My Lifestyle Dream

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Matched Betting Dream

Chapter 6 : A Year in Matched Betting

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I’ve always been a big sports fan and have partaken in the occasional punt on a horse, but only recently came across Matched Betting.

Like I said in my first article last year I have no interest in gambling but I had seen reports of people earning £1000+ a month from Matched Betting without putting in too much effort, so I was more than tempted to look into this.

The basic principle is that you place a bet at one Bookmakers that an event will happen, then you place a bet at a betting exchange that the event won’t happen.

Whatever happens in the event means that you will make a small loss, however, the trick is that in a lot of cases you will be given a refund by the bookmaker if that event doesn’t happen.

Examples would be:

• If the game ends 0 – 0

• If the horse finishes 2nd

• If there is a red card

On top of this there are over 40 bookmakers who will give you free bets when you open an account with them.

3 Things I learned About Matched Betting in 2016

Start Slowly and Learn the Basics

The concept of matched betting may take you a while to get your head around to start with, however, there is plenty of useful information available and as long as you pace yourself then you should be ok.

As I said in my recent article I think there are roughly 5 stages to matched betting:

• Stage 1 – Signing up to the bonus offers

• Stage 2 – Playing the account reloads and daily offers

• Stage 3 – Laying off bets in an accumulator

• Stage 4 – Expanding out into other sports eg Horse Racing

• Stage 5 – Moving into trading / arbitrageTo start with I would recommend having a maximum of 2 offers that you are trying to complete open at the same time, otherwise it gets too complicated for the newbie.

Take on the easy offers first and use a service like Oddsmonkey where they give you step by step guides to the offers.

Spend a couple of months at least, going through these offers and then you can start to try out the reloads, when you have a good understanding of what you’re doing.

OddsMonkey

Try to Act Like a Regular Punter

Bookmakers

Photo by tvol / CC BY

The most important thing for a matched bettor is keeping your accounts open so you can continue to take advantage of the reload offers.

As soon as you start to win a lot or exhibit strange betting patterns, then for sure your accounts will be restricted.

Unfortunately, the bookies are clever folks and with the help of their spying software (which is tracking everything you do) they have a pretty clear picture of what kind of customer you are.

The typical pattern that they will look out for is:

• A customer who only ever bets when there is an offer available

• A customer who places a bet at low odds to qualify for an offer and

• A customer who places a bet at high odds when using their free bet

Remember, bookies don’t like to lose money!!!

There is no exact science to it and you are still going to lose accounts at some point but you can help minimise the chance by:

• Not playing every offer

• Adding stakes above the maximum that you’d get back on a free bet for an offer

• Not taking the best match available

• Placing random bets not associated with free offers – Now you can use something like the Eachway matcher to make this profitbale

Never Bet When You’re in a Rush

Most of the mistakes that I have made over the past year have happened when I’ve either been in a rush or in a scenario that was not relaxed or where I couldn’t focus.

Examples would be:

• When a deadline was approaching eg the start of a race or kick off time

• When I was not in front of my PC, so mainly trying to place bets on the move on an Iphone

• When I was with friends of when someone was waiting for me to go out

• When I was on a lunch break at work

In all of these situations you can’t fully focus on what you are doing and try to rush, which will lead to mistakes.

You’ll either back the wrong horse, add the wrong stakes, or completely forget to lay a bet, so whatever you do, make sure you’re in a stress free environment to place your bets.

What Did I achieve?

After a year I would now class myself as a fairly experienced matched bettor, who understands most of what they are doing and have played out all the different offer types.

I’ve now tried to refine my time to only partaking in offers that are worth my while with either guaranteed profit, or a good chance of making a return.

Previously I would end up spending hours going through all the different offers and only making a few pounds profit here and there.I’ve managed to make a decent enough profit and still have some of the major accounts left open, although not as many as I would like.

Low Light of the Year

There are few lowlights that come to mind including the multiple gubbings on some nice accounts, which always hurt and missing the Bet365 Grand National offer as I read the rules incorrectly, but the lowlight has got to be a mixup with Smarkets that cost me a few hundred pounds.

For some reason when I tried to lay a horse in the Smarkets exchange it got the lay odds completely wrong.

I’m not sure how this happened; it was either a data entry error or a glitch in the system but instead of laying at odds of 8, it went up to 80 and of course this was snapped up in the exchange.

At one point I stood to lose £1500 but thanks to people in the Matched Betting Forums, I managed to minimise the loss down to about £300, but it was extremely stressful!!!

Highlight of the Year

Getting into horse racing and the racing festivals such as Cheltenham was fun, even though it was really stressful at the time, but the highlight for me has to be the discovery of the Eachway Matcher and playing the Extra Place Races.

The good thing about the Eachway matcher is that you can use this with gubbed accounts and can make a tidy profit.

I used this a couple of times recently to pick up £200 profit on a couple of extra place races where my horse came in fifth which was a real buzz!

How much Time Did I spend?

So, this is the big thing for me. I think because I kind of enjoyed it and also because you can see immediate gains from your actions, I ended up spending hours and hours sorting through offers and looking for close matches.

In fact, I think because of matched betting, I was able to spend less time on the other activities that I wanted to pursue such as the websites.

However, I’ve learned that you can limit this and you really should do if you want to have any kind of life left!!!

How much Money Did I make?

Money

I started making detailed accounts of every transaction that I made to start with, however, in the end this was taking too much time so I just run a spreadsheet, which has details of:

  • Withdrawals
  • Deposits
  • Balance

From this I can tell that I’ve probably made about:

£3500 tax free profit

from matched betting during the course of the year, which isn’t too bad.

Was It Worth the Effort?

This one is really difficult to say. Overall I have enjoyed the thrill of matched betting and making money out of nothing, however, at times this can be really stressful and also quite addictive.

There is no gambling involved however, there is something quite addictive about making small wins all the time.

I think I’ve spent too much time doing this over the year to justify continually doing this, so I’m going to limit this to a few hours a week moving forward.

I’ve also lost a lot of my accounts so am getting limited on which offers I can play at the moment.

Also, it seems like matched betting is becoming a lot more popular so the bookies are not putting so many decent offers out there like they used to do.

I think in general the best days of matched betting are over, but there is still some money to be made from it.

Chapter 5 : Footy Accas and Sports Arbitrage

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Could footy accas be the solution to a dry month of matched betting?

Well, after completing a lot of the sign up offers and also being gubbed from a few bookies, I’ve noticed 2 main things recently from reading a lot of the matched betting communities out there:

  1. There are a heck of a lot of gubbings going on
  2. There are very few decent offers around at the moment

A lot of people have put this down to a post-Cheltenham clear-out, but a lot of people are also saying that matched betting is dead and is nothing like it used to be. To be honest I’m finding it all a bit more time consuming than I would have hoped, and even though there is money to be made out there, you still need to put a lot of hours in.

Claims of people making £500 – £1000 per month, are now looking to look at little exaggerated to me, unless of course, you are spending hours in front of your computer trying to squeeze every penny out of every offer available.

With this in mind, this month I thought I’d take a look at a couple of other options where people have been claiming big winnings as well:

  1. Accumulator Generator
  2. Sports Betting Arbitrage

Accumulator Generator

Accumulator Generator

If you don’t know, the basic concept of an Accumulator or footy acca as it is commonly known, is that you place a bet on a series of events happening, and if they all win, then you receive a multiple of all of the odds combined and usually make a big profit if it comes off.

However, if any of the legs of your accumulator loses, then you lose all of the bet. Typically footy accas are anywhere between 3 to 6 legs (matches), and obviously the more legs there are the more you can win, and the easier it is to lose.

Most bookmakers now offer something called ‘Acca Insurance’, which means that if one of your legs loses, you would be entitled to a refund of your initial stake, which is where a matched bettors radar starts flashing!!!

Paddy Power Acca InsuranceWilliam Hill Acca Insurance

Bookies love Accumulators, because they always have an edge over the punter and most of the time the bet will end up losing. Basically, the table is weighted even more in the bookies favour for Accumulators than on single bets.

However, Accumulator Generator is a bit of software that scans the different bookmaker’s offers out there and provides a combination of matches, where you are likely to make a profit, by taking advantage of the Acca Insurance refunds.

In the screenshot below, you can see a list of all of the footy Accas that were available on a certain date, and in the ‘EV’ column you can see the estimated value of the Acca. This shows you how much you would make from placing a £50 bet on the Acca, but generally you’re looking at a £10 return for every £50 spent.

Accumulator Generator Acca Matcher

The idea is pretty simple… put an Acca on with the bookmaker, then just lay off each of the legs of your bet after each match finishes.

There is a screen in Acccumulator Generator dedicated to each Acca that you put on, as you can see below, and the system is also clever enough to give you reminders of when you need to put your next bet on.

Accumulator Generator Acca Details Screen

After each match finishes, you put in the result, and then add in the lay odds of the next leg in the sequence and the Accumulator Generator software will automatically provide you with the lay stake required.

There are a number of different tactics that you can use but the easiest is back, lay and hope technique. This is where you put the selection on at the bookies, then you lay one match at a time, and stop laying as soon as you have lost one match.

• If you win all of your matches in the accumulator then you will make a small loss

• If you lose more than 2 legs in the accumulator you will make a small loss

• If you lose only 1 leg, then you will qualify for the Acca insurance and this is where you make the profit.

What Does Accumulator Generator Cost?

At the time of writing the cost is £148.99 + VAT, or you can sign up to a £1 trial for 14 days

Is Accumulator Generator worth the Money?

I used Accumulator Generator for a 30 day trial period, and came to the following conclusions:

1

YOU NEED LOTS OF TIME

Most of the techniques used by Accumulator Generator, mean that you have to wait until the match has finished to place your lay bet. Games can be finishing at any time of day or night, as a lot of the matches will be in different locations around the world. What this means is that you constantly need to be aware of when your next match is finishing, because if you don’t lay one of your legs you can ruin your accumulator.

For some people this may be fine, but for me I found that this ended up affecting my free time, and meaning I always wanted to be near to a computer so I could place the lay bets easily and ensure I had internet connection. I can see that if you had a lot of Accas on all at once and you dedicated a weekend to this, then it may be worth it, but overall I found this a bit of an inconvenience

2

THERE’S AN INCREASED RISK OF GUBBINGS

Now, I don’t know if this was just a result of the post Cheltenham gub-a-thon from the bookmakers, but every day I was hearing about people losing their accounts (primarily William Hill) after they had been using Accumulator Generator.

​

It seems pretty obvious to me that this would happen. If there are lots of people putting bets on the same random matches then this is going to send signals to the bookies, that something is a bit fishy, and I’m pretty sure that any matches that the Accumulator Generator was throwing up, would bring up some kind of flag at the bookmakers HQ.

​

There do seem to be a lot of people that have signed up to Accumulator Generator so I fear that it has just become a victim of its own success and now is a quickfire way to get a gubbing.

3

YOU CAN MAKE A TIDY PROFIT

I think again, the golden rule with Accumulator Generator is not to overuse it and you will probably be ok.

If you stay away from the highest Estimated Value footy accumulators, don’t always bet the maximum stake, only play a few accas a week and don’t bet on really obscure games, then you’re less likely to get flagged up.

I can see that the temptation would be to put loads of multiple Accas on with different bookies each day, and the individual profits would start to add up, but in my opinion you’re probably going to lose your accounts pretty soon, unless you’ve had your account for a long time with a track history of betting on Accas.

…Read my Full Review of Accumulator Generator

Sports Arbitrage

Whilst we’re in this dry patch of matched betting, with lots of gubbings going on and not a lot of offers that were particularly appealing, I decided to branch out and try my hand at Sports Arbitrage.

To be honest, I just fell into this more by accident and out of boredom than anything else.

For those of you who don’t know much about this either, the principle of sports arbitrage or ‘arbing’ is pretty simple:

Place a bet at one bookmaker for certain oddsTHEN

Lay the bet on a betting exchange at lower odds.

I was just checking out some odds on oddsmonkey.com because I needed to use up one of my free bets, when I noticed there were a lot of bets that had ratings of around 110% , like in the example below:

Sports Arbitrage Example

I’d never looked at the highest rated bets too much previously because I was guessing that if you place too many bets with these high ratings, you’re likely to get your account flagged.

However, as I’d recently been gubbed by the likes of Paddy Power, Bet Victor, Stan James and Coral, I thought there is no harm in placing a few bets on these accounts.

Depending on the size of the arb I thought this could bring in a few useful extra quid, as using the oddsmatcher software they were quite easy to find and put on although didn’t bring in groundbreaking returns as you can see in the example below:

Sports Arbitrage Example2

Can you make money from Arbitrage betting?

Well, in my brief foray into sports arbitrage this month, I would say that there definitely is money to be made from this, however, you need to consider the following items:

1

YOU NEED TO BE QUICK!

I was using the free version of MBassist or Oddsmonkey as it is now, which refreshes its odds every 30 minutes. Unless you are using some kind of paid software, which updates as soon as an arb is found, then in a lot of the cases, by the time you get to put the bet on, the odds in the exchange have changed and there is no longer an arb available.

2

YOU’LL PROBABLY GET YOUR STAKES LIMITED

So, my little experiment was going along swimmingly well, until one of the bookmakers (Stan James) started limiting my stakes. In fact they limited them so much that it was pretty much impossible to put a bet on any more.

3

YOU RISK LOSING YOUR ACCOUNTS

Yes, the bookies are actually quite clever, and anywhere they notice they may have a disadvantage, then sooner rather than later they will catch on to you an close your accounts.

​

From what I have read, the same can be true for arbs.I’m not 100% sure how they find out, but I imagine that most bookies are aware of when an arb is taken, so if they see this behaviour repeatedly on your account, or a flurry of bets at a certain time, then they are likely to either limit your stakes or close your account.

​

I’d only recommend doing this occasionally and spread out across your various bookmaker’s accounts, and definitely don’t overdo this on accounts you want to keep.

​

However, if you’ve been gubbed already, then you may as well make the most of it and take them for every penny you can get.

​

​

Chapter 4 : Reloads and My First Gubbing

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I feel that this month I really picked up the momentum with matched betting and am pretty confident in what I’m doing now. I’ve really moved on from just the sign up offers, to looking at taking on any of the offers related to football, primarily at the weekends.

I’ve been doing a lot of in-play betting this month making the most out of the William Hill and Paddy Power offers:  “Place £20 on qualifying match and get £10 in-play on another match”. To be honest I’m starting to think whether it is worthwhile pursuing these smaller bets or not. For example out of the £10 free bet I’m probably only managing to extract 60 – 70% back into my account and the whole In-Play betting experience can be quite stressful.

Paddy Power In Play Free Bet
Paddy Power In Play Free Bet

I’ve had a few occasions when I’ve been trying to add the in-play bets on my Iphone 4S, which was a bit of a nightmare to be honest. The best time to put your bets on is at half time, because the odds don’t fluctuate so much, but if you miss this window it gets a little bit more tricky.

The other thing that you need to consider is that because the games are spread out over the course of the day / weekend now, you will need to structure your weekend around these games, which is not really what I want to be doing for a few quid here and there. However, at the moment, I am still learning my trade, so it is all good knowledge to pull in.

Bet365 Risk Free Bet

Bet365 In Play Free Bet
Bet365 In Play Free Bet

This month also completed the Bet365 risk free bet offer twice, we gave me a massive £35 for each match, which was well worth the small amount of time involved.

The offer was basically, place up to £50 pre match and up to £50 in-play and if your in-play bet loses then they will refund this bet to you. You simply need to calculate this as a risk free bet, and lay this off at one of the exchanges, then sit back and count the cash.

Risk Free Bets

Paddy Power Watford Everton Price Boost
Paddy Power Watford Everton Price Boost

 

I ventured a little bit further forward in my matched betting career this month, when Paddy Power gave a price boost on both Watford and Everton winning in the cup.

Thanks to the matched betting blog, I followed the advice of laying this off at Smarkets booking exchange:  http://matchedbettingblog.com/football/paddy-power-price-boost-watford-everton/#.VtCRIvmLTZ4

Basically this was a risk-free bet, where if the event happened ie Watford and Everton both won, then I would earn £27, but if they didn’t win then I break even. This was a pretty good deal, took 5 minutes to add the bets on, and ended up netting me £27.60… GOLA!

There are a lot of these types of offers out there that I haven’t really started looking at yet, but will try and progress on these next month.

Horse Racing

Coral Cheltenham Festival Offer
Coral Cheltenham Festival Offer

I made my first venture into horse racing as well this month, which I’ve wanted to avoid initially as I believe it can be a little more complex than a standard football match back and lay scenario.

However, there were 2 particularly good offers, for the upcoming Cheltenham festival.

Coral were offering to match your bets of up to £20 per bet that you put on, as long you place a bet each weekend for the 4 weekends leading up to the festival and Betway are offering a similar offer for up to £50, so I added a couple of bets this weekend.

GUBBED

All was going so well until yesterday I got this lovely email from Coral:

Coral Betting Account Gubbed
Coral Betting Account Gubbed

Now, I’m not really sure how this had happened as I hadn’t placed too many bets with them and my history didn’t seem abnormal:

stake odds date game
5 2.2 24/10/15 Ajaccio GFCO v Nice
20 7.6 28/10/15 Liverpool vs Bournemouth
20 3 30/01/16 Ang v Serena
10 5 31/01/16 3 – 1 Djok
20 3 20/02/16 Ars v Hull draw
20 3.25 20/02/16 14:05 Haydock One  track mind
10 3.9 20/02/16 Bourn v Eve

However, they had been on a bit of a gubbing spree and lots of members in the Matched Betting Facebook groups experienced similar things.

My theory is slightly different, however, as I had been a bit stupid. My plan for this site was that as I go through the offers with different bookmakers I would also add affiliate links to these offers so other readers could sign up as well, and I’d earn a small commission.

I tried applying for affiliate accounts with 5 of the main bookmakers, however, as part of the application process they check out your website and see that I am promoting Matched Betting, which they’re probably not to keen on, so 3 of them refused my application. One of those was Coral, so my suspicions are that they put two and two together and linked my personal account with the application for the affiliate account. Oh well, lesson learned!!!

More Sign Up Offers

So, this month I added 3 more accounts to my name and signed up to Matchbook (Betting exchange), Net Bet and BetsafeMatchbook Sign Up Offer

Betsafe Sign Up Offer

 

 

 

 

Net Bet Sign Up Offer

Last Month’s Goal

  • Sign up to 3 more offers – COMPLETE
  • Continue In-Play betting – COMPLETE

Next Month’s Goal

I really want to start looking at Accumulator’s as this seems like another solid way to keep generating income, without having to place in-play bets, however, this would require moving up to the next level of matched betting expertise and I don’t think that I’m quite ready for that yet. I’ll research it a bit more if I have time, but think I will keep this month’s goals quite simple to:

  • Sign up to 3 more offer

Overall Earnings to Date

I have finally managed to get a grip on what I have earned so far and am pleased to announce the grand total of :

£732.00

Chapter 3 : In-Play Betting

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I’ve been doing a few offers a week this month and gradually building up my matched betting knowledge. I’ve been using the matchedbetting.guru site and the Matched Betting for Free Facebook Group, which has been particularly helpful.

Last weekend I decided to dedicate the whole weekend to Matched Betting and I ended up making a massive profit of £25!!! Doesn’t sound like a lot, and to be honest it completely stressed me out all weekend, but I think that is because I’m still learning some of the rules and techniques.

In fact, I think this weekend I think it’s fair to say that I graduated to phase 2 of the matched betting academy:

  • Stage 1 – Signing up to the bonus offers
  • Stage 2 – Placing in-play bets and making the most of weekly offers
  • Stage 3 – Laying off bets in an accumulator
  • Stage 4 – Expanding out into other sports
  • Stage 5 – Moving into trading / arbitrage

Placing In-Play Bets

I think the most stressful part of the weekend was getting used to the In-Play bets. For example Paddy Power gave an offer where if you bet £20 on a qualifying game, they will give you two £5 bets to use In-Play, ie when the game has started.

The main issue with In-Play bets is that you can’t use an odds comparison like Odds Monkey, so you have to check the odds between different bookmakers manually. That doesn’t sound too bad, but the problem is that the odds are constantly changing, so by the time you put your odds into a matched betting calculator to find the amount to lay your bet, the odds will have changed. I found this to be extremely stressful, and also meant I made a few mistakes.

TOP TIP: If you’re going to use In-Play bets then you should place your bets at half time when the odds are more stable.

Rollovers

The other thing that is worth learning is the concept of ‘rollovers’. These are the bane of the lives for matched betters as they can really spoil the amount you can extract from a free bet.

An example of this is with Bet Victor. They recently made an offer of Bet £20 and get a £10 free bet, however, you can only withdraw the free bet once you had bet 4 x the bonus amount ie you need to bet an additional £40. This means that on some offers it’s just not worth doing because the rollover just eats into the total you’ll get back from the free bet.

What odds should I place my Free Bet at?

A lot of people’s accounts were getting ‘gubbed’ or closed down this month, which happens when you bet in a suspicious way. Basically if they suspect that you are a matched better, then they will close you account immediately and sometimes even keep your balance.

For some offers I was placing my free bet of odds of over 10, so that I could extract as much as possible from the free bet. Looking back this was a little silly as it is likely to raise suspicion and after taking some advice from the Matched Betting for Free group, I found out that you should try to keep the odds to between 5 and 7, and not risk going any higher.

Matched Betting Balance Sheet

This month I’ve really struggled with understanding my finances and figuring out exactly how much money I won or lost with Matched Betting. I tried using the Ultimatcher Spreadsheet, but for some reason the numbers just weren’t stacking up so I’ve decided to go back to my own spreadsheet, where I can manually check how much I’ve won / lost on each match. In the long term I’ll probably need to switch to something else, but I think for now this will have to suffice!

LAST MONTH’S TASKS

  • Complete Bet365 Offer – COMPLETE
  • Place an Inplay bet offer – COMPLETE
  • Get an accurate balance sheet – COMPLETE

NEXT MONTH’S GOALS

  • Sign up to 3 more offers
  • Continue In-Play betting

TOOLS AND SITES USED

Chapter 2 : More Free Bets and Rollovers

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Well, I’m not a matched betting expert yet, but I’ve been steadily putting bets on every weekend and working my way through the free offers over the past month and am getting to grips with the whole Matched Betting technique.

I’ve gone through most of the easy and medium difficulty sign up offers and this month I completed offers with the following bookmakers:

Bet365 Offer

Things are starting to get a little more complex now and I need to make sure I pay attention to detail with each offer that I sign up with an thoroughly understand the terms and conditions.

For example I have just signed up for the Bet365 introductory offer, where they will match your deposit up to a total of £200 bonus

This offer and a lot of the more complex offers come with something called a ‘Rollover’. The Bet365 offer has a rollover of 3 times the value of your deposit and bonus, before you can withdraw the bonus. This means that you must place bets of £200 (deposit) + £200 (bonus) x 3 = £1200 within a period of 90 days, before you can withdraw your money.

Now we’re starting to talk bigger sums of money so it’s important to get this right and choose the right matches. For this offer the odds need to be greater than 1.5, and so far I have placed 3 bets of £200 at just over these odds. The bad news as I have discovered is that because these odds are quite low, it is quite likely that this event will happen, so all of the money is being added to my Bet365 account. This unfortunately means that I have to keep re-depositing in my Smarkets Booking Exchange account to lay the bet against this.

In general I’m losing about £7 per bet so should hopefully be able to make about £150 from this offer.

Matched Betting Facebook Groups

There is still a lot to learn about Matched Betting especially when it comes to the more complex offers, betting on horseracing and things like accumulators, but I’m going to bide my time and come onto them later on.

In the meantime, however, I have found that there are loads of Facebook groups around Matched Betting such as:

and I also found the Matched Betting Guru and Matched Betting Blog Websites really useful.

Ultimatcher Spreadsheet

The other thing that you need to do with Matched Betting is keep track of your winnings, as there are lots of calculations to be made and your money will be distributed around many different Bookmakers.

In Month 1, I was using my own spreadsheet to keep a track of this and calculated I’d made a total of just under £200, however, I wasn’t confident in this number and it was quite an arduous process to update.

After doing a bit of digging around I found that most Matched betting professionals use the Ultimatcher Spreadsheet to keep a track of their winnings. On first glance this seems like a really complicated spreadsheet, however, after a quick read through the instructions it is actually a really useful tool to use.

All you need to do is to set up bookmakers and exchanges that you have accounts with and for each match that you bet on record your stake and the odds that you put your bet on, as well as the type of bet (free or qualifying) and it will do the maths for you and give you a running total.

The other nice thing is that it gives you detailed statistics of things like where your most profitable bets were made, which could prove fruitful in the longrun. Best of all is it is entirely free to use and available to download here

The only drawbacks I found is that if you make a mistake it is difficult to undo it and I don’t really know how to record bets where there are rollovers and you just get a bonus instead of a free bet, but I’ll get to grips with that soon.

Overall, it is proving a little more time consuming than I had imagined, but I think if you focused solely on matched betting then it would be easy to get to grips with.

I think I’ve made around £350 over the 2 months since I started, but I need to do a little bit of work on my numbers to be totally confident.

How much have I earned from Matched Betting so far?

XXXXXXX

What Free Bets did I complete?

Next Month’s Goals

  • Complete Bet365 Offer
  • Place an Inplay bet offer
  • Get an accurate balance sheet

Last Month’s Tasks

  • Complete the free offers for the next 10 bookmakers – 6 Offers COMPLETE
  • Understand how to use the ultimatcher spreadsheet – COMPLETE
  • Create an article on 5 easy offers – INCOMPLETE

Tools and Sites Used

Chapter 1 : Easy Sign Up Offers

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OK, 1 month down and I’m well on my way to becoming a matched betting expert.

Now the reaction that I’ve got from everyone that I’ve mentioned this to has been extremely negative with people telling me that I need to be really careful and that I’ll never make any money out of this. However, I have to say, my experience so far has been completely the opposite of this.

I think that as long as you are methodical and have good attention to detail then there is risk free money to be made. Admittedly, it is a little bit fiddly to start with and may take a while to get your  head around the basic principle,  but I can honestly say that there is risk free, and tax free money to be made fairly easily.

So far this month I have opened up accounts with 9 different bookmakers and placed a total of 20 matched bets (betting on both the event happening (backing) and the event  not  happening (laying)).  I haven’t worked out the exact total yet, because I have a couple of bets in progress, but so far I have made about £200. One thing I have learned from this is that I really need to learn keep track of your betting activity, which I’ve been doing manually so far, but am planning to migrate to the Ultimatcher spreadsheet next month.

Originally, I had thought that this would be pretty much a one-off income stream and as soon as I had gone through all of the available bookmaker’s free entry bets (totalling between £500 and £1000) that I wouldn’t be able to do this anymore. Well, I was wrong. The good news is that the bookies are so desperate for your cash that they keep emailing you with offer after offer of free bets, which means that you can keep on applying the technique you have used for your entry bets to these re-load offers.

From what I have learned so far this can get you a steady online income of between £500 to £1000 a month depending on how much time you’re willing to put into this activity.

How much have I earned from Matched Betting so far?

Month1-Matched-Betting-Settled-Bets

What Free Bets did I complete?

William Hill – Sign up and Deposit £10 to get a £20 free bet

Ladbrokes – Sign Up and deposit £50 to get a £50 free bet

Coral – Sign Up and deposit £5 to get a £20 free bet

Paddy Power – Sign Up and deposit £10 to get a £30 free bet

Skybet – Sign Up and deposit £5 to get a £20 free bet

Titanbet – Place 5 x £5 bets and get a £25 free bet

Summary

Matched  betting definitely looks like a winner to me and is something I am going to pursue further. Getting that amount of revenue per month for a relatively small amount of work really would be a big bonus for my Dream Fund and help me pursue my goal of location free living.

Next Month’s Goals

  • Complete the free offers for the next 10 bookmakers
  • Understand how to use the ultimatcher spreadsheet
  • Create an article on 5 easy offers

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