How easy is it?
What are offers?
Matched betting offers are where betting sites (bookies) will offer you some form of reward (free bets, free spins, cash) for completing a task. For example, there may be an offer where you can get a £5 free bet for betting £5 on the Grand National.
What is important, is being able to distinguish between the different types of offers! So let’s have a look.
Sign-up offers
It is what it says on the tin, but effectively bookies want lots of customers because more customers means more profit.
The way they try and lure new customers in is by offering sign-up offers. The way that these will work is that you will normally have to sign up to their site and bet £X. Once that bet has been settled then you will receive £X of free bets for you to use.
This can confuse people at the start (I know it baffled me) but here is an example.
888Sport offer a sign-up bonus where you will receive £30 worth of free bets when you sign up and bet £10.
So in order to receive the £30 of free bets, you will want to place a “qualifying bet” of £10.
The reason that we don’t lose money, is because we will use the calculators to calculate how much to bet on the betting exchange. Below is an example of this calculation and shows that we will make a small loss.
This is what you will expect from qualifying bets, as free bets are where the profits are at!
So in the above example, you can see that from our qualifying bet we would have lost either £2.91 or £2.92 depending on whether we win the bet on the bookies or the exchange.
If we won on the bookies, we would receive £36 which is £26 more than our stake, but we would have to pay the exchange £28.92 as we lost the bet there (therefore a loss of £2.92).
Whereas, if we won on the exchange we would win £7.23 but we would lose the £10 bet we placed on the bookies (therefore a loss of £2.91 when you account for 2% commission).
Hopefully that is starting to show how the maths behind it works?
Okay so we made a loss - now what? What we would see now, is that we have £30 of free bets waiting for us on the bookies.
Obviously we would probably have to use a different event to bet on, but for simplicity we will use the same odds as before to show our profits!
(Also don’t worry, as Outplayed* has a built in software which finds the best events to bet on - the ‘oddsmatcher’)
You can see from the above that for each of the 3 x £10 free bets we place, we would make a profit of £6.45 no matter which side of the bet wins.
Therefore, as a result of completing 1 sign-up offer, your profit would be:
Qualifying: -£2.92
Free bets: +£6.45 x 3
Total profit = +£16.43
And that would have probably taken you anywhere from 2 minutes to 30 minutes at the very most!
What Next?
So hopefully that makes sense, if it doesn't then contact us and we can help as much as possible! But now you have figured out how sign-up offers work, it is time to tackle the £600+ of profits available from these!
What other offers are there though?