Should you punt or match bet?

I’m in a similar situation to you Farang – been trying my hand full time at making a couple of affiliate websites and getting the SEO right. After about 6 months I’m only making pennies so it felt good get back into matched betting and get immediate results for a bit of effort.

How I do underlaying, if the odds are say, 7, and the calculator says to lay £10, just lay a bit less – say £8. This way you still have some guaranteed cash every time, but if it wins you will be up 6x£2.

I’ve done about 200 bets over the last month and noted results and odds etc in Excel. Was thinking of going back through all of this and working out what I would have had if I hadn’t laid anything. Over so many bets I guess the wins and losses would even out, and save all the 2% commission on smarkets.

Same here, punted £60 worth of free bets on the final and not a sniff. The whole tournament has been like that for me tbh, free bets winning with ease when laid off ‘properly’ but getting nowhere when punted.

I suppose you should probably always do it one way or the other, otherwise you’ll end up getting the worst of both worlds more often than not, at least that’s the way it seems.

I’m a bit of a rouge match better I take the approach of any free bets less than or equal to 10 pound I punt and then anything over I will lock in for profit.

Seems to work out slightly in favour of locking in but hey Where’s the fun?

That moment sturridge scored for England 2-1 for 365 offer was priceless

Yes. Definitely works out even. Well, I have been up on all my bookie accounts and would have been better not laying except Bet365.

With Bet365 I had “lost” well over €2000 since December or there abouts. And then suddenly this weekend I “won” €1500. Of course having all these bets layed off I didn’t really lose or win, just a slow steady increase.

With betting you will always have lucky periods where you win more than your fair share and that makes you think that you can give up laying, but if I had not layed Bet365 for example I would have been really down €2000 and destroyed my bank roll, my household budget, my family and probably my life.

So my advice is to lay.

BUT.

Before I had heard of matched betting I kind of operated some kind of bonus bashing strategy. I didn’t lay anything. In order to mitigate against variance though my real money bets were always on the favourites (about 3/1 or less on horses and only about evens or less on football). That way I never had to wait too long for my wins to come and even up my losses. Then my free bets would always punt on max 7/1 on football and 9/2 on horses. I kept the stakes smaller as well, 25 or less or even less than that depending on my bank roll or if I was playing a new promotion that I wasn’t sure of the value.

I never tackled the Bet365 4/1+ offer bonus bashing because of these rules. The variance would have killed me. Like I said, was strictly sticking to favourites 3/1 and less and the offer of €50 per race would have been way too much to risk.

With 3/1 horses and shorter I did a lot of research before trying it. I scraped a years worth of horse SP’s and results off some website and I crunched the numbers. And simulated different strategies. The numbers seemed to be good for Money Back 2nd offers – but proved the 2nd to SP promo was not worth it (at least without being very picky about which races you go for). I reckoned the long run average was only about €1-€2 per horse based off SPs.

Some days I didn’t win a bet at all and then I would be down up to a couple of hundred.

Would be rare not to either have a winner or 2nd place though over a whole day backing favourites. I also mixed my free bets in to the same races as my real money bets to mitigate from variance as well. Would be unlikely to have a total wash out.

Some days I won almost every real money bet so I would be laughing.

It worked for me. I don’t think I would do it again. Profit is not that much different in the end. But now I know what I know about matched betting, it is much safer to lay. Stick to matching, or at least don’t change just because you hit a couple of winners and had to pay out on the exchange. Do a lot of research and even play with imaginary stakes to prove your method. Better if you can get historic data and simulate different strategies.

The BIG disadvantage

1. One bad run of results could wipe you out! Variance is bad but you can live with that if the good days are better than the bad days and more numerous, but its the streak that wipes you out (and more) that kills this idea. You live in constant fear of that. I suppose I got lucky.

There were some advantages though of backing 3/1 and shorter favourites.

1. You don’t need to match on the exchange, so you can get everything done the night before even though the exchange doesn’t really become liquid until about a half an hour before each race and during some mid week races you never seem to get enough liquidity at all for matching. This was HUGE in terms of BOG – prices change a lot from the early prices. My paddy power value statement says I made €1000 off BOG alone (over about 6 months until I got banned).

2. Its as quick as scanning the promo races and clicking 3/1 and lower, you can literally do it in 1 minute.

3. You pay no commission!

4. You don’t need a big float in the exchange, but you do on the other hand need a bank roll big enough to sustain any significant losing streak.

Looking back, maybe it was a bit ballsy and maybe I just got lucky, knowing nothing at all about horses and all that. But it was money that I had won on the football promo’s so I was never risking the rent.