Betconnect Review - Can You Make Money Using Betconnect

When I first came across Betconnect I was pretty skeptical,but I jumped in and gave it a test, claimed the sign up offer and since then, I’ve become really addicted to the service. I’m glad to say it’s something I’ll be using going forward, which says a lot.

It’s been a very profitable few months testing and in the first two months I have tried out a number of bookmaker offers that you can utilise this Betconnect as well as placing punter bets from high ROI pros. So far, totalling all profits, I’m looking at a profit of around £2,000. £500 or so came from a nice 50/1 winner and we know that won’t happen every day. Be sure to check out our other bookmaker reviews at Yesbets to find the right bookmaker for you.

Betconnect Welcome Offer

Bet Connect have a £50 sign up offer for new customers. The free bet welcome offer is a great way to kick start your profits but the usefulness of this service does not end there. You can use bookmaker existing customer offers like 2Up, William Hill Golden goal in much the same way that you would whilst matched betting. I’ve detailed six options below on how you can really go to town with Betconnect and the bookmaker offers available.

What is Betconnect in a Nutshell?

Betconnect is a service that matches together what they call “pros” with punters that like placing bets. It has been described as a “social betting exchange”. The pros put up the bets they would like to get matched and at the odds they would like to get. The bets are then offered up to the punters that can decide to “follow”, “lay” or “reject” the bets. We’ll discuss these options a little later in this article.

A simple analogy for how Betconnect works is it’s a bit like sticking a fiver on the game for a friend. He gives you £5 to place the bet, if it loses, you lose nothing. If it wins, you give him the winnings.

If you are familiar with matched betting, perhaps the easiest way to look at bet connect is like a betting exchange. Let’s say a pro wants £5 for Manchester United to win. The stake is £5 and if the bet wins, you will win £10. He puts this bet request up. You think it’s a good bet so you accept the request. £10 is taken from your betconnect account as this is the liability for the bet if it wins. To ensure you don’t lose any money, you place a £5 bet at a bookmaker. If the bet wins, £10 will be deducted from your Betconnect account, but you will win £10 at your bookmaker account, leaving you with an overall profit of £0.

If the pro is a profitable gambler, it would make sense to follow his suggestions. So using the example above, the pro wants £5 on Man Utd to win and you accept this bet request. Instead of just putting £5 on at the bookmaker, you actually put £10 on. £5 for you and £5 for the pro. If the bet wins, you lose you £10 liability at Betconnect, but win £20 at the bookmaker, leaving you with £10 profit. If the bet loses, you get £5 back into your Betconnect account (the Pro’s stake) and lose £10 at the bookmaker, leaving you £5 down overall. This £5 was the stake you placed following the Pro’s tip.

If you do fancy a flutter, following the rights pros can be a God send. With traditional tipser services, you pay a monthly or quarterly fee and receive all their tips. As long as you are following tipsters with a decent ROI (return on investment) you can make a decent profit. The subtle difference with Betconnect is that you know the pros are profitable because they are actually putting money on the bets they put up.

Before we jump into bookmaker offers and the other features available on betconnect, let´s first take a look at the sign up offer currently available:

How to Claim the £50 Betconnect Welcome Offer

1. Sign up for a punter account

Please click this link and sign up to betconnect. On the landing page click the “Sign up today” button from the banner. “Join in today to get up to £50 in Free Matched Bets*”.

*Terms and conditions apply. ‘Up to £50 in Free Matched Bets’ promotional offer is only available to NEW PUNTER accounts. This offer is NOT available to Pro Accounts.

2. Accept Offer

Once you have joined, you will be greeted with a popup asking you to opt-in to the £50 free bets. Click the “Count me in!” button and deposit at least £10.

3. Make a deposit

As you can see I’ve placed a £500 deposit, but the £50 “matched free bets” have already been automatically added to my balance. You don’t need to deposit as much as this, you can start with the £10 as this will give you enough of a balance to get the three bet requests on and make full use of the £50 free matched bet balance on offer.

If possible, we would recommend depositing a little more as the balance used is similar to an exchange. If you accept a bet, the liability of the bet will be deducted from your balance.

Taking a look at our transactions, we have been credited with “Bonus Funds Deposit” of £50.

As we can see the £50 bonus will only be used on the first 3 bet requests we are provided.

“We’ve deposited £50.00 into your account so you can Match your First 3 Bet Requests risk free!

The free bet offer only applies to the first three bet requests you are shown.

Any unused bonus is removed after you have seen your third bet request. Make sure you match the first 3 bets requests you are shown”.

 

 

4. “Follow” the first 3 bet requests received

With the bet requests I received, all are pretty low stakes, I took 100% of the stake that was on offer, the liability of all (£13.50 + £13.20 + £13.60 = £40.30) The £40.30 was from my free bet balance, once I’ve completed my first three bet requests (follow, lay or reject), the remaining free bet balance will be removed from the account.

So we really want to be using as much of the £50 free bet balance over the first three bet requests as possible.

How to Profit from the Offer?

I’d recommend giving the whole article a good read before you jump in to completing the offer. If we take a look at the first three bet requests I placed and see how much profit we could make.

Option 1 - “Follow”.

If we decide to take one of the bet requests on offer (we really need to take the first three bet requests we decide to show to optimise the £50 free liquidity offer).

If we decided to take the whole stake on offer and “Follow” the pro, we are essentially saying we will place a bet for the pro using our own bookmaker accounts. If the bet wins, our bookmaker bet will win, but we will lose the liability from the betconnect account.

Brighton v Cardiff - Pro Lost - Cardiff won this game, so the pro bet lost. Our Betconnect account was credited with £6. This is not profit as we placed a £6 bet at the bookmakers.

Juventus v Ajax - Pro won - Ajax beat Juventus, so our £3 bet at the bookmakers won = £3 x 5.40 =£16.20 returned, £13.20 profit. We lose the liability from the betconnect account (£13.20). As this was placed with the free bet, we don’t lose any of our cash balance from Betconnect.

Barcelona v Man Utd - Pro lost - Barcelona won 3-0 therefore our under 2.50 goal bet lost. Betconnect returned our £8 we placed at the bookmaker.

By following the pros and placing the bets at the bookmakers, we really need the bets to win to come out with a profit.

Our profit from the above by following: £13.20.

If all three bets would have won, we could have been sitting on £40.30 profit.

(£13.50 + £13.20 + £13.60 = £40.30)

Option 2 “Lay”

With this method, we are essentially taking on the pro and saying we don’t think their bet is going to win. We take the bet request on Betconnect however we do not actually place the bet at the bookmakers website. If we look at matched betting, this is the same as placing a lay bet without having the required back bet in place. If the bet wins, we will lose the liability.

Let’s take a closer look at our example above with the “Lay” option.

Brighton v Cardiff - Pro Lost - +£6 profit

Juventus v Ajax - Pro Won - We lose £13.20 from our bet connect account as the bet won, however this was placed using free bet, therefore profit/loss is £0

Barcelona v Man Utd - Pro Lost - +£8 profit

£6 + £0 + £8 = £14 profit from the offer.

Option 3. 50% Follow

We have looked at both extremes of the offer, so what if we try to “lock in” profit as we do with matched betting and find a middle ground. If we opt to follow the bet request, but only place 50% of the stake at the bookmakers. Let’s not worry about the actual results of each bet this time, as we don’t really mind what happens if we lock in.

Brighton v Cardiff (£3 bet placed)

• If Pro Lost - We receive £6 back to Betconnect, - £3 staked at the bookmaker = +£3 profit
• If Pro Wins - -£13.50 free bet liquidity, £3 bet at bookmaker wins = £6.75 profit

Juventus v Ajax (£1.50 bet placed)

• If Pro Lost - We receive £3 back to Betconnect, - £1.50 staked at the bookmaker = +£1.50 profit
• If Pro Wins - -£13.20 free bet liquidity, £1.50 bet at bookmaker wins = £6.60 profit

Barcelona v Man Utd (£4 bet placed)

• If Pro Lost - We receive £8 back to Betconnect, - £4 staked at the bookmaker = £4 profit
• If Pro Wins - £13.60 free bet liquidity, £4 bet at bookmaker wins = £6.80 profit

If all pro bets lose, we end up with (£3 + £1.50 + £4) = £8.50 profit

If all pro bets win, we end up with (£6.75 + £6.60 + £6.80) = £20.15 profit

Based on the actual outcomes, we would have netted (£3 + £6.60 + £4) = £13.60 profit

To summarise, it´s really up to you how you decide to play each bet request you get offered. It´s important to take up the first three you are offered, worse case if you don’t have a bookmaker you can place a bet at the required odds the pro wants, still take the bet, but “Lay”. If the bet loses, you will profit. If the bet wins, you won’t make any profit.

As we can see the sign up offer only provides us with a limited amount of profit, the real profit from Betconnect comes longer term.

Betconnect for Matched Betting With Bookmaker Existing Customer Offers (Reload Offers)

Option 1 - Bet365 / Paddy Power 2UP / William Hill Golden Goal

With 2Up and golden goal, instead of laying your qualifying bet at an exchange, you accept the bet on Betconnect from a pro punter. Once you accept the bet the liability is taken from betconnect (this is effectively your lay bet). You then place the bet at the bookmaker with the offer. If the bet wins, you win at the bookie, but “lose” in your Betconnect account. If 2UP or golden goal hits, this is where you make your profit in much the same way as you would when matched betting.

During the football season, there are so many football bets displayed by pro punters that will qualify for 2up or William Hill golden goal. You can see the UEFA Europa League match we snapped up for Chelsea v Eintracht Frankfurt. The odds may be lower than you would usually take, however there is no qualifying loss on the offer, all you need to do is place the £45 bet for the pro.

Taking such bets, will hopefully make your bet365 / paddy power accounts look a lot more natural too. You also don’t need to take the full £45 stake on offer, you may decide £40 looks more punter like.

 

Option 2 - Arbing

It’s always worth checking oddschecker & your betting exchange before placing at bets. This may feel like a waste of time, but you can find some great added value. Take a look at the the bet request below,

Pro wants 2.375, but we can get 2.52 at the exchange (betfair) So if the horse wins, we pay the pro out at the odds requested and claim the extra profit ourselves. If the horse wins at 2.375, the bet will return £357.00, but as we have managed to get odds of 2.52, the return would be £378.00, giving us an additional profit of £21 (minute the betfair commission).  This works well if you have an exchange with a 0% commission. If we manage to find higher odds as a different bookmaker, this also gives us the option of hitting a BOG (explained below).  

 

 

 

Option 3 - Extra Places

These are my favourite. Bet requests that want an each way bet on races that bookmakers offer extra places. Betconnect will always pay out the places at the standard place market. By using oddschecker, we can quickly see bookmakers that are offering extra places. If you place a bet using a bookie that is offering 4 places instead of 3 and the horse comes 4th, you will receive the place payout from the bookmaker, but receive all of the liability back in your Betconnect account, in much the same way as you would with Extra place matched betting.

One thing to remember is if the standard place terms are 3 places at place payout of 1/4, if there is an extra place the place payout will reduce to 1/5. Therefore if the horse wins or place in the standard place terms, you may come back with a loss as the place terms are lower.

Extra place winning example:

The pro (lbbets) wanted £15 each way on “Kinks” at Doncaster 15:25. We found BetVictor offering extra places on this race. Kinks placed 4th, with Betconnect only pay standard place terms your bet connect bet lost and therefore we had the whole stake returned (£30). BetVictor paid out so we netted £63 profit (the stake returned is also profit as Betconnect paid back out stake).

Extra place winning example 2:

The pro (callumth1) wanted £40 each way on “Truckingby” at Nottingham 19:05. We found William Hill offering extra places on this race. Truckingby placed 4th, with Betconnect only pay standard place terms your bet connect bet lost and therefore we had the whole stake returned (£80). BetVictor paid out so we netted £108 profit (the stake returned is also profit as Betconnect paid back out stake).

 

Option 4 - Best Odds Guaranteed

It’s also possible to net a cheeky BOG (if using the correct bookmaker). If we take the required odds but the horse goes off at a higher price, we will still pay out the pro at the odds they requested at the time, so any additional profits we will keep.

I must admit this does not happen too often, the pros often pick horses that steam in (the SP odds are lower that the odds earlier in the day), but there are occasions that a pro has requested £200 on a low odds favourite, that I have taken and it has gone on to win at a higher price.

I would stay away from just trying to hit a BOG, unless its on low prices favourites that will look like decent punter bets at the bookmakers.

Option 5 - Win & Place Exchange Markets (Advanced)

Another option when we are offered each way bets is to check to see if there is any value on offer from checking the win and place markets on the betting exchange. We need to first know what the place terms are (1/4 or 1/5), once we know this we can work out the odds of the place. We can use our each way calculator for this.

In the above example of “Kinks”, the win odds are 16/1 (17.0) at the standard place payout of 1/4 the place odds are 5.0. If we find the odds at the exchange are 17.0 for the win, but 6.0 for the place, we can place a £15 bet on the win market and £15 bet on the place market.

This can work really well if there are non-runners and the bookmakers reduce the places from 3 to 2 due to a rule4 being applied, but the exchange still pays out on the 3 places. So you could end up with betconnect bet losing and our full take being returned plus our exchange bet winning.

Option 6 - Follow Decent Pros

If you get to know the decent pros, this service really can be an amazing free tipster service. These are pro gamblers that are often restricted at the bookmakers and are using Betconnect to get higher stakes on the bets they want. This is not a risk free method, you will be putting your own stake at risk, but...

One tipster has provided me with some really decent winners recently (one being 50/1). A word of warning, obviously they all can’t win when you are betting on horses at these odds.

Here’s an example of one such long odds horse that won. The pro wanted just £1 on Freerolling to win. I decided to go £20 each way @ 15.0. The horse went off at 10/3 = 4.33 and won. Thanks Birkdale!

FAQs

How to Place a Bet Request?

All you need to do is click the blue bet request logo:

Once clicked, the logo will revert to an orange colour, this means you are waiting for a bet request to hit:

Once available, if you want to take a look at the bet, you need to click on the “Unlock” key.

Remember you need to be quick, as you are working against other punters, if someone gets to the bet request before you, when you click the “unlock” button, the offer will just disappear and we receive a message from Billy, “Oops! You didn’t unlock that Bet Request in time, You’ll receive the next one that becomes available, remember to act quickly!”

We now get another offer, we have 8 minutes (was 15 minutes but this has been changed) to decide if we want to take up the offer. You can see (most of the time) the odds the pros are looking for are the best in the industry, but this is not always the case.

Decide If You Want to Follow / Lay / Reject the Bet

Follow the bet - click the “Follow” link this means we are going to place the bet on behalf of the pro, once confirmed we can see the bet within our “matched” bet requests. We have decided to follow for the full £50 the pro was asking for, you don’t need to you can select any amount under £50. So we could have followed with just a £5 stake.

Lay the bet - if we want to go against the pro, then we can lay the bet (exactly like you would on the exchange).

Reject the bet - If the bet is not for you, you can reject the bet - a reason is required, however you can just select any.

Limited Liability

If you have a low balance, you may receive a bet request that looks like this, even though we have “unlocked” the bet, we still don’t see the details as we don’t have enough of a balance to cover the liability of the bet. We can either reject, or

“You´re almost there but you need to Deposit the liability of the Bet Request in order to fully Unlock and Match it. Please use the green Add Funds box below”

Rejecting Bet Connect Bets

You can reject any bet requests you are provided. You are provided with three different options, it doesn´t really matter the reason you provide, from my knowledge I don’t believe these answers are filtered into their algorithm and effect any of the future bet requests you are provided.

The one place you can see the effect of these rejected bets is on your punters profile, you can see my rating is 1000, I’ll request more details from Betconnect on how this rating impacts your future bet requests, but you can see from the limited exposure on this account:

• 291 Bet Requests Matched
• 230 Bet Requests Matched 100%
• 444 Bet Requests Rejected

How to Make Sure I´m Getting the Best Odds?

Oddschecker:

I always check oddschecker to see if there are any other bookmakers offering the odds the pro wants, this means I’m not always placing bets at the same bookmaker all the time. Blacktype will frequently offer the same odds as the large bookmakers in the industry and still offer Best Odds Guaranteed from 10am on the race day.

Exchange:

Always check the exchange to see what the odds are looking like, you can often find odds higher than the pro is looking for. If we are looking first thing in the morning, when there is limited liquidity in the exchange (especially for horse racing) its difficult to get higher odds. Later on in the day, we can find better odds. For example a £10 bet request at 7.0, you can find 8.0 at the exchange. If you have a 0% exchange offer, if the bet wins, you will lose liquidity of £60 from betconnect, but win £70 at the exchange, giving you a £10 profit.

How Do I Change the Odds Format on Betconnect?

Click “Account Settings” on the left nav, you can then toggle between “Fractional” and “Decimal”. Once altered, please remember to click the “Update Details” button towards the bottom of the page.

How Do I Change the Type of Bet Requests I Receive?

The first point I’d mention is make sure you have the correct sports preferences set, you really only want to be receiving bet requests relating to sports you are happy to place bets for. As you can see for the welcome £50 free bets, we really need to be taking advantage of the first three bet requests we receive otherwise we will lose the free bets.

I’d recommend sticking to just Football to start with as its usually pretty easy to get these bets placed as the odds don’t move quickly and are the same at the bookmaker as quoted at on Betconnect.

Connect with Pros

I believe if you connect with pros, you have a better chance of getting their betrequests. If you find pros that are offering the type of bets you like to take, it could be high stake bets or just excellent value tips you want to be placing these bets regularly for them.

Betconnect Issues

Like a traditional tipster service, you are provided with an email or access to all the tips that are put up for the day. If you take all the bets using the staking strategy you have opted for (e.g. £5 per point), you can get close to the ROI that the tipster states. That said, your ROI will often be lower as it’s unlikely you will be able to get on exactly the same odds as the tipsters every time, the odds may have dropped before you even get change to bet.

With betconnect, you find a pro that you connect with and want to get on all their bets. With the way betconnect issues the betrequests you may easily miss some bets that the pros publish. You can’t be on twenty four hours per day checking for new betrequests and another punter may take all the stake the pro wants on a certain bet and therefore the tip will not be offered to any further punters.

My Longer Term Reservations

Betconnect only works if there is an equilibrium between the number of pros and punters. If the punters grow too quickly without new pros coming on board if it will become too difficult to actually get on any bets. If the punters grow too quickly without an equal number of pros, you may have Billy telling you you didn´t unlock the bet request in time, which will become really frustrating. You could end up with only bet requests left that no punter wants!

Another situation that may arise is, you could get pros that come on and puts up lots of bet requests that are so high, one or two bookmakers offer them. If you keep putting bets on with these bookmakers at the best odds in the industry, it will make you appear like a value punter and in turn receive the dreaded stake restricted email.