What is matched betting (UK)?
Matched betting is where you take advantage of promotional offers on betting sites. Typically bookmakers will offer you free bets when you sign up to their website, or when you bet £X on a certain sporting event.
There are obviously a million events that you could bet on with these free bets and you might win some money. However, using matched betting we are able to guarantee that we make a profit from any offers that these bookies give us.
How does this work?
As well as having betting sites (bookies) we also have betting exchanges available to us. These exchanges allow you to bet on pretty much anything.
This is useful for matched betting because we can bet that Football Team A will not win.
Whereas, we would use our free bet on the bookies to bet that Football Team A will win.
Therefore, whatever the result we will win one bet and lose the other. It just takes some fancy online calculators to figure out how much you need to bet on each site to secure a profit.
But how do we make a profit?
Since the free bets we are using to “back” an event aren’t our money this gives us room to play with. Here’s an example:
We received a £10 free bet.
We are going to bet it on Chelsea to win a football match at odds of 3.0
Then on the exchange the odds that Chelsea won’t win are 3.1
Don’t worry about odds for now, these will make sense as we progress.
We would use an online calculator on Outplayed* or OddsMonkey* to calculate how much we need to bet on the exchange in order to secure a profit:
The Matched Betting calculator on Outplayed (above)
SNR stands for stake not returned. So if our bookmaker bet wins our result is:
Bookmaker win: +£20.00
Exchange loss: -£13.55 (lose the liability)
Total profit: +£6.45
And then if our exchange bet would have won:
Bookmaker loss: £0 (not our money)
Exchange win: +£6.45 (get our lay bet doubled)
Total profit: +£6.45
Hopefully that makes some sense and seeing the maths behind it makes it easier to visualise how we can profit from these offers!
You should average between 60% and 90% of your free bet retained. Meaning that is our rough profit margin for each free bet. Now you can see how we can make a lot of money from this when bookies are giving out £30+ of free bets for signing up to their sites!