Matched Betting Guide

Matched betting is the process of matching back bets with lay bets.

By covering all outcomes of an event, we can claim free bets and bonuses for a little or no loss. We can then use the same strategy to extract a CASH PROFIT from those free bets and bonuses.

I’m going to take you through a fully worked example of how this can be done!

Choosing a Welcome Offer

My advice for all matched betting newbies is to start with the smaller welcome offers. Coral have a perfect welcome offer to get you started. If you sign up and bet just £5.00, Coral will give you £20.00 in free bets!

The beauty of starting with an offer like this is that you only need a bankroll of around £50.00. Once you’ve completed your first couple of offers, your confidence will build and so too will your bankroll.

Open an Exchange Account

If you haven’t got one already, you’re going to need a betting exchange account to lay your bets.

My recommendation has to be Smarkets. Smarkets make their money by charging us a small fee on our winning bets, so they absolutely love matched bettors!

Their 2% commission rate is substantially lower than other exchanges, including Betfair who charge a hefty 5%. You’ll need a Betfair account too for a handful of offers, but if you’re serious about maximising your profits, Smarkets is the way to go.

Place our qualifying bet

Once we’ve got our Coral and Smarkets accounts set up, we’re ready to place our first matched bet!

It’s important that we read the terms and conditions of an offer before we get involved, to check for any specific requirements. For example, the offer may only be available on football or there may be a minimum odds requirement. For the Coral welcome offer, our qualifying bet can be placed on any sport at odds of 1.50 (1/2) or greater.

So, we need to place a £5.00 qualifying bet and Coral will then give us £20.00 in free bets.

When matched betting, we need to place our bets on selections with close back and lay odds. This enables us to minimise our qualifying losses and maximise our profits. We also need to place our qualifying bets at low odds.

The above screenshots show the back odds at Coral and the lay odds at Smarkets for a Premier League match between Chelsea and Everton.

We can place our qualifying bet on Chelsea at back odds of 1.50 and lay odds of 1.53.

We know we need to place a back bet of £5.00 on Chelsea at Coral. We can work out our lay stake for the Smarkets bet using my matched betting calculator…

As you can see, the calculator tells us that our lay stake should be £4.97…

So, we just click on the 1.53 lay button and enter our stake of £4.97. It tells us that our liability on this bet is £2.63 and it’s good practice to check this figure against the expected liability on the matched betting calculator. As you can see, they are both the same, so we know we have entered the correct lay stake.

We will need to deposit funds into our Smarkets account to cover the £2.63 liability as this is the amount we stand to lose from Smarkets if Chelsea win. Don’t worry though, our winnings at Coral will cover it.

Let’s have a look at our potential profit/loss for the possible outcomes…

So regardless of the outcome, we will lose £0.13, but the good news is that we’ve qualified for £20.00 in free bets!

Extract our profit from the free bets

Once our qualifying bet has been settled, Coral will credit our account with 4 x £5.00 free bets, so £20.00 in total. This is perfect as we can place them individually which requires less cash in our Smarkets account.

It’s now time to extract our profit. As with the vast majority of free bets, our Coral free bets are ‘stake not returned’. This means that each £5.00 free bet will not be returned with any winnings. Again, it’s important to check the terms and conditions when using free bets, so that we know which option to select when using the matched betting calculator.

The process of extracting profit from a free bet is pretty much the same as the qualifying bet we have just done. Again, we need to find close back and lay odds in order to maximise our extracted profit.

Free bets should ideally be placed at high odds. Although this requires more cash in our Smarkets account, it enables us to extract more profit. It therefore depends on your bankroll. There’s nothing wrong with going for lower odds if need be, it’ll just mean slightly less profit.

The above screenshots show the back odds at Coral and the lay odds at Smarkets for a Premier League match between Liverpool and Watford.

We can place our first £5.00 free bet on Watford at back odds of 13.00 and lay odds of 13.50.

Again, we can work out our lay stake for the Smarkets bet using my matched betting calculator…

As you can see, the calculator tells us that our lay stake should be £4.45…

So, we just click on the 13.5 lay button and enter our stake of £4.45. It tells us that our liability on this bet is £55.60 and as always, we need to check this against the expected liability on the matched betting calculator. As you can see, they are both the same, but for a few pence difference (due to rounding), so we know we have entered the correct lay stake.

We will need to make sure we have sufficient funds in our Smarkets account to cover the £55.60 liability as this is the amount we stand to lose from Smarkets if Watford win. Don’t worry though, our winnings at Coral will cover it.

Let’s have a look at our potential profit/loss for the possible outcomes…

So, regardless of the outcome, we will extract a minimum of £4.36 cash from our £5.00 free bet. Once we’ve repeated the process for our remaining 3 x £5.00 free bets and taken into account our £0.13 qualifying loss, we should be looking at an overall minimum profit of around £16.00 on this Coral welcome offer.

Now, imagine if you applied the same matched betting strategy to all of the welcome offers…

There is over £1,000.00 to be made from bookmaker’s welcome offers, but that’s just the beginning. We can then make over £500.00 every month by applying the same strategy to tons of reload and free bet offers targeted at existing customers. I post them all on the homepage of my blog, so all you have to do is follow my lead and get your bets on!

It’s really quite straightforward once you get the hang of things. Give it a go, you’ll be glad you did!

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