Matched Betting - The beginning...

Matched betting is a system of getting guaranteed profit from bookmakers. It’s been around for years but I’ve never got round to doing it as I thought it was too complicated and it would take too much of my time. Now we can't do much due to Covid, I thought I'd give it a go and will document my journey through this. Profits are likely low compared to time spent but it’s risk free, stress-free and tax-free.

How it works?

Bookmakers frequently offer deals for new customers, many of them will include a free bet. For example, a bookmaker may say they will give you a £30 free bet if you bet £10 of your own money. This £30 bet can be turned into real money via a process of laying off bets. I’ll explain it below.

If there is a match of Team A vs Team B, and the odds of team A winning is 2.5. This means that that if you bet £10 on Team A on winning, you will receive £25 in winnings plus the original bet back. To eliminate the risk of this bay, you have to ‘lay’ off this bet by betting on the opposite outcome (which is a draw or Team A loses). This is done at a betting exchange, where you in effect are acting as the bookmaker, where you will take another person’s bet if you win, but you pay out if you lose. This payout is known as your ‘liability’ and is determined by the initial stake and the odds of the lay.

The bet odds and lay odds are usually done so you will lose some money from this initial bet, but normally this is a few pence. But now you have qualified for a free £30 in which you can do the same thing again. Now if you repeat this process, you will win a 70-80% percentage of the free bet as cash. That’s the essence of matched betting!

There are little nuances that I will hopefully learn but let’s see month by month how much can be made. The popular sites that explain it in great detail are Oddsmonkey, Team Profit and MatchedBettingBlog.com.