What is Matched Betting?

What is matched betting

We discussed in our post on making money on the road how we are able to live and travel full time in our van and the method which drew the most amount of questions was matched betting. Since we released the article we have taught our friends and family how to matched bet and have been emailed to explain further what matched betting is. Therefore we have set out to write a step by step guide to matched betting so that anyone can understand because we want you to be able to take advantage of matched betting to fund your adventures.
This is part one of our step by step guide to matched betting:

What is matched betting?

Matched betting is NOT gambling! Matched betting takes advantage of bookmaker free bet offers to guarantee you a profit. The most profitable and easiest offers you’ll do are sign-up offers, so the first few months can guarantee you a few hundred pounds with very little effort.
In matched betting, when we make a bet, we bet to cover all outcomes of an event (a horse race, a football match etc). We make a bet with a bookmaker that a result will happen and then a corresponding bet (which we call a lay bet) with an exchange that the result will not happen.

So, for example, in a Chelsea vs Manchester United match we could bet for Chelsea to win with the bookie and Chelsea to not win with the exchange. By betting against Chelsea to win with the exchange this covers all outcomes, including a draw. It’s very important to note that you always bet against the outcome you have bet on with the bookie with the exchange, not on another outcome (e.g. you would not bet on Manchester to win rather than Chelsea with the exchange in this example, if the match ended in a draw you’d lose both bets and be seriously out of pocket).

So how do we make money from Matched Betting?

So we’re covering all outcomes, how do we make money? A bookie will normally have an offer such as bet £10, get a £20 free bet. So the £10 bet is our qualifying bet, this is real money that you’ll need to deposit with the bookie. Using oddsmatching software (see section below) we can work out how much money we need to bet with the bookie and the exchange so that we are as close as possible to breaking even with our qualifying bed. The point of the qualifying bet is not to make money, but to qualify you for the free bet.
Normally when placing a qualifying bet you’ll make a small loss depending on the size of the bet, and the closeness of the odds. This is because the odds are rarely exactly the same and the exchange charges a commission on your winnings.

Once you’ve placed this bet, you’ll get the free bet. This time, as we’re placing a bet with free cash, we can make a small profit. You repeat the process again, but instead of using your money to make your back bet with the bookie we use the free money they have given us. It sounds pretty complicated, but as with everything it all becomes very self explanatory once you have a go yourself. There’s no need to try and wrap your head around the algebra or manually comb through for closely matched odds as luckily there are plenty of websites who find these odds and do all the math for you.

Which Matched Betting website is best for you?

If you plan to do matched betting we can’t recommend using a matched betting service enough. If you had to work out and find the offers yourself every day then it simply wouldn’t be worth the money you’d make! (Using our matched betting service we currently make around £500 each per month spending around 10 hours a week doing it) Any matched betting website worth it’s weight does charge a subscription but by far the most popular is Profit Accumulator.

Profit Accumulator give step by step instructions on every single offer, there’s a forum full of experts in case you get stuck and they email you new offers every week. The oddsmatching software is easy to use and covers many more sports and websites than any free oddsmatching software, plus they provide a multitude of calculators to make the most out of each bet and for the more tricky stuff later on so you can keep money coming in once you’ve done all the lucrative sign-up offers. The subscription is £17.99 a month but easily pays for itself!

You can sign up to Profit Accumulator for free and they will give you video guides on 2 sign up offers which made us around £45 each (more than enough to pay for our first 2 months subscription) if you want to give the whole thing a try.

Continue to part 2 of the guide: How to Start Matched Betting

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