How to Do Matched Betting

Are you put off matched betting by the word “betting”? If so, let’s focus for a second on the word “matched”. The concept behind matched betting is that we place a matched bet to cover both outcomes. We bet for an event and we bet against that same event. We cover all eventualities.

This is not gambling, because we have covered all eventualities. We can’t lose.

In fact, when we first learn matched betting we quickly find out that if we were to place one bet at a bookie, say £10 on Leicester to win, and bet against that same outcome - lay betting - on an exchange we might lose 50p or so. The amount we lose depends on the odds between the bookie and the exchange. (Online bookmakers monitor exchanges closely to ensure their odds are lower than the odds available at the betting exchanges, to minimise the possibility of arb bets - matched bets that give us instant profits - but that’s not important right now.)

Our profits from matched bets come from the free bet offers and reloads that online bookies offer punters to first attract them into gambling. “If you place a £10 bet with us,” they might say, “we’ll give you a £30 free bet.” So you place the £10 bet on Leicester to win, match it on the exchange, and lose 50p. But then the bookie is giving you a £30 free bet, so even if you lose £2 on that bet you will still come out with £24 profit overall.

You could trawl the Internet for offers or you could sign up with Yesbets, the industry-leading matched betting service that provides all the sign-up offers and daily reloads any customer could need.

Get The Offers

The beauty of the Yesbets service is that it does the donkey work for us. Like we said, we could trawl the Internet for bookmakers’ offers. If you Google “online bookmaker uk” you come out with over 600,000 results. But do you realistically have the time to go through all these hits, make a note of all the offers, keep a spreadsheet of the ones you’ve completed and the amount you’ve invested and the profit you’ve earned from each?

Personally, I find it a laborious chore to do some research on new items of clothes or gifts for birthdays and Christmas. Yesbets keeps track of our bookmaker and exchange balances, details how much profit we’ve made and only shows us offers we haven’t yet completed. So, once we’ve completed one offer, which might take 20 minutes to do, that offer disappears and is replaced by another. When we complete offers, Yesbets also reminds us of important information such as minimum odds requirements to land the offer. Easy.

Always Back And Lay

This is the key to achieve success from matched betting. Bookies entice us with free bet offers because they want new customers, new football fans or horse racing enthusiasts who think they know enough about sports to make profits straight from the bookies. Even if you’re picking favourites and you’ve got luck on your side, eventually you will lose. Tell every Liverpool fan who have watched them lose supposedly “easy” games at Anfield over the years that backing favourites is the way to the boulevard of betting dreams.

By backing and laying every single bet we are ensuring that we won’t lose. We are covering both outcomes. The Yesbets OddsMatcher trawls through the online bookmaker and betting exchange odds to find us the closest matches, and the Matched Betting Calculator allows us to complete the matched bet.

When the game or race is over, we settle our bets at Yesbets - we mark whether the back bet at the bookmaker or the lay bet at the exchange has won. Yesbets then keeps track of how much profit we have made from the various offers we have completed, and also keeps a record of our balances so we know how much we’ve got at our bookies and betting exchanges.

So if this is a dead cert, why don’t we open several accounts to make even more money from this matched betting enterprise? Well, the bookies’ terms and conditions explicitly prohibit this. Make sure you check out the Yesbets top tips and guides to multi-accounting to ensure we stay onside and avoid being gubbed or having our accounts restricted.

By using the Yesbets OddsMatcher we are minimising our time outlay and maximising our profit. When we back and lay we are guaranteeing ourselves profit from this easy, tax-free, profit-making enterprise.

We aren’t betting. We are matched betting. Say it once and say it loud.