Free Matched Betting Guide

admin 4/10/2022

Free Matched Betting Guide Rating: 3,7/5 2415 reviews

Matched betting is a legal way of guaranteeing a profit on a bet. Yep, there are no games here. That statement is 100% accurate.

The idea of matched betting revolves around paying in a small amount and claiming back free bets. You can then use your free bets to follow the same process again, therefore potentially making a fair amount of money back in the bargain. It’s easy to see why people enjoy matched betting. Team Profit are arguably the biggest free matched betting service and community and are very popular with the crowd of people that don’t want to invest in a premium service. Interestingly, they are another service that recommends Oddsmonkey for those wanting to move from the smaller profits that free guides can offer and move onto the larger profits and higher efficiency that paid services allow for. The best brokers are free to use (they get a fee from the lender, not you), and you can be honest about matched betting. A broker will advise the best course of action for you to take in order to secure a successful mortgage application. Ready to start learning matched betting? There is no better way than via our easy to follow video guide courses: Matched Betting Explained (includes 4 videos with a total watch time of 25 minutes); and A Matched Betting Offer, Step by Step (includes 4 videos with a total watch time of 27 minutes). When you’re ready grab your cup of tea (or glass of wine!), sit-back and start learning how you.

How Does Matched Betting Work?

The days of wandering into your local high street bookmaker are gone. It’s all about the online bookies now. There are tens, hundreds, hell, even thousands of bookies trying to make a go of it online. As a result they’re all coming up with offers to tempt punters in. Many of them come in the shape of free bets.

Most people see a bookie offering a freebie and scroll past, some take the free bet and do one of two things – win and run or lose and leave. Then there are matched bettors. Matched betting utilises free bets to guarantee a profit. This is achieved by placing a free bet on one outcome and then using a betting exchange to ‘lay’ against the said selection.

The betting exchange side of things can confuse people but the best way to explain it is that you’re acting as the bookie against other punters. This means your ‘lay’ bet comes with what is known as ‘liability’. This is you covering the potential winnings of the other persons bet. Let’s simplify all of this with an example.

A Real Life Example

Man City face Arsenal at the weekend. Coral, who have free bet opportunities to the value of £20, have the draw priced at 5.00 (matched betting is always calculated in decimal odds). The Betfair Exchange offers you the option to ‘lay’ the draw i.e. betting either team will win at odds of 5.40.

Your ‘back’ stake is decided for you as it is whatever is the value of the free bet so your bet in this instance looks as below:

£20 on Manchester City to draw with Arsenal at odds of 5.00 with Coral = £80 return (free bet stake is excluded).

You then ‘lay’ the draw stating the match will not be a draw at 5.40 on the Betfair Exchange. The stake associated to the bet will be £14.95 (because of how betting exchanges work, this is actually your potential winnings – more on these calculations later) giving you a liability or amount ‘at risk’ of £65.78. Don’t worry though because, come kick off, you’re laughing:

If the game ends in a draw, you lose your liability on Betfair (£65.78) but win £80 from Coral. A £14.22 profit.

If either team wins the game, you’ve lost nothing with Coral because your stake was a freebie but you’ve won your bet on the betting exchange. Your liability is returned along with your £14.95 winnings. Exchange winnings are usually subject to a commission (5% on Betfair) meaning your overall profit is £14.20.

It’s two bets that take less than five minutes work and you’re guaranteed to make over £14.

Is it Really that Simple?

Sort of, yes. The example we’ve walked through above is the matched bet and it does give you a positive return regardless of the result but there are a few more components to consider.

Firstly, most free football bets are only awarded if you make a bet with real cash first. This is called your qualifying bet. The approach to your qualifying bet is exactly the same as your matched bet. Place your ‘back’ bet with the bookie i.e. “I bet team X will beat team Y” and then ‘lay’ off your selection on a betting exchange i.e. “I bet team X will not beat team Y”. This initial bet is placed with real money. For that reason, it is possible that you’ll lose a small amount (usually pence).

The second part of matched betting that you need to understand is how to identify an appropriate opportunity. Not all fixtures are suitable for matched betting because it’s reliant on the odds falling in a certain range.

Now, a lot of people are scared off by the fact you need to find specific games for matched betting to work. Don’t be, there are tools out there that are created with this betting strategy in mind.

Top Matching Betting Sites

There are two main companies that operate matched betting services. Profit Accumulator, who have been going since 2014, are the name that has been helping punters make money through this method the longest. Their service does come at a cost (£20 a month) but they offer a free trial and you can cancel any time. Their offering is decent too with alerts taking you to the best free bet offers, software that allows you to find the games that are matched bet opportunities by bookmaker.

Now, remember earlier when we spoke of the complicated ‘lay’ stakes? Well, to top it all off, their service also includes a bet calculator. This will give you the stakes you need to wager for a guaranteed profit for your matched and qualifying bet.

The other major name in the market for matched betting services is OddsMonkey. To be honest, their platform is very closely aligned to that of Profit Accumulator to the point where even the pricing is the same. The main difference is the fact they claim their free trial will yield you greater profit (£62 instead of £40). If you go the whole hog with matched betting that £22 extra will become insignificant with hundreds of pounds quickly racking up. I’d suggest you check both out with the free trials and opt for the service that you find more user friendly – everyone is different after all.

Best Bookies for Matched Betting?

On the surface of things, no. Any bookmakers with a free bet offering can be exploited for profit. That said, all of these offers come with extensive terms and conditions. It is in these terms that certain bookies make themselves more appealing to matched bettors.

Some of the big boys like William Hill, SkyBet and Ladbrokes will not limit a household to one single use of a free bet offer. This means that if you share wi-fi with someone you don’t need to worry about not being credited with an offer or, if you live with a partner or friends, you can all club together for multiple matched betting wins. Happy days.

Some bookies though do restrict their offers to one person per house and/or wi-fi network. You can still use them for matched betting but just make sure someone else in your network hasn’t taken the offer already.

Just a quick caveat to stress that the terms and conditions do change regularly so either check them out at the time of betting, ask the company directly or hit up one of the forums operated by the two resources mentioned earlier.

Does Matched Betting Still Work in 2020?

The internet is a phenomenal tool but, boy, do you read some nonsense. There are plenty of people out there who claim that you’ve missed the boat on matched betting. It’s simply not true. Bookies will always offer free bets and whilst that remains the case, you’ll be able to make money from laying of your back bet.

The only risk to consistent matched betting is getting your account ‘gubbed’. This is where the bookie spots you’re winning too much money and limits your stake to the point of insignificance. There are easy ways to avoid this though. Continue your matched betting but avoid staking large amounts on really obscure leagues (this is a red flag to the bookies that you’re covering your bet) and, on occasion, throw on a small stake accumulator. This is a random piece of advice but to the watchful eye of bookmaker systems it will help your account resemble the behaviour of a regular punter.

Is it Possible to Lose Money When Matched Betting?

After reading all this, you’re probably fully on board. Before you take the plunge understanding the risks is an important thing to close on.

Matched betting is a guaranteed way of making money. That doesn’t mean it’s completely risk free though. The reason for that is two-fold. The first is that odds can change in an instant. It’s not that common for dramatic shifts to occur (it’s not happened to me in several years of matched betting) but it’s important to acknowledge it could happen. If you get caught by this, simply crack on as planned and know that your loss will be limited. You’ll soon make it back with the next bet as you won’t get caught out every time.

The other thing that can catch you out is human error. This is in your control – take your time when using the calculators from Profit Accumulator or OddsMonkey and double check things before you hit ‘place bet’.

It’s like that old saying ‘measure twice, cut once, win often’.

There you have it, your guide to matched betting.

From the age of 6, I’ve always had some sort of entrepreneurial spirit. At that age it was pumpkin farming, ok farming is a slight exaggeration, I had 3 pumpkin plants which yielded about 12 pumpkins and revenue in the region of £20 per year. My passion for business continued throughout my teens and upon arriving at university, I stumbled across the world of Matched Betting.

If undertaken correctly, Matched Betting is a risk free method of essentially using the free bets offered by bookmakers and turning them into profit. How can this be risk free I hear you ask….to understand this I must firstly explain the difference between a ‘back’ bet and a ‘lay’ bet:

A back bet: is a selection with a bookmaker or market that something will happen. An example of this would be: Bournemouth FC will win the league.
A lay bet: is a selection with a bookmaker or market that something won’t happen. A similar example would be: Manchester United won’t win the league. In lay betting, you essentially become the bookmaker to a back bet.

Now this can be difficult to understand but when leveraged correctly, it can be a very powerful money making machine. It helped me fund what in hind sight was a very extravagant university lifestyle and has gone on to make people in excess of £55,000. Read on to find out how this could be you.

The basic concept is simple. When using your free bet, you bet on every outcome of an event to ensure a guaranteed profit no matter what the outcome. You do this by cancelling out the risk on the back bet by betting against yourself at the same odds (the lay bet) which you can do at a betting exchange. Following your initial or qualifying bet you will then be awarded the free bet by the bookmaker. This is the part where the profit is made. All you need to do now is repeat the first process, bet using the free bet whilst also laying the same bet and no matter what the result you are guaranteed to make a profit.

I’m completely against gambling, the weighted power of the odds means that over the long run you’ll always lose money. We can use these free bet opportunities to ensure we make money no matter what happens.

Risk and Reward?

What Is Matched Betting

Let’s focus on the risks initially. The use of the word betting in ‘Matched Betting’, is somewhat misleading. If implemented correctly matched betting is a completely risk free method of earning money. Where there is an element of risk is from human error and as such it’s essential that you follow and understand every part of this article before setting off on your journey.

Secondly, let’s look at the rewards. For each matched bet, you will be left with up to 95% of the free bet amount as profit. This is because betting exchanges such as Betfair usually charge a small commission (5%) on winnings. There may also be a very small loss on the qualifying bet due to the minor difference in odds on the websites you use but fear not this will be recouped by the free bet.

Matched Betting – An Example

Whilst the concept of matched betting is relatively straight forward, it can take a while to get your head around it. As such, I thought it would be useful to give you a full step by step demonstration whilst I introduce my willing friend Jack to Matched Betting.

Step One – Sign up for Betfair.com

First things first, you’ll need to sign up to a betting exchange. Betfair is a betting exchange that makes it possible for backers and layers to match their bets with one another. It is by far the most popular betting exchange and that’s important because it means that as a customer you have more opportunity for your bets to be matched with someone with the opposing view.

This will be your main port of call in the world of matched betting so get signed up now.

Step Two – Sign up for Coral

In this walk through we’ll be using one of my personal favourite sign-up bonuses, Coral. They currently have a special offer for new customers, called “bet £5 and get £20 in free bets”. Basically if we stake £5 of our own money (the qualifying bet) Coral will give us £20 worth of free stakes to bet with.

You can access the special offer by clicking here.

When registering I’d strongly recommend opting in to receive offers and promotions via email, these will be useful to make profits on an ongoing basis.

Step Three – Finding an opportunity

Just before we find the opportunity we need to make sure you’ve deposited some cash into your Coral Account. In this instance it is £5 to qualify for the offer. You’ll notice that your account balance should now be £5 and your free bets balance should be at £0. This will stay as £0 until we place a £5 matched bet.

One more step, instead of using fractions (4/1, 7/2 etc), us Matched Bettors like to use decimal odds. On the Coral home page, you’ll see the option to change over from decimals to fractions at the top, change this across to make life far easier.

Now we need to find a suitable bet. This used to be slightly difficult however there are now many calculators online which will source these for you. Using the free odds comparison service at Oddsmonkey (click here to sign up for free) I found the below qualifying bet:

We’re looking for a bet where you can place a back bet on it at Coral and then place your lay bet on the same selection at Betfair for the same or as close odds as possible. We want to keep the odds as low as possible which will reduce the amount of money we deposit at Betfair, however we also need to make sure they are over 1.5 as that is a requirement of the particular offers terms and conditions.

So I’ve gone for Wigan to win the first half against Crawley town, which has odds of 1.8 on both Coral and Betfair. Let’s step back and run through this for a second. You place a £5 bet at Coral and ‘lay’ a £5 bet at Betfair. If the bet wins (Wigan win first half) you’ll get £9.00 (5*1.8) from Coral and have to pay out £9.00 at Betfair. In this instance you’ve reclaimed the whole value of your bet. Should Wigan lose you’ll lose the £5 with Coral and win £5 with Betfair, again breaking even.

Note that this doesn’t take into account commission of 5% that needs to be paid if you win at betfair. As such you’ll need to use the calculator at Oddsmonkey (click here) to calculate the correct back/lay amounts to ensure you only lose a very small proportion of your stake (12p) which will then be recouped by the free £20 bet. The snippet from the Oddsmonkey calculator is set out below:

Step Four – Placing your qualifying bet

We’ve picked our match, used Oddsmonkey to calculate the appropriate bets and now we need to place the bet on both betting portals.

Below we place the qualify back bet of £5 at Coral and in line with the betting calculator place a corresponding lay bet of £5.14.

No matter what the result of the above are we’ll lose £0.12 of our original stake but receive the £20 free bet.

Step Five – Turning that free bet into cash

We now need to repeat stages 3 & 4 however this time using the free £20 bet instead of the £5. You’ll see below that the free bets are given in 4 x £5 bets (tokens), so simply place them as 4 separate bets on the same event.

What is important to highlight is that the stake (the free £20 given by Coral) is not returned and as such it’s import to go for a bet with higher odds to maximize the incentive. This will be limited by the amount you have in your Betfair account to lay the bets. In this instance I’ve selected West Ham v Liverpool with the outcome to be a draw, as below:

Again using the Oddsmonkey calculator, we calculated the appropriate amounts to both ‘back’ and ‘lay’, adjusting the calculator to reflect that it was a free bet with the stake not returned and importantly placing 4 separate bets of £5. See the selection below:

Note that you’ll need £50.04 (4 x £12.51) in your Betfair account to lay this bet. If you’d prefer to start smaller just use 1 or 2 of the free £5 token bets initially.

Step Six – Withdrawing the profits

In the example above, my lucky friend Jack made the following from our 15 minute exercise:

We placed our qualifying bet where we lost 12p regardless of the outcome.
This triggered our £20 free bet
We made £3.49 from each of the four £5 free bets totalling £13.96
So our total profit was: £13.96 less £0.12 = £13.84

That should take no longer than 15 minutes and we made £13.84. That’s £55.36 per hour tax free. Now I’m not saying you’ll be able to achieve this month after month, however there are plenty of lucrative sign up bonuses which could earn you far more than the example above (try Bet365 next time where the sign up bonus is £100).

Now the bookies will try everything possible to encourage you to spend those winnings with them, which should be avoided at all costs. To avoid any temptation withdraw your profit from Coral ASAP!

Finding Offers

I suspect you’re thinking, ok that’s fine but how do I go about finding these offers for myself. Let’s start with sourcing simple sign up bonuses and then move on to the re-occuring reload bonuses.

Initially you’ll want to start with the more straight forward offers, however it should be highlighted that not all promotions offered by bookies can be used for Matched Betting and as such there’s some work involved in reviewing the various terms and conditions. Fortunately, other people have done the vast majority of this work for you.

There are two options here in either the form of online forums or the more popular method of using a matched betting service which will hold your hand throughout the process and provide numerous offers for a small monthly fee. Usually priced at around £15 per month (the example above has virtually paid for one month’s trial so why not use it to sign up, they’re worth their weight in gold!).

I’ve summarised the top two platforms below. Oddsmonkey as you may have guessed is my favourite and by clicking here you can receive a free trial to get you started.

OddsMonkey Review – View Full Review Here

Matched Betting Sites

OddsMonkey is the most established of the 2 reviewed having started life many years ago as an odds matching software and relaunching in 2016 entering into the matched betting full service space. With over 30,000 customers it’s also one of the largest providers.

Customer Service – Upon signing up to the premium version you’re given a free 30 minute 1-1 session with an OddsMonkey instructor who can either get you started or perhaps help you leverage the software once you’ve been up and running for a month or so. There’s also a very active forum to share your experience as you go along.

Software – Easy to use software with an array of tools including Oddsmatcher, Dutching, Racing Matcher, Tennis Matcher, Acca Matcher, Each Way Matcher. What it doesn’t include is casino and bingo offers.

Price – At £15 per month or £149 per year it’s the cheapest of the softwares reviewed. There is also a free version available offering a reduced but useful service. Click here to sign up now.

Matched Betting Blog

ThriftyPoint thoughts: A strong all round matched betting website with additional tools to assist advanced matched bettors should they require them.

Profit Accumulator Review – View Full Review Here

Benefits from the largest matched betting forums and most video tutorials. The product offering is clean and simple to follow with easy step by step instructions.

Customer Service – Significant number of training guides and content available to help users navigate the software. It also has a thriving community contributing to the websites forum.

Software – The website itself has a relatively simple interface, making it one of the easiest to use. Plenty of tools available including oddsmatcher, acca catcher and dutching finder.

Price – At £17.99 per month it’s the more expensive of the two however if purchased for a year the price drops to £150, almost in line with OddsMonkey above. Again there is also a free version available offering a reduced but insightful service. Use the link here to sign up.

ThriftyPoint’s thoughts: The simple interface makes the website easy to use with clear step-by-step instructions. If you’re planning on dedicating time to matched betting, you may wish to go with the slightly more advanced OddsMonkey.

Other Packages

Matched Betting In Usa

Some other packages with free sign ups include:

MatchedBets.com: Click here for free trail

Other Alternatives

As I mentioned earlier, the only risk associated with matched betting is human error. As such I’d strongly recommend using one of the above matched betting service providers who will walk you through the processes. If for some reason you don’t fancy using their services (you’d be foolish not to – they’re free after all!), you could join the matched betting forum at Money Saving Expert where there are various reload offers and recently changed sign up offers.

Once you’ve signed up to all the bookmakers?

The most lucrative offers are sign up bonuses. Once you’ve used these up there are various reload offers which can be utilised to provide on-going earnings. Reload offers are only available to current members of the bookmaker and can vary from betting £X to receive £X of free bets to second place refunds.

There are three ways you can find these. Either via emails sent directly from the bookmaker, forums or from your matched betting service provider. If we take a look at OddsMonkey’s daily bonus page (4/11/2017) they are currently showing £141.95 in guaranteed profit for today alone. That’s most people’s spending money for the weekend sorted. A snippet from OddsMonkey is set out below:

Simple Recap

To get you started with Matched Betting I’ve summarised the most important elements of this article below:

If this is the first time you’ve read the page then please read it again. I can’t stress how important it is to understand the various steps.
Sign up to Betfair and Coral to make the most of the example in the post.
I’d strongly recommend signing up to a free trial at either OddsMonkey (click here) or Profit Accumulator (click here). These platforms will eliminate any risk of human error as you get to grips with the art of matched betting.
Most importantly of all, do not use the proceeds to gamble otherwise the bookies win!

FAQs

Now you may have some queries after reading this so I thought I’d summarise the most frequently asked questions here.

Is Matched Betting legal?

Guaranteed profits earnt in your own time, now that sounds too good to be true. There really is no catch, it’s a 100% legal and legitimate way of generating additional income from your sofa.

Does Matched Betting impact your credit rating?

Your credit rating is not affected by depositing at gambling sites – indeed, most online bookmakers do not even perform a credit check, meaning that you can make money online genuinely guilt-free.

Do I have to pay Tax on the proceeds?

If you live in the UK like me, all income from gambling is completely tax free.

Matched Betting Acronyms

Acca: Accumulator – When you place multiple bets on a coupon at a bookmaker, usually 4 or more teams.

Matched Betting Uk

RF: Risk Free – When we can place a bet using an offer and there is absolutely no risk to our balance.