PROVIDING YOU WITH ALL THE BEST BETS
Picture this: you’re a bookie. You’ve got some punters who have taken advantage of your Sign Up offer but you have to keep giving away free bets to keep them punting. Would this hack you off? Of course it would.
Bookies want punters to find the bookmaker site such a great sportsbook offering that the punters keep punting and the pounds keep coming in. Sure, new customers are enticed by free bets offers. But now they’ve got the bug. They want to keep spending their hard earned moolah in our online sportsbook.
At least, that’s what bookies want. But we don’t want that. We’re after the free bets. Remember, free bets make us the biggest margin of profit - when we are matched betting using the free money that bookmakers have given us. And we’re in this for the long haul.
To ensure the long-term sustainability of our various bookie accounts, we have to appear to bookmakers like regular punters if we want to avoid account restrictions and being gubbed. We have completed the Yesbets Sign Up offers. We can see exactly how much profit we have made already when we log in to our account. We are now looking to keep these bookie accounts open to ensure we maximise the reload offers each bookie offers. Can we achieve this through mug betting? Yes we can.
Stay Popular, Act Natural
Two Angelfish find themselves in a shark pool. The sharks are suspicious. They’re eyeing the fish. And they’re hungry. One of the Angelfish turns to the other. “Act natural,” he says.
Mug betting might sound derogatory, but it really isn’t. “Mug” bets are popular bets that a lot of punters would make. “You’d have to be a mug not to bet on Arsenal hammering Colchester.”
Betting on a favourite in a major horse race is another good example of a mug bet. But don’t hit up Bangor-on-Dee on a random Wednesday. When betting on horse racing, it’s best to make sure it’s part of a big festival - Aintree, Ascot, Cheltenham, Epsom, 1000 Guineas at Newmarket. Maybe the Chester Festival and Yorkshire Cup, too, if you bet on the others.
You see, we are those Angelfish. The bookies are the sharks. If we never bet on horse racing then swan in with a totally random £50 bet outside of a big meet we might as well raise a “Free Dinner” banner, cover ourselves in seasoning and ready ourselves to be gubbed.
The Grand National is the greatest steeplechase in the world. But this is a mug’s bet. And I do mean that in a derogatory way. It’s a huge field and anyone’s race. That’s why bookies love it. Plenty of them offer immense bonuses in the races preceding the Grand National to draw us into punting huge amounts on the National itself. We can take advantage of these pre-National bet offers with glee, but make sure to match bet on the National too. This way you won’t look like a bonus-abusing Angelfish.
Match Bet Football, Mug Bet Football
Football is the most popular sport for betting in the UK, and the world. The BBC reports that 70% of world sports betting activity is bet on football. In the UK, the football betting industry revenue is worth nearly twice that of horse racing.
Remember the Angelfish? Football is a great way to blend in. And now countries play more football games than ever, we get the turnover we need to keep the mug bets coming in - and therefore the Reload bonuses and Free Bet offers rolling in with them.
We keep hearing that the Premier League is the best league in the world. Which is why its teams don’t get past the Quarter Finals of the Champions League nowadays. But there is enough interest in it to mean there are often multiple bets available to be placed on a Saturday and Sunday, with Monday night football and the occasional midweek game thrown in too. And then there are the UEFA Champions League and Europa League betting offers. Even if you aren’t a football fan, match betting on football gives you the avenue to keep churning those matched bets and mug bets through.
Pick A Team
If you’re a football fan you will know already of the emotional attachment we have to our teams. They are our teams. It is a unique, individual, personal relationship as well as a tribal group experience. We back them to the hilt, in good times and in bad. Normal punters back their teams, often precisely because of this emotional attachment. We don’t need to detach ourselves emotionally from our teams. Quite the opposite. We just need to be pragmatic enough to realise that there are tax free profits to be made from matched betting. This isn’t personal. It’s business.
If you’ve read our blog post “A complete guide to avoid account restrictions and being gubbed”, we say as much there. We want to appear to bookmakers as a normal punter. If you find the idea of laying a bet against your team abhorrent, then pick another team as an undercover favourite. Think of matched betting as the ultimate undercover job. One last job. And we’re only two weeks away from retirement. (Although, obviously, we don’t want to retire from Matched Betting at all. We want to carry on supplementing our income with free profits. Which is precisely why we need to appear normal and stay under the bookies’ radars.)
Bet Two Get One Free
So how many mug bets should we place? If we’re talking strategy, I’d suggest a 2:1 ratio of mug bets to bonus bets. We should be looking at making a loss of no more than 0.50 for every mug bet we place.
Say we make two mug bets at a 0.50 loss. That’s a £1 loss for two mug bets. Then we match bet a £20 free bet with a profit margin of £17. That’s a net profit of £16 from this mini betting series. Not bad for the sake of ten minutes’ “work”. The inverted commas are important, because the Matched Betting Calculator does all the “work” for us. All we need to do is follow it diligently and we are off and running like a favourite at Kempton.
Win Big, Mug Big
Boom! Two birds with one stone. Mug betting big winnings at a bookmaker so the winnings transfer into our exchange account makes us look to the bookie like a cash cow. At the same time, our funds whiz into our exchange account to use on more offers. This is far quicker than a process of withdrawing everything from a bookie, waiting 3-5 days for that payment to process (yawn) before we can re-invest it in our exchange account.
Hold Your Horses, Leslie
Bookies’ Trading Teams watch our accounts like hawks to keep an eye out for bonus-abusing behaviour. This is annoying for a number of reasons, but not least the duality of it all. We sign up to a bookie to scoop a Free Bet offer, the bookie sends us scores of offers which we then take up, then bookies gub us for taking every offer they send. It’s Catch 22.
Remember our above tip of “Bet Two Get One Free”? As long as we mug bet like a trooper we’ve got a good chance of building up a “normal” pattern of behaviour. We are playing the long-game, building our bankroll until we can regularly take the bookies for everything they’re worth. Slow and steady wins the race. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Insert Your Own Clichéd Sporting Proverb Here.
Deposit More Than The Minimum
Have you seen the Matrix? The Sentinels send out what I like to call “lasers” to scan for illicit activity. It’s like the Wachowskis made a trilogy of films based on matched betting. We are the rebels. You are Neo. The trading team sends out its laser probes as automated checks to hunt out bonus abuse.
One of the major flags for these sentinels is rebels/players depositing the bare minimum to qualify for their bonuses. To combat this, we don’t need to know Kung Fu. We just need to deposit more than the minimum. The Offer Strategy that pops up when we are completing our Sign Up offer reminds us of this very thing. Once we have deposited and bet, we can still withdraw the full amount. It’s this initial deposit that raises the red flag to Agent Smith.
Bin It Off And Make Hay
That said, you could just ignore every tip we’ve just shared and go hell for leather, rinsing every bookie for all the Free Bet offers they’ve got until they gub you. It’s a short-term strategy but it will definitely yield short-term profits.
Ultimately it comes down to you. Do you want to go big and go hard before having the door slammed in your face? Or do you want to go under the radar and add long-term supplements to your income?
The choice is yours. But before you decide, here’s our Graham with a quick reminder.