Well, I’m not a matched betting expert yet, but I’ve been steadily putting bets on every weekend and working my way through the free offers over the past month and am getting to grips with the whole Matched Betting technique.
I’ve gone through most of the easy and medium difficulty sign up offers and this month I completed offers with the following bookmakers:
Bet365 Offer
Things are starting to get a little more complex now and I need to make sure I pay attention to detail with each offer that I sign up with an thoroughly understand the terms and conditions.
For example I have just signed up for the Bet365 introductory offer, where they will match your deposit up to a total of £200 bonus
This offer and a lot of the more complex offers come with something called a ‘Rollover’. The Bet365 offer has a rollover of 3 times the value of your deposit and bonus, before you can withdraw the bonus. This means that you must place bets of £200 (deposit) + £200 (bonus) x 3 = £1200 within a period of 90 days, before you can withdraw your money.
Now we’re starting to talk bigger sums of money so it’s important to get this right and choose the right matches. For this offer the odds need to be greater than 1.5, and so far I have placed 3 bets of £200 at just over these odds. The bad news as I have discovered is that because these odds are quite low, it is quite likely that this event will happen, so all of the money is being added to my Bet365 account. This unfortunately means that I have to keep re-depositing in my Smarkets Booking Exchange account to lay the bet against this.
In general I’m losing about £7 per bet so should hopefully be able to make about £150 from this offer.
Matched Betting Facebook Groups
There is still a lot to learn about Matched Betting especially when it comes to the more complex offers, betting on horseracing and things like accumulators, but I’m going to bide my time and come onto them later on.
In the meantime, however, I have found that there are loads of Facebook groups around Matched Betting such as:
and I also found the Matched Betting Guru and Matched Betting Blog Websites really useful.
Ultimatcher Spreadsheet
The other thing that you need to do with Matched Betting is keep track of your winnings, as there are lots of calculations to be made and your money will be distributed around many different Bookmakers.
In Month 1, I was using my own spreadsheet to keep a track of this and calculated I’d made a total of just under £200, however, I wasn’t confident in this number and it was quite an arduous process to update.
After doing a bit of digging around I found that most Matched betting professionals use the Ultimatcher Spreadsheet to keep a track of their winnings. On first glance this seems like a really complicated spreadsheet, however, after a quick read through the instructions it is actually a really useful tool to use.
All you need to do is to set up bookmakers and exchanges that you have accounts with and for each match that you bet on record your stake and the odds that you put your bet on, as well as the type of bet (free or qualifying) and it will do the maths for you and give you a running total.
The other nice thing is that it gives you detailed statistics of things like where your most profitable bets were made, which could prove fruitful in the longrun. Best of all is it is entirely free to use and available to download here
The only drawbacks I found is that if you make a mistake it is difficult to undo it and I don’t really know how to record bets where there are rollovers and you just get a bonus instead of a free bet, but I’ll get to grips with that soon.
Overall, it is proving a little more time consuming than I had imagined, but I think if you focused solely on matched betting then it would be easy to get to grips with.
I think I’ve made around £350 over the 2 months since I started, but I need to do a little bit of work on my numbers to be totally confident.
How much have I earned from Matched Betting so far?
XXXXXXX
What Free Bets did I complete?
Next Month’s Goals
- Complete Bet365 Offer
- Place an Inplay bet offer
- Get an accurate balance sheet
Last Month’s Tasks
- Complete the free offers for the next 10 bookmakers – 6 Offers COMPLETE
- Understand how to use the ultimatcher spreadsheet – COMPLETE
- Create an article on 5 easy offers – INCOMPLETE
Hey, thanks for the advice regarding matched betting, I’ve just started matched betting and found this post soo helpful!