Rather Than A Fraction!
Normally when you see odds at a bookmakers you’ll see them as a fraction (as an example 2/1). But for matched betting we need to Switching to decimal odds as this makes comparing odds so much easier. Exchanges (in this instance we are using Smarkets as the exchange) use decimal odds already, but most bookmakers (in this instance we are using Coral) use fractional odds. You can usually find the switch to decimal odds either at the top of the page, in the sidebar on the left, or if you go to your account and open up settings. So with Coral for instance, its located in your account settings. To find them go to the very top right hand corner of the page and click on the image of a person, from the drop down menu click on settings, then click on betting settings. You’ll then see that you can click on Decimal, then click on Sports (top left of the page, next to the Coral logo). You can then see that all of the odds are now showing as decimals.
Placing Your Bets!
So, now that you have your Coral bookmaker account and Smarkets exchange account set up, lets get going with Coral’s introductory offer. Every offer you’ll come across has a few terms that you need to be aware of. Examples of this might be minimum odds of your bet, a particular sport or even a specific football match or horse race. If you look at Coral’s introductory offer terms, you’ll see that the our qualifying bet can be placed on any sport and the odds need to be a minimum of 1.5 or greater.
I recommend that you place your qualifying bet on a popular event that lots of people would be betting on such as Premier League Football. You’ll find it much easier to match your bets.
So just to remind you, we need to place our qualifying bet of £5 on any sporting event at odds of 1.5 or higher. Once we have done this and the event is over we will have met the criteria and be issued with our £20 in free bets.
Now when we place the £5 qualifying bet we want to find a game that has odds as near to 1.5 as possible. If you also remember the reason we joined two different bookmakers, Coral where we will be placing our “BACK” bet on the football team to win and Smarkets where we will be placing a “LAY” bet on the same team to lose. We need to make sure that we get both bets as close to each other as possible.
So, as an example if the odds for the football team to win are 1.5 we need the odds for the same team to lose to be as close to 1.5 as possible (eg. 1.51) If we do this we will be matching the bet and win or lose we will receive most of our £5 qualifying bet back.
Lets Find Some Odds Suitable For Our Qualifying Bet!
So, I’ve found odds of 1.61 for Arsenal to beat Burnley at Coral. This is our back bet. On Smarkets (the exchange), I’ve found that the odds for Arsenal to lose against Arsenal are 1.63 making the BACK odds and LAY odds nice and close, perfect for matching our qualifying bet.
Placing Our Back Bet!
So lets place our qualifying bet with Coral. You know you need to place a bet of £5 to qualify. Simply click on the ‘1.61‘ button underneath ‘Arsenal’, enter your stake of £5 and click ‘Place Bet. That’s it the BACK bet is placed.
Placing Our Lay Bet!
What you don’t know yet is how much you need to stake at Smarkets to even out your bets. This is where I use a Match Betting Calculator (I’ll tell you where to get a matched betting calculator, along with some really good guides at the end of the blog). You simply insert your back stake of £5 and our back odds which were 1.61 for Arsenal to win (back commission is 0% as coral don’t charge us a commission). We then insert our lay odds which are 1.63 on Arsenal to lose (Smarkets charge us 2% commission so insert 2% as the lay commission). The calculator will then tell you how much you need to stake at Smarkets to be as close to breaking even as possible. Based on my Arsenal example, that is a stake of £5.14 and results in a tiny overall loss of 12 pence. You can see this from the calculator results below.
In order to double check that we are placing the correct amounts on our bets we can use a checking calculator (I’ll tell you were you can find this and some other brilliant stuff to help make things a lot easier later in the blog). But for now take a look at the calculator below. You’ll see that I’ve placed in the £10 stake and the 1.61 Back Odds and 1.63 Lay Odds as in the diagram above. Scroll down a little further the part circled in red and you’ll see the “Profit Breakdown” show us that whether we win or lose the bet we will make a 20p loss on our qualifying bet.
OK, so we’ve placed our qualifying bet on the game, once the game is over we will be given a £10 free bet by Coral
Now in order to make money on our £10 free bet we use the same system of betting on a team to win and betting on the same team to lose (just as we have in the demonstration above.
But there is one important thing we have to do. That is to bet on team that has high odds. Look at the demonstration above again and you will see that we bet on Arsenal at 1.61 odds to win and 1.63 odds to lose.
With our free bet we want to look for a team with odds over 5.0
So something like Luton to win at odds of 5.50 and Luton to lose at odds of 5.60
With the odds high we can actually make money from the free bet whatever the outcome.
So we’ll place our bets again with Coral and Smarkets as in the diagram below ………
Below shows the calculator again using the rather clever “Free Bet Mode” (again I’ll show you where to access this neat bit of kit later)
You’ll see that this time I’ve placed the £10 free bet as the amount of the bet and then the 5.50 Back Odds for Luton to win and 5.60 Lay Odds for Luton to lose. Again, scroll down a little further and you’ll see the “Profit Calculator” which this time tells us that whether we win or lose the bet we will make £7.90 on our free bet.
So now that we’ve run through how matched betting works, placing a qualifying bet for a promotion and how you can extract a profit from a free bet you receive as a result of placing a bet on a promotion, you’re now ready to take advantage of all the other bookmaker sign ups and re-load offers with the potential to make £1000’s of pounds tax free. Good Luck!
MY BEST ADVICE IS TO TAKE YOUR TIME BEFORE YOU START MATCHED BETTING FOR REAL …….. AND BEFORE YOU HEAD OFF, PLEASE TO TAKE A LOOK THROUGH THIS MATCHEDBETTING BLOG BY MATT KIRKMAN WHICH I HIGHLY RECOMMEND AS THIS IS WHERE I STARTED AND IT REALLY HELPED ME LEARN THE ROPES WHEN I STARTED OUT MATCHEDBETTING!
I REALLY DO RECOMMEND YOU READ THROUGH MATT’S BLOG BEFORE YOU START MATCHED BETTING AS I PICKED UP SO MUCH KNOWLEDGE FROM IT AND YOU CAN ALSO ACCESS BET MATCHING SOFTWARE WHICH HELPS HUGELY WITH PLACING YOUR BETS AND FINDING CLOSE ODDS. HIS FIRST OFFER WALK THROUGH IS REALLY USEFUL TOO!
ONE MORE THING …… MATCHEDBETTING FOR ME WAS A SHORT TERM INCOME GENERATOR. AFTER AROUND 8 MONTHS I HAD USED ALL THE PROMOTIONS OFFERED BY BOOKMAKERS AND EVENTUALLY THEY STOPPED OFFERING ME THE PROMOTIONS (THIS IS CALLED GUBBING IN MATCHEDBETTING TERMS). ITS NOTHING TO BE WORRIED ABOUT, THEY JUST DON’T OFFER YOU ANY MORE PROMOTIONS. AS A RESULT I STOPPED MATCHEDBETTING COMPLETELY.
I FEEL I DID WELL TO EARN £5000 FROM IT IN 8 MONTHS WITH NO PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE OF GAMBLING.
BE REALLY DISCIPLINED ABOUT IT THOUGH, STICK TO THE MATCHEDBETTING STRATEGY AND DON’T STRAY AWAY FROM IT AND JUST HAVE THE ODD BET WITHOUT MATCHING IT, ITS A SURE WAY TO LOSE MONEY. I CLOSED ALL OF MY ACCOUNTS, SO NOT TO GET TEMPTED WHEN I DECIDED THAT I HAD EARNED ALL I COULD FROM MATCHEDBETTING.
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