What is Matched Betting?

Put simply, matched betting is betting on two opposite outcomes of an event. It might be a sports match, football game or horse race. It might even be a cultural event, like who will win the X-Factor.

There you have it. Off you go.

Only, you probably have several questions. Which is fine. I’d certainly have questions if you introduced me to a subject that I’d never dug into before.

Like, “Why matched bet?”; “How does matched betting work?”; “What do I need to do to ensure I make a profit?”; “Who matches bets?” Among numerous other questions, thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams.

The feelings are gratefully shared. The hopes and dreams can be nurtured along the way. But the questions we can definitely help with.

Let’s start with a big one. 

Why Matched Bet?

We matched bet to minimise our chances of loss and earn risk free, tax free profits.

Bookies are reviled as having a “license to print money”. 16% or more of all racing income goes straight to bookmakers profits. It’s impossible to beat the bookies. Or is it?

Enter matched betting like a betslip-wielding Zorro.

Betting on two opposite outcomes surely means we can’t lose? Well, depending on the match or the race and the odds, of course. Should the lay bet odds be lower than the back bet odds, we can certainly make instant profit. 

But hold your horses, if you’ll pardon the pun. We’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Back Bets & Lay Bets

We said that matched betting is betting on two opposite outcomes of the same event. This could be a football match, a horse race, a game of tennis. It could even be a cultural event, like which fame-hungry warbler will win the X-Factor.

In order to do this we need to place two bets - back bets and lay bets.

Back bets bet for an outcome, say England will beat Germany. lay bets bet against that outcome. England won’t beat Germany.

This is not the same thing as betting that England will draw or lose. It’s betting that England won’t win.

We place back bets with bookmakers. Any bookmaker you like - there are scores of them. But bookmakers don’t take lay bets. We must place lay bets at a betting exchange, like Betfair or Smarkets.

And that’s not all. The bookmaker and the exchange will have different odds. We need to compare these and make sure that they work in our favour to make profits.

Does this sound complicated?

It would be. But that’s where the Yesbets matched betting software comes in. The Yesbets OddsMatcher searches thousands of markets for the best matched bets, based on our parameters, and shows us how much to bet and where to bet it.

So, we want to bet on England against Germany. Let’s say we want to bet £10. We enter these terms into the Yesbets OddsMatcher and it returns all of the markets we can bet on.

By markets, we mean various different aspects of a game that we can bet on. Football has hundreds of markets. They include the outcome of the game, whether or not both teams will score, who will score, correct results, and so on.

For example, take Manchester United’s 2016-17 Europa League Quarter Final against Anderlecht. SkyBet offered 128 separate markets just on this one game. And that’s only one bookmaker. Now imagine yourself with a pen and paper trawling through all of those markets looking for the right matches and odds. And then doing the same for the betting exchange to place your lay bet.

You just wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t have the time, the patience or the inclination. 

But the Yesbets OddsMatcher searches all of those possible outcomes for us in a heartbeat. This makes our search for profits not only super-quick, but also super easy.

How Do I Make Profits?

This is the key question. The nitty gritty. It’s that point in the conversation when it’s time to talk about money. Because that’s precisely what we want to make from matched betting.

We now understand the matched betting principle. We know we have to place bets on two opposite outcomes of the same market. Any market we choose.

As we hinted earlier, if the lay bet odds are lower than the back bet odds, we can make a small margin of instant profit. The Yesbets OddsMatcher will tell us exactly how much we’ll make from these bets.

But it’s not little profits we’re after. It’s big profits. These come from bookmakers who offer us free bets when we join their sites - Sign-Up Bonuses - or free bets to keep us returning to their sites - Reloads.

When we match these free bets up with the Yesbets OddsMatcher we are making instant profit. Why? Because the money we are using for our back stake is free. Say a bookie has given us £20 for opening an account with them. We use these 20 notes for our next back stake. Result? Higher profit margins. Even if that particular bet makes a small loss, it still makes a net profit because the money we’re backing with didn’t cost us anything. Multiply these free bets by how many online bookies there are and we can see just how much profit there is to make, thanks to the matched betting principle. 

And if you want to see how much profit Yesbets members have made, we have a running total on our home page. We also let you know just how much profit you’ve made when you log into your account.

How Can Matched Betting Work

It’s easy. Matched betting works because online bookmakers want to keep us betting. They need us to keep betting on teams, races or matches, because that’s how they make their profits.

To ensure they keep us coming back, they need to keep offering us free bets - Reloads.

It’s like that new restaurant that’s opened up in town. Sam’s. There’s an initial fanfare. Everyone’s talking about it. It’s booked up for weeks. But then things slows down. The novelty is gone. There are other restaurants in town, after all.

So to bring fresh appeal to its customers Sam’s decides to run a promotion. Or to change its menu. Or to post delicious pictures of its meals on social media and try to recapture that buzz that it enjoyed during the first weeks of being open.

Bookmakers are the same. They want us to keep coming back, to keep placing bets, to keep funding their profits.

But with matched betting, we aren’t funding their profits.

We’re funding ours.