Make Money Online

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? We match bets at a bookmaker and a betting exchange that qualify us for free bet offers that we then also match in order to make profits from free money.

Surely it’s not that easy? And is it legal?

Actually, the answer to both of these questions is a big, fat “yes”.

Like many adventures - be they business or personal - making profits from matched betting requires an injection of capital to start the whole ball spinning. We need to place qualifying bets with bookies in order to activate the free bet offers that allow us to make the real profit. That money has to come from somewhere. Yesbets can help you make tax-free money from bookmakers, but it can’t magic money out of thin air.

But following the first few profitable matched bets, the whole process can run itself. We can withdraw our initial investment and simply make profits from profits, earning free money from reload bonuses and being careful to avoid being “gubbed”.

Let’s rewind a second. We are getting ahead of ourselves.

The Matched Betting Principle

Simple Coral Matched Bet Example

Let’s say you haven’t read any other of our blogs or done more than scanned across the Yesbets site. This blog is about making money from matched betting. But you might have the burning question, “What is matched betting?

It’s an important question, seeing as it’s the key to this whole process. Matched betting involves placing a back bet at a bookmaker - we are betting for an outcome - and matching that bet at a betting exchange - we are lay betting against that same outcome. Because we have matched our bets, we have covered both outcomes.

The chances are that we will make a small loss on our qualifying bets, detailed when we select a market and make our matched bets via the Yesbets matched betting calculator. But because bookmakers offer us free bets to incentivise us to keep betting we can cream tax-free profits from these free bets until the cows come home.

Stumping Up The Start-Up Cash

In its very first example, Yesbets shows us how to make £15 in 15 minutes. This is a great example, not only of how to place a matched bet but also to give us an indication of the kind of time and effort we need to invest if we are to start earning profits from matched betting: hardly any.

We need to place a £10 bet at a bookie - in the example it’s Coral, but there are shed loads of other bookies out there - and match that bet at a betting exchange. The example cites Betfair - the world’s largest betting exchange. We will need to deposit funds into our Betfair accounts in order to match any bets we place at a bookmaker. Yesbets recommends that we deposit £100 or more into Betfair, though we could start with as little as £40.

Coral Qualifying Bet

So, let’s say we’ve made our first bet. We have backed our bet at Coral, and we have laid our bet at Betfair. We’ve matched the bets up. But let’s say our back bet actually wins. This means that our winnings will sit in our Coral account. Coral will still honour the £20 in free bets it’s offering to us for placing our first £5 bet. But because our back bet won we will have nothing in Betfair to lay further bets. This is why Yesbets recommends we place more money in Betfair to begin with.

In an ideal scenario, our lay bets always win. The back bet loses so we don’t have money sitting in our bookie accounts, and all our funds pile into the betting exchange. The more money we have in the exchange, the higher odds bets we can match.

For example, a £20 bet at a bookie with odds of 19 will return £380. Big winnings. But to match it at the betting exchange would require a balance of £360 or more.

Coral Free Bet

But this is our destination. This is where we are headed. First, we must build up our exchange balances making first smaller matched bets then bigger ones to maximise our profit.

Don’t Punt, Always Match

Manchester United to beat Swansea at home. It’s a sure thing, right? Well, no. United would undoubtedly be favourites, especially at Old Trafford, but in sport you never know. Swansea could nick a draw, or even an unlikely win.

Man Utd Champs League 1999

Remember United’s famous victory against Bayern Munich in the Champions League final in 1999? It was 1-0 to Bayern on 90 minutes. Who’d have bet on United to come back from that to win 2-1?

But they did.

You might look at one of those free bets from Coral and think, “I’ll just stick £5 on United to win. I’ll scoop all the profits and build my balance up quicker.”

Fine. If United win. They should. Of course they should. But they might not. And if they don’t you’ve just wasted £4.50-odd of guaranteed profit.

Why take the risk?

If someone said to you, “If United beat Swansea I’ll give you a new car, but if they lose I’m taking your car,” what would you do? You’d tell them to get bent, wouldn’t you?

Sure, it’s a gleaming prize. But you might lose your car. And what kind of hassle and expense would that cost you?

It’s an extreme example. But the principle is the same. Why take the risk?

If you back and lay your bets, you remove the risk and guarantee the long-term profit.

Work Your Way Through The Bookmaker Offers

Bookmaker Signup Offers

It might sound wild, but we want to open up as many bookmaker accounts as we can. The online betting industry is fiercely competitive. Every bookie offers one kind of sign-up bonus or another. It might be £10 free bets, £20 free bets, even £50 free bets like the kind Ladbrokes often stumps up.

One of Bet365’s key offers dangled a deposit match bonus of up to £200. This could translate up to £190 in sheer profit. But hold your horses on this one - we want to build up our exchange balances before we attempt this offer to maximise our profit and meet the wagering requirements. That’s right. Some of the bookies insert clauses like wagering in order to make sure we don’t take the money and run.

But if we have enough in our exchange balance before we take on this offer, that’s precisely what we’ll be doing.

Once we have signed up to every bookie under the sun we can look to hit their reload offers. Bookies offer free bet bonuses as incentives for us to bet. But be careful. Bookies monitor our accounts, even going to the lengths of installing secret software onto our computers to report back a digital footprint of our betting activities. If we constantly scoop a bookie’s reload offers without seeming like a regular punter, we could well find ourselves being “gubbed”.

Become The Regular Punter

Wait. Didn’t I just say we shouldn’t punt? Yes I did. And well done for paying attention. We must always match our bets off; back and lay, back and lay. But if bookies notice us doing this, they are going to “gub” us or restrict our accounts. They don’t want us to make money from them. They want to make money from us.

So we must appear to bookies as though we are regular punters, just interested in betting and happy to spend our hard earned dough on whimsical fantasies that our favourite football teams are going to win every week.

If we make mug bets - as in, bets that mugs would make (Manchester United to beat Swansea at home, for example) we will look less like a matched bettor and more like a punter. Remember to back and lay your mug bets off, too, seeking odds of 1.5 or more. With no bonuses to be had from mug bets, we might make small losses here. Always look to make a loss of no more than £1 for a mug bet, and a good rule of thumb is to place two mug bets for every bonus offer.

Hit The Ponies

First of all, we wouldn’t recommend you randomly swoop in to a midweek afternoon race at Bangor-On-Dee with a £50 bet. You might make instant profits from it, but it’s going to flag you right away to bookmakers as a potential matched bettor.

People tend to follow sports. If you have an active interest in horse racing then by all means bet on horse racing. But remember, we’re trying to stay under the radar.

Football is the most popular sport in the UK, and the most popular sport for bettors. And also for bookmakers. There are literally hundreds of betting markets per football event, giving us more options for better matches. It makes objective sense to consistently bet on football, at least at first.

But when the big race meets come around, we all like a bet. Ascot, Epsom, Aintree, Cheltenham, Chester, The Yorkshire Cup. Bookies fall over themselves with promotional offers for these big meets and we can make some serious money. People love to bet on horses at these big events, so why wouldn’t we?

Keep Your Accounts Close

So if we can make moolah hand over fist, why not open up several accounts with bookmakers and take advantage of these free bet offers many times over? Well, for a start, bookies prohibit the practice of multi-accounting. They also make it difficult to do, monitoring our cookies, Mac address and IP address.

If they get a sniff of any such goings on they will not only shut our accounts down but also potentially whisk winnings away from us too.

The safest bet is to back and lay responsibly like a normal punter. After all, that’s exactly what we are. Aren’t we?

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