How Does Matched Betting Work?
Matched betting in its simplest form involves taking advantage of the promotional offers from bookmakers. We exploit the sign-up welcome offers for new customers and other opportunities such as reload offers (yes, you can continue to earn a profit after welcome offers!), 2ups and horse racing Extra Places strategies.
We always match our bets (to avoid any gambling!) by using a bookmaker with a betting exchange site. As we explain elsewhere, for simple sports matched betting, we place a qualifying bet with a bookmaker and lay against this bet on an exchange site, which would typically result in us breaking even.
However, when we repeat this process with the free bet, we can lock in a guaranteed profit every time.
Each of these matched bets consists of a back bet and a lay bet. But how does matched betting work to get us the profit we need and to allow us to earn £500-£1k in our first month alone?
The Matched Betting Back Bet
We usually place the back bet at the bookmaker (though it is possible to place these at an exchange through their sportsbook), and this type of bet is the ‘normal’ type of bet a punter would make with a bookmaker, i.e. we bet that a team or a horse will win.
To ensure we don’t gamble, we cover all outcomes by also placing a lay bet.
The Matched Betting Lay Bet
The lay bet is a bet against an outcome occurring. At the exchange site (we recommend Smarkets), members of the public exchange bets with each other.
A betting exchange means you act as the bookmaker since you bet against an outcome (including the draw in football).
Referred to as ‘laying a bet’, this is always the other outcome of the same sporting fixture or race and results in a matched bet.
It’s worth mentioning that a betting exchange usually takes a commission from us; for example, at the time of writing, Betfair charges 5% commission and Smarkets 2%.
A matched betting service usually has some active promotion that ensures you don’t have to pay commission, which will save you cash.
Remember to place the back bet before the lay bet since if the odds change at the bookmaker, we may lose money, which is one of the limited ways in which matched betting can go wrong.
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Matched Betting Qualifying Bets /
Free Bets
So, how does matched betting work in order to lock in profit?
To earn profit from matched betting, we place qualifying bets as the promotion requires; then, we repeat this with our free bets.
To lock in profits we have to carry out different calculations for each.
With a qualifying bet/bets, the only purpose is to qualify for the promotion with which we will earn out profit, so for that, we keep the loss to as close to breaking even as possible, and with your qualifying loss, you should aim never to lose more than 3% of your stake.
When we repeat the process with our free bets, we do our best to match our bets in a way that will guarantee ourselves the highest profit possible (without taking too much value and risking our bookmaker accounts’ health).
Matched betting calculators and a matched betting sites’ oddsmatcher allows us to find the highest SNR available (sporting fixture opportunity with the highest odds available) to extract the best value from our free bet. An SNR of 78.7% would return us £7.87 from a £10 free bet.
The various types of offers have matching calculators that enable guaranteed profit no matter the free bet structure, for example, ACCAs or more advanced strategies.
To find out more about matched betting, why not check out the following pages on our site:
- Matched Betting Beginner’s Guides
- Matched Betting Tips and Advice
- Matched Betting Advanced Strategies
- Profit Accumulator Review 2021
- Oddsmonkey Review 2021
- Is Matched Betting Legal?
- Best matched betting sites
- Matched Betting Welcome Offers and Reload Offers
- Matched Betting after Welcome Offers
- Matched Betting 2up Strategy