Matched Betting

[Job]

If you want to make money from betting...open a bookies...all other methods are pie on the sky.

 

[Gumbo]

Seems @Gumbo got in too deep with mob and is now sleeping with the fishes.

Nono, just realised an update after one bet would be a bit rubbish really, perhaps I'll do a weekly update like Donglemouse did. (Google him if you're interested in the matched betting hobby.

I'm under no illusions that it could replace working for a living, but an extra £50-£100 a week for what is easy sofa based work is achievable in less than an hours work per week.

I have made one nice learning curve cockup. I wasn't stupid enough for it to cost me my money, but it did cost me a potential £20ish profit. I'll explain later.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to have a go, and use Betfair, feel free to hit me up for a referral code

 

[Gumbo]

@ECA I didn't know poker was your game. I'm impressed you make a living from it. I enjoy it as a recreation occasionally. I go through periods of playing for a few weeks and then don't for months at a time. Do you ever consider making the move to live tournament poker and going for biiig money? Or is it more of a mathematical click click keep grinding the small edge for a living then get far away from poker for relaxation time?

 

[Gumbo]

If you want to make money from betting...open a bookies...all other methods are pie on the sky.

Depends how you define making money. It's definitely feasible to make money fairly simply. Enough to pay for a holiday, or clear some credit card debt or whatever. For a living, you need to be a Chilly.

Of course the subject of this thread isn't even really betting. If you think it is you're failing to understand it correctly. It's more calculated trading.

 

[caLLous]

Job failing to understand something correctly? Whatever next...

 

[ECA]

@ECA I didn't know poker was your game. I'm impressed you make a living from it. I enjoy it as a recreation occasionally. I go through periods of playing for a few weeks and then don't for months at a time. Do you ever consider making the move to live tournament poker and going for biiig money? Or is it more of a mathematical click click keep grinding the small edge for a living then get far away from poker for relaxation time?

Live poker is stupid. ( tournaments anyway ).
You can undergo massive variance even over several hundred - lets say you play 30 $10k buyin tournies a year. 10 years to even get to 300 tournies, and you can easily go broke before then. You need around 1500 before you even start to see the "long run" shake out variance.

Basically the $10ks are for rich recreational players, or pros who want to play the big cash games that occur around those tournies and can afford to drop $10k every other weekend.

To play that circuit is ~$500k/yr in entries+expenses, it should never be looked at for pro income. Plenty of broke people down that road and very very few winners.

 

[Gumbo]

Yeah, wasn't thinking necessarily the £10k buyins, but perhaps the couple of hundred quid jobs, more for the fun of it, using your skills. Mind you, I suppose it's probably a rather different skillset.

 

[Marc]

If you want to make money from betting...open a bookies...all other methods are pie on the sky.

Seeing as though you obviously know what you are talking about, please can you tell me when I am going to lose the £500 or so profit ive made in 3 weeks. I would love to know so i can try and avoid.

TIA

 

[Job]

Because you will lose it...if you bet you lose..its how it works..everyone thinks they are the exception...which is tje mass delusion that keeps Ladbrookes in gold Ferraris.

 

[Chilly]

Because you will lose it...if you bet you lose..its how it works..everyone thinks they are the exception...which is tje mass delusion that keeps Ladbrookes in gold Ferraris.

Can you explain how I've been making a living out of it the past two years? Or how hordes of people win consistently at poker?

Your attitude is almost correct, but you can beat the bookies if you're prepared to put the work in.

 

[Gumbo]

Because you will lose it...if you bet you lose..its how it works..everyone thinks they are the exception...which is tje mass delusion that keeps Ladbrookes in gold Ferraris.

There seems little point in trying to reason with you but...

The particular example that we're talking about here of matched betting is that you can't lose. If you bet on a team to win for instance, then you win at the bookies, if they draw or lose, you win at the betting exchange. It's literally win/win less a small amount of commission which is easily covered by the bookies offer.

 

[Marc]

Because you will lose it...if you bet you lose..its how it works..everyone thinks they are the exception...which is tje mass delusion that keeps Ladbrookes in gold Ferraris.

Translation: I have no idea what im talking about

 

[Nate]

So by not loosing all the time do you just up the bet every time?

 

[mooSe_]

what

 

[Job]

Chilly if you are making a living from betting..and I dont include poker because you can influence the outcome obviously..then you are lucky beyond the normal rules of the universe.

 

[Chilly]

Chilly if you are making a living from betting..and I dont include poker because you can influence the outcome obviously..then you are lucky beyond the normal rules of the universe.

I'm not lucky, I'm skilled. I have large databases of stats and work with a mate who is a statistician. We are BETTER than the bookies at their job, in specific cases. We know where we are better and when we are, we bet and we win more than we lose. That's essentially all there is to it.

 

[Gumbo]

So by not loosing all the time do you just up the bet every time?

In reference to this thread, no.

You move on to the next bookies offer.

At it's simplest it works like this. It's often more complicated and you must read up on it if you want to have a go. Step 0.5 you only need do once, although you will probably do more with different Exchanges to get their offers.

0.5 Open an account with an Exchange (Like a bookies, but you can bet to lose, essentially act like you're the bookie for other punters) and deposit some funds.
1. Find a bookie with an offer like - If you deposit and bet £10 with us, we'll give you another £10 to bet with.
2. Deposit £10 with said bookie and look for something which you can back to win at the bookie, and then match at the Exchange to lose with very close odds.
3. Wait for outcome. If your bet wins, you obviously win at the bookies and they credit your account with your winnings PLUS the £10 they promised you. if your bet loses your £10 at the bookies has gone, but wait. You bet that you'd lose over at the Exchange so woohoo, your £10 arrives there. (less a small amount in commission and the fact that your odds were probably, but not always, slightly favouring the bookies outcome. Hence why you look for the closest match.)
4. Repeat step 3 using the free money. If your first bet won at the bookies, you can choose to include this and try to move it to the exchange or you could withdraw it back to your bank account of course. This is where you have to be very clear on the Terms and conditions of the offer. You will always have to bet the freebie money though, at least once, often up to 10 times if the Terms say that, but of course if you lose at the bookies, the money will arrive at the Exchange.
5. Repeat Step 3 until you've either moved the money to the Exchange, or Satisfied the terms of the offer.
6. Look for the next bookies offer and repeat.


That is basically it, but it is a bit more complicated with a few more variables, so read the links in the first post or the information on here http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/forumdisplay.php?f=41 before you even think of having a go yourself.

Done correctly, you will make money, but there is the possibility of you pressing the wrong thing, or screwing up the maths of it in which case you could lose. There is no luck, or poor choice of who to back though, and losing because the result didn't go the way you thought it would. This is not betting, it is trading. READ UP ON IT FIRST!!!

 

[Chilly]

I suppose a good way to put it is that this is abuse of bookie promotional bonuses and not gambling. The profit isnt made from gambling, it's made from rinsing the marketing budgets of ladbrokes & co.

 

[ileks]

I'm not lucky, I'm skilled. I have large databases of stats and work with a mate who is a statistician. We are BETTER than the bookies at their job, in specific cases. We know where we are better and when we are, we bet and we win more than we lose. That's essentially all there is to it.

How did you get in to this kind of work if you don't mind me asking? Some of the models I've looked at for football predictions are very technical. Also, where do you get your stats? Opta?

 

[Gumbo]

I suppose a good way to put it is that this is abuse of bookie promotional bonuses and not gambling. The profit isnt made from gambling, it's made from rinsing the marketing budgets of ladbrokes & co.

Precisely.

 

[MYstIC G]

So, effectively, you are taking the free offers from the bookies and using the exchange as a method for extracting the money for cash.

 

[Gumbo]

Yes.

Of course, depending on how the bets fall you might not be entirely 'rinsing the marketing budget of the bookie' because it's quite possible to lose both the qualifying bet and the promotional bet at the bookie end and still come out with a profit because someone took the other side of the risk away from you on the exchange. In which case in a roundabout way, you're using the free money to extract some money from someone who is gambling through the exchange.

That's why it's complicated and hard at first to get your head around.

 

[georgie]

Has anyone here used the link that Marc put in the first post? http://www.fixtheodds.com/

I'd be quite happy paying a tenner a month to someone if it takes a lot of the hassle out of it.

 

[Job]

I am aware of what you are actually doing..making use of promotional offers and playing them off each other...but those offers are there for good reason...to suck you in no matter how educated you go in because somewhere down the road they will take your money.

 

[Marc]

Has anyone here used the link that Marc put in the first post? http://www.fixtheodds.com/

I'd be quite happy paying a tenner a month to someone if it takes a lot of the hassle out of it.

You dont have to pay the £10 subs, they do some for free. First time I did I used them. Then I just did it myself as you can get better odds searching yourself which means you get to keep a higher % of the free bet

What I will say is this though, be careful of rollover bonuses, the ones you have to rollover x times before you can withdraw, because if you keep winning at the bookies, you need more capital in your betfair account and if you dont have it, you can lose a lot. At one point, I had over £400 in bet365 that I couldnt withdraw (well i could but I would lose £150 of it as it was bonus). Thankfully, I had the capital in betfair to keep on betting until I had met the rollover requirement

 

[Gumbo]

Marc makes a good point, you have to be very aware of the Terms and conditions of each offer. That's where errors could be made, along with the maths and clicking in the wrong box.

I started last Wednesday, and I'll have a couple more completed or in progress by after the footie tomorrow. Would anyone be interested in hearing my experiences so far?

 

[Marc]

yeah keep me updated

 

[cog]

Following this with interest as well (from a lurking perspective ) Might try it soon. Been reading up on it on a few sites this week.

 

[georgie]

Placed my first bet using FixTheOdds and have now been given my free bet by William Hill and have just placed that too. By all accounts I should be £20 richer in a couple of days for 10 minutes work.

Feeling a lot more confident about the next bet/offer too. Will wait for this one to fully play out before doing any more. Keeping it as simple as possible for now.

 

[Gumbo]

This overly long post is vaguely in homage to the Donglemouse Diary. If you want to do this you have to read it on the Moneysaving Expert Forum.

Week 1 (26th Feb to 5th Mar 2014)

I read Marc’s post at the beginning of this thread, and it piqued my interest. I’d used Betfair before, and taken advantage of a casino bonus a long time ago, so I was aware of how this could work, so when I had a second I did some reading around it and thought why not? I have some spare funds and it makes sense. I’ll have a go.

I’m not going to include detailed cashflow as it would just complicate things, suffice to say that I threw about £185 into my existing Betfair account to take it to £200, and at most committed a further £75 from my current account. You could do this with much less, but you’d have to slow the pace. I would guess that in about 3-4 weeks my activity will be entirely funded by the bonuses I have processed.

This first week saw a profit of £67.75. I have also done the qualifier for a further £20 free bet, but that will be included when it is completely processed.

First go was with Stan James. Deposit and bet £10, get a free £10 bet. On the Qualifier I backed Chelsea at 2.3 and laid them at 2.36 in their Champions League game vs Galatasary. For the free bet I used some obscure French League game and matched 6.25/6.2. Came away with £7.50 profit.

Next up was Totesport/Totepool with a bet £5 get a £10 free bet. I matched the qualifier 3.75/3.70 on another Champions League game. With the Free bet I found another obscure League game which I matched at 6.50/6.60 and got £7.75 profit on the offer.

Next up I jumped ahead to SkyBet with a bet £30 get a £30 Free Bet offer. I made a screw up on this one… The qualifier went fine with a 2.2/2.28 match on French Football again. Then came my screw up. I tried to do the Free Bet in-play when I spotted a good match. I had Betfair open on my laptop, SkyBet on my desktop. I filled in the info on the SkyBet betting slip and the same on Betfair, then checked everything was right and realised I wasn’t logged into Betfair. Close One!! So logged into Betfair and placed the bet and hit place bet on Betfair. At which point it asked me to log in! Again?! It had my username and balance at the top, but apparently this wasn’t enough. I guess it was because I had opened the Betfair betting slip before logging in. Anyway, whilst logging in, the game was suspended and sure enough there had been a goal. Gah! Because of this, overall on SkyBet, I made a loss of £1.50. More annoyed that I missed out on a potential £20something, but I learnt some lessons. Don’t do in-play or if you have to, do it at half time and log into Betfair before doing anything.

Next was YouWin with deposit £20 get £20 free bet, this is the first one I had done with a wager through requirement. No need to qualify this one though, so bet the whole £40 on Southampton V Liverpool to finish over 2.5 goals. 1.65/1.75. 94 minutes in and I’m on to lose which is great, that would have been £36.88 straight to me, but noooo, Suarez draws a penalty in the 5th minute of injury time and Gerrard converts. So I had a balance at YouWin of £66. Had to go again so backed Swansea to beat Crystal Palace at 1.8/1.9 and when the draw came and I lost the bet I banked a nice £12.

William Hill was next on the list with a bet £25 get £25 offer. I also took this offer up through Quidco so got £22 cashback. I used my money baking Rotherham v Colchester at 1.95/1.94 (My first arb!) and a draw meant easy extraction of my money. The free bet is backing Chile vs Germany tonight where I managed 8/8. As the conditions of the offer are quite nice the result makes no difference to my figures so even though as I type this the match is still going on, I know that I’m clearing £20 profit.

I also already made the qualifier for Corals £20 free bet, but that would appear in the next instalment if there is to be one.

Week 1 Transactions
(Bookmaker/offer/cashback&points/matched bet return)
Stan James/£10 free bet/-/£7.50
Totesport/Bet £5, Get £10/-/£7.75
SkyBet/Bet £30 get £30/-/-£1.50
YouWin/Deposit £20 get £20/-/£12
William Hill/Deposit £25 get £25/£22/£20

Cumulative Profit&Loss
Matched Bets – new account offers £45.75
Quidco - £22
Total £67.75