Make Money Online

Accumulator Generator Review

8th June 2016 By martinos74 2 Comments

I recently purchased the Accumulator Generator software, which is the latest in a range of products from Betting / Software whizz Mike Cruickshank.

I did this mainly due to the lack of good offers around in the Matched betting world at the moment and this looked like a decent way to add a few more pounds into the piggy bank, so here’s what I found:

What is Accumulator Generator?

Accumulator Generator is basically a piece of software that scans a wide range of bookies that are out there and provides a selection of pre-selected Football accumulators that will help you make the most out of the bookmakers offers.

In general, bookmakers love footy accas, as they are a big, steady source of income for them and the odds are stacked even more in their favour than with a standard bet. Pretty much every bookmaker is now offering some kind of ‘Acca Insurance’, to draw the average punter in.

Most of the terms of these Acca Insurance offers are that if you lose a single leg of your Acca, then you are eligible for a refund.For the normal punter that is a great bonus, but for the seasoned matched bettor, this shouts ‘OPPORTUNITY’ and the Accumulator Generator makes the most out of this, by providing an easy to use interface and a series of straight talking training videos that will get you up and running in no time.

How Much can You Earn from Accumulator Generator?

Well, to be honest that is entirely up to you and how much time and effort you want to put in and also how much you want to risk your accounts from getting referred to the traders.

Realistically though, you’re looking at earning on average £10 from every £50 staked, which is a pretty decent return.

Most of the bookies limit you to having a maximum of a single acca finishing each day, but even if you just placed a single acca each day, that’s a return of over £300 a month, which isn’t to be sniffed at.

What’s Included in Accumulator Generator?

Accumulator Generator Training Videos

The software itself as actually pretty easy to use, but to help you get started Mike has provided a series of training videos, which take you all the way through the basic principles of what a Football Accumulator is, to detailed descriptions of the 5 different strategies that you can employ.

I found these videos really useful, not only in helping me understand how to use the software, but Mike often goes into detail explaining the logic and maths behind the software, which is a nice touch.

The Accumulator Generator Acca Matcher

The centre piece of the software is the Acca Matcher screen, which you can see in the screenshot below:

As you can see from the screenshot, the Accumulator Generator software throws up a large number of potential Accas that you could use, searching over 50,000 potential accas combinations per bookmaker and providing you with the most profitable selection.

The software usually throws up pages and pages of accas which range in value usually up to a maximum of about £15.For each potential accumulator, the software provides the following key information:

• The ‘EV’ or Estimated Value column shows the returns you should expect to receive when you complete the Acca, if you had placed a £50 stake.

• Length of the Acca, which is really useful to know in case you’re not likely to be around for a few days

• Teams – Which matches are included in the Acca

• Total Back / Lay Odds

And to help you sift through all of those footy accas to find the one most suitable for you, there is a handy filter tool that you can use:

The Accumulator Details Screen

Once you have found an Acca that you are interested in you can click through to the Accumulator Details screen shown below:

This is another key screen that you are going to be using at the following times:

Creating Your Acca

This screen shows you the details and timings of each individual leg of the Acca as well as the individual back odds for each leg, that you will need to place at the bookmaker.It also gives you some useful statistics about the likelihood of losing a certain number of legs in each acca.

Updating Your Acca

As soon as a leg of the accumulator has completed, you’ll need to come back to this screen and add whether the leg has won or lost, and then hit the ‘Save Acca’ button.This will then update the ideal stake that you should add as a lay stake.

Sometimes the lay stakes will fluctuate, so you can manually override them on this screen and this will recalculate the ideal stake to lay for you. This is a great feature and makes it really easy to use.

Footy Acca Leg Reminders

One key thing for you to remember if you’re using this software, is to lay each of the legs of the Acca before the game commences otherwise, you’re likely to ruin your acca.

Luckily Mike and the team have already thought about this and have provided a ‘Reminders’ section, which provides you with a list of the timings and games that you will need to lay off next for each acca.

This automatically updates when you input the result of the previous leg in the Acca details section.

Accumulator Generator Bet Finder Feature

The final feature worth mentioning in the software is the bet finder, which helps you find bets with close matches across all of the different bookies.

This is a killer feature which you can use to:

• Help you gain maximum profit from your free bets and go under the bookies radar

• Place Mug bets on decent Acca bets

• Find a comprehensive list of other offers from bookmakers

Just check out this video from Mike, as he walks you through each of these features in person on the Accumulator Generator:

Accumulator Generator Strategies Explained

There are a number of different ways in which you can use the Accumulator Generator software, depending on your attitude to risk and the time you have available.

You’ll get detailed instructions about each of these strategies in the training videos, but we’ve pulled out the key points from each strategy below:

Back, Lay and Hope

With this system you place you accumulator at the bookies and lay off each leg one by one. You are hoping that only one of your legs loses so you can hit the refund from the bookmakers.

If all of the legs in the accumulator win, then you make a small loss

If more than one of the legs loses, then you make a small loss

If you only one of the legs loses then you receive the refund from the bookies

This is a low risk, easy to follow approach that a lot of beginners will use, and means you need to lay each leg one after another

Bonus Included

With this method you will make a profit whatever the outcome, however, the further down the accumulator you get before you lose a leg, the more profit you will make. If you lose a leg at the start of the Acca then you just won’t make as much profit.

With this technique, you just keep on laying the bets until you lose 2 legs

Lock In Profit

This technique is fairly similar to the previous technique, however, you are pretty much guaranteed to make the EV of the Acca each time.

This technique means you are less open to any fluctuation in the lay odds and guarantee the profit, regardless of what happens.

Again, with this technique you keep on laying the bet until you lose 2 legs of the Acca

Advantage Play

This is a completely different approach for those of you, who don’t have the time to lay off your bets and also don’t mind taking a bit of a gamble.In this approach you don’t lay off any of the bets, but use the special ‘Advantage Play’ filter to find your accas.

These will usually be accas made up of of legs with low odds so you are a lot more likely to win the acca or the refund. The software selects the best possible odds combos from a bookmaker, which effectively removes the bookmakers edge and gives the advantage back to the punter.

They advise that this isn’t recommended for users, who haven’t been betting for long, probably because you could go for long runs without hitting a refund.

The overall recommendation is that you need to put on about 100 accas to see if this approach works for you.

Lay All Method

Most of the other acca methods require you to lay off the accas sequentially, so you can’t have more than one game in your acca taking place at the same time. This can, of course, prove to be quite time consuming and a bit of a pain.

The Lay All method, however, is different as it selects Accas where you can place all of your bets up front, without having to worry about remembering to lay them at specific times.This is the easiest approach, but there don’t seem to be as many candidates of accas in this category.

How much does Accumulator Generator Cost?

So what’s the price for this package of money spinning fun?

At the time of writing the cost is £148.99 + VAT, or you can sign up to a £1 trial for 14 days

Try it Now!lorem ipsum dolor

Is Accumulator Generator Worth the Money?

My honest opinion is yes, this is definitely worth the money and you will more than make the £150 one off cost for the software back pretty quickly, however, this may not be for everyone for the following couple of reasons:

You Need Good Availability

Although the accumulator generator software gives you all the tools and information that you need, for most of the strategies that we’ve talked about, you’re going to need to be near to an internet connection and computer to lay off your bets at specific times, ie when the leg has finished.

If you’ve got a lot of time on your hands then this will be fine for you, or you can just use the Advantage Play or Lay All Techniques

You Have an Increased Risk of Gubbing

So logically, if there are thousands of people who have signed up to this software already, then that means there is going to be a lot of people who are betting on the same accas that the Acca matcher throws up.

From a bookies perspective any flurries in activity or any suspicious betting activity/patterns gets flagged up pretty quickly in their systems. Remember, these guys are recording pretty much everything you and others are doing so patterns become clear quite quickly.

If you overuse this software, and go for the highest EV accas all the time at the highest stakes, then I’m afraid, you’re risking your account at some stage. BUT, by being a little more cautious with your approach you should blend in more easily and shouldn’t have any problems.

My Recommendations

• Don’t abuse the system and don’t hammer all of the offers

• Mix your accas up across different bookies

• Don’t always take the highest EV accas

• Don’t always place bets at the maximum stake

• Try to stick to matches that are in the more popular leagues rather than betting on Albania vs Kurdistan

If you’re in any doubt about this then just sign up for the 14 day trial and it will only cost you a quid. This is what I did and was plenty of time for you to get used to the Accumulator Generator software and figure out if it is right for you.

For a fuller review of the software, check out this video from our friends at Matched Betting 101

ACCUMULATOR GENERATOR IN Summary

Price: £149 one off fee or 14 day trial for £1

Value For Money:

Ease of Use:

Like I say if you’re in any doubt, just throw a pound at this and sign up for the 14 day trial then you can make your own mind up.

Try it Now!

Chapter 5 : Footy Accas and Sports Arbitrage

21st May 2016 By martinos74 4 Comments

Could footy accas be the solution to a dry month of matched betting?

Well, after completing a lot of the sign up offers and also being gubbed from a few bookies, I’ve noticed 2 main things recently from reading a lot of the matched betting communities out there:

There are a heck of a lot of gubbings going on
There are very few decent offers around at the moment

A lot of people have put this down to a post-Cheltenham clear-out, but a lot of people are also saying that matched betting is dead and is nothing like it used to be. To be honest I’m finding it all a bit more time consuming than I would have hoped, and even though there is money to be made out there, you still need to put a lot of hours in.

Claims of people making £500 – £1000 per month, are now looking to look at little exaggerated to me, unless of course, you are spending hours in front of your computer trying to squeeze every penny out of every offer available.

With this in mind, this month I thought I’d take a look at a couple of other options where people have been claiming big winnings as well:

Accumulator Generator
Sports Betting Arbitrage

Accumulator Generator

If you don’t know, the basic concept of an Accumulator or footy acca as it is commonly known, is that you place a bet on a series of events happening, and if they all win, then you receive a multiple of all of the odds combined and usually make a big profit if it comes off.

However, if any of the legs of your accumulator loses, then you lose all of the bet. Typically footy accas are anywhere between 3 to 6 legs (matches), and obviously the more legs there are the more you can win, and the easier it is to lose.

Most bookmakers now offer something called ‘Acca Insurance’, which means that if one of your legs loses, you would be entitled to a refund of your initial stake, which is where a matched bettors radar starts flashing!!!

Bookies love Accumulators, because they always have an edge over the punter and most of the time the bet will end up losing. Basically, the table is weighted even more in the bookies favour for Accumulators than on single bets.

However, Accumulator Generator is a bit of software that scans the different bookmaker’s offers out there and provides a combination of matches, where you are likely to make a profit, by taking advantage of the Acca Insurance refunds.

In the screenshot below, you can see a list of all of the footy Accas that were available on a certain date, and in the ‘EV’ column you can see the estimated value of the Acca. This shows you how much you would make from placing a £50 bet on the Acca, but generally you’re looking at a £10 return for every £50 spent.

The idea is pretty simple… put an Acca on with the bookmaker, then just lay off each of the legs of your bet after each match finishes.

There is a screen in Acccumulator Generator dedicated to each Acca that you put on, as you can see below, and the system is also clever enough to give you reminders of when you need to put your next bet on.

After each match finishes, you put in the result, and then add in the lay odds of the next leg in the sequence and the Accumulator Generator software will automatically provide you with the lay stake required.

There are a number of different tactics that you can use but the easiest is back, lay and hope technique. This is where you put the selection on at the bookies, then you lay one match at a time, and stop laying as soon as you have lost one match.

• If you win all of your matches in the accumulator then you will make a small loss

• If you lose more than 2 legs in the accumulator you will make a small loss

• If you lose only 1 leg, then you will qualify for the Acca insurance and this is where you make the profit.

What Does Accumulator Generator Cost?

At the time of writing the cost is £148.99 + VAT, or you can sign up to a £1 trial for 14 days

Is Accumulator Generator worth the Money?

I used Accumulator Generator for a 30 day trial period, and came to the following conclusions:

YOU NEED LOTS OF TIME

Most of the techniques used by Accumulator Generator, mean that you have to wait until the match has finished to place your lay bet. Games can be finishing at any time of day or night, as a lot of the matches will be in different locations around the world. What this means is that you constantly need to be aware of when your next match is finishing, because if you don’t lay one of your legs you can ruin your accumulator.

For some people this may be fine, but for me I found that this ended up affecting my free time, and meaning I always wanted to be near to a computer so I could place the lay bets easily and ensure I had internet connection. I can see that if you had a lot of Accas on all at once and you dedicated a weekend to this, then it may be worth it, but overall I found this a bit of an inconvenience

THERE’S AN INCREASED RISK OF GUBBINGS

Now, I don’t know if this was just a result of the post Cheltenham gub-a-thon from the bookmakers, but every day I was hearing about people losing their accounts (primarily William Hill) after they had been using Accumulator Generator.

It seems pretty obvious to me that this would happen. If there are lots of people putting bets on the same random matches then this is going to send signals to the bookies, that something is a bit fishy, and I’m pretty sure that any matches that the Accumulator Generator was throwing up, would bring up some kind of flag at the bookmakers HQ.

There do seem to be a lot of people that have signed up to Accumulator Generator so I fear that it has just become a victim of its own success and now is a quickfire way to get a gubbing.

YOU CAN MAKE A TIDY PROFIT

I think again, the golden rule with Accumulator Generator is not to overuse it and you will probably be ok.

If you stay away from the highest Estimated Value footy accumulators, don’t always bet the maximum stake, only play a few accas a week and don’t bet on really obscure games, then you’re less likely to get flagged up.

I can see that the temptation would be to put loads of multiple Accas on with different bookies each day, and the individual profits would start to add up, but in my opinion you’re probably going to lose your accounts pretty soon, unless you’ve had your account for a long time with a track history of betting on Accas.

…Read my Full Review of Accumulator Generator

Sports Arbitrage

Whilst we’re in this dry patch of matched betting, with lots of gubbings going on and not a lot of offers that were particularly appealing, I decided to branch out and try my hand at Sports Arbitrage.

To be honest, I just fell into this more by accident and out of boredom than anything else.

For those of you who don’t know much about this either, the principle of sports arbitrage or ‘arbing’ is pretty simple:

Place a bet at one bookmaker for certain oddsTHEN

Lay the bet on a betting exchange at lower odds.

I was just checking out some odds on oddsmonkey.com because I needed to use up one of my free bets, when I noticed there were a lot of bets that had ratings of around 110% , like in the example below:

I’d never looked at the highest rated bets too much previously because I was guessing that if you place too many bets with these high ratings, you’re likely to get your account flagged.

However, as I’d recently been gubbed by the likes of Paddy Power, Bet Victor, Stan James and Coral, I thought there is no harm in placing a few bets on these accounts.

Depending on the size of the arb I thought this could bring in a few useful extra quid, as using the oddsmatcher software they were quite easy to find and put on although didn’t bring in groundbreaking returns as you can see in the example below:

Can you make money from Arbitrage betting?

Well, in my brief foray into sports arbitrage this month, I would say that there definitely is money to be made from this, however, you need to consider the following items:

YOU NEED TO BE QUICK!

I was using the free version of MBassist or Oddsmonkey as it is now, which refreshes its odds every 30 minutes. Unless you are using some kind of paid software, which updates as soon as an arb is found, then in a lot of the cases, by the time you get to put the bet on, the odds in the exchange have changed and there is no longer an arb available.

YOU’LL PROBABLY GET YOUR STAKES LIMITED

So, my little experiment was going along swimmingly well, until one of the bookmakers (Stan James) started limiting my stakes. In fact they limited them so much that it was pretty much impossible to put a bet on any more.

YOU RISK LOSING YOUR ACCOUNTS

Yes, the bookies are actually quite clever, and anywhere they notice they may have a disadvantage, then sooner rather than later they will catch on to you an close your accounts.

From what I have read, the same can be true for arbs.I’m not 100% sure how they find out, but I imagine that most bookies are aware of when an arb is taken, so if they see this behaviour repeatedly on your account, or a flurry of bets at a certain time, then they are likely to either limit your stakes or close your account.

I’d only recommend doing this occasionally and spread out across your various bookmaker’s accounts, and definitely don’t overdo this on accounts you want to keep.

However, if you’ve been gubbed already, then you may as well make the most of it and take them for every penny you can get.

Streamlining your Content Creation Process

13th April 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

This month I have managed to refine my content creation process so that it is a lot more efficient than previously. This is particularly useful when I’m writing articles for things that I know nothing or very little about, which will be a common occurrence for a lot of niche site builders.

For each article that I am writing I find it helps enormously to run through these following logical steps:

STEP 1 – CREATE A LIST OF ARTICLE TOPICS

I’ve got a spreadsheet where I list out all of the potential ideas that I may have for articles in my niche. Whenever an idea pops into my head I just collate the ideas into this spreadsheet.I’ll usually then do a bit of keyword research using Long Tail Pro and list out the Keyword Competitiveness and the Monthly Search volume next to the article.

STEP 2 – PICK AN ARTICLE

Whenever, I have a bit of free time I’ll go to this list and pick out an article topic, that I feel like writing at the time. Some articles are going to be harder to write than others so it’s best to have a range of articles for me to choose from depending on how I feel.

STEP 3 – CREATE SUB HEADINGS

Before I start writing the article I’ll do a 10 minute brainstorm to flesh out some ideas for things that I could write about in the article. Then I’ll try and place these in a logical structure, thinking about the best way to make the content flow.

What I usually find is that the items that I list out here, become the sub-headings on my actual article.

STEP 4 – RESEARCH IN GOOGLE

I’ll simply type the keyword, the sub-heading or the article topic into Google and scan through the results. Any articles that I think look interesting I’ll open in a new tab.

STEP 5 – REVIEW OPEN TABS

Next I’ll simply work through the tabs one by one, discarding the ones with low value or unrelated content and copying the info from pages that I think contain useful information into a new Word document.

STEP 6 – ORGANISE CONTENT

At this stage I’ll have a massive 20 page word document, full of all the source content in different fonts and styles, which will look and feel like a complete mess, so lets get organised!I simply start to cut up the content and group relevant bits from each article into the sub-headers that I had written at the start. During this process you’ll find that you start to discard some more unrelated content and end up with a pretty big document still, with the benefit that it is now grouped into related content items

STEP 7 – REWRITE THE CONTENT

I usually just make a copy of the word document then work my way through the different sections of content, taking the key points, facts and figures from the source content and rewriting in my own style. This has the benefit that it applies your own voice to the content and you won’t get into any trouble with plagiarising content!

STEP 8 – TOP AND TAIL

Make sure you write a good introduction to the topic, and if it’s a long article add jump links to the relevant sections.At the end of the article try to write a summary of what you have found and pull out some of the key learnings. Both of these places are good locations to bring in your keywords.

STEP 9 – WRITE A KILLER HEADLINE

It’s always good to try and get your keyword into your headline, but creating a title that sticks out can also make the difference. Remember that your site will be sitting in the search results competing against many other sites, so if you can make a heading that stands out and are position 9 on the page, you could end up getting more click throughs than position 3 if their title is written poorly.

There is a great free tool that you can use to help you ensure that your title is up to scratch : http://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer

STEP 10 – REVIEW YOUR ARTICLE

Leave the article for a day or so, before you come back to it, and you’ll be surprised at the things you spot with a fresh pair of eyes. I usually then try to read the article out loud to myself and make final edits to the content, before preparing this for publication on my site.

Of course after these steps, there are another series of things you need to go for before publishing you article such as:

Make sure your content has been properly optimised for SEO
Format your content correctly
Add in a decent amount of outbound and internal links
Check how this will look on Social accounts

However, I’ve found that running through these 10 steps has made my approach to content a lot more systematic, logical and of course time saving.

My Website Dream: Chapter 5 – Content Writing Process

13th April 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

The overall progress on my niche website has been a little slower than I had hoped this month as I’d mainly been distracted with my matched betting updates instead, given the Cheltenham Festival and the fact that I recently purchased the Accumulator Generator software.

I’m also finding it hard again to know what is best to focus on as I need to work on the moment as there are lots of things that I need to work on, but don’t have the hours in the day to look at everything.

Anyway, enough whinging, so what did I achieve this month:

MY NICHE WEBSITE

The good news is that I did manage to write another 3 articles, so I have a total of 8 written now and I finished compiling the details of the London listings page.

However, I’m struggling a bit to find additional content to write for the site to be honest. There are definitely more articles out there that I can write, but they are likely to be smaller articles than I have written so far, and I need to figure out how I can bring them into the site and make the site hang together well.

Realistically I have enough content already to launch the site, so I think that logically that should be my next step. Once I have the site up and running it will be a lot easier for me to see how the content fits together and where the holes are.

Content Writing Process

I found that I could distill this technique down into a number of repeatable steps that would help me speed up this process in the future. You can read about these in more detail in my post on Streamlining your Content Creation, which covers the following steps:

Create a List of Article Topics

pick an article

Create sub headings

research in google

review open tabs

organise the content

rewrite the content

top and tail

write a killer headline

review your article

However, I’ve found that running through these 10 steps has made my approach to content a lot more systematic, logical and of course time saving.

AUTHORITY HACKER PRO MEMBERSHIP

This month I’ve been hot on the learning trail again and one of my key resources recently has been the Authority Hacker website. This is a site run by Gael and Mark, who are 2 entrepreneurs and experienced Digital Marketers who give you really solid and actionable advice in building up authority sites.

I attended a webinar where they pretty much gave step by step instructions on how to build up a niche and authority site so that it brings in a steady passive income stream. At the end of the webinar was a Q&A session and then they offered a discount membership plan to attendees (a pretty standard marketing tactic)

The webinar was really useful and they both provide valuable insight into building out your business so I decided to sign up for the annual membership, for just over £350.

This might sound like a lot of money but for this price you get:• A 30 minute 1 on 1 call with Gael• Access to a private Facebook Group• 2 x monthly webinars and Q&A sessions• Access to all of their blue prints

For me this seemed like a solid investment, especially as I am currently in the process of building out my niche site so I went ahead and made the purchase.

There is a bunch of really useful content available in the ‘Blueprints’ section. Each blueprint is made up of a series of lessons with a video and step by step instructions of what you need to do.

Some of the themes covered were:

Affiliate Marketing
Content Upgrades and Promotion
Email Marketing
Guest Posting
Lead Magnets

Outreach Process
Pinterest
Creating effective Pop Ups
Producing & Outsourcing Top Content

The content creation and the outreach blueprints were particularly relevant to me at the moment and I definitely learnt some things from these, however, overall the area is pitched at people who are a bit further downstream with their websites than I am.

Most of the blueprints are for larger Authority sites, that already have a decent amount of content on them and to a certain extent already have some kind of following / social presence.

In the end I decided to ask for my 30 day refund as I think this will be more useful to me in the future and I’m pretty sure that I’ll pick up a membership with these guys again in the future.

If anything, the most beneficial thing is access to the Facebook group and the bi-monthly webinars, where you can ask all of those questions that crop up from time to time. I think I would find this hugely beneficial as a lot of the time it feels like there is no one to ask, and is always great to bounce a few questions and ideas off of other people.

You can sign up for the Pro Membership from as little as $39 per month if you sign up to a yearly membership and I would definitely recommend this service.

If that’s too steep for you at the moment, then they have loads of invaluable information on both their website: http://www.authorityhacker.com/

And also in their podcasts : http://www.authorityhacker.com/podcast-2/

LAST MONTH’s GOAL

Complete the London listings page for my niche site : COMPLETE
Write 5 more articles for niche site : INCOMPLETE
Stretch goal – look at the Thrive Content Builder : INCOMPLETE

NEXT MONTH’s GOAL

Write 5 smaller blog posts of max 1500 words
Set up the site in Word Press
Buy a domain
Stretch goal – look at the Thrive Content Builder

TOOLS AND SITES USED

http://www.authorityhacker.com/

Cheltenham Festival : A Matched Betting Paradise!

23rd March 2016 By martinos74 2 Comments

The turf has settled back down again, the fences repaired, the jockey’s cuts and bruises patched up and the matched better’s stress levels have fallen by a few hundred percent, but did YOU make the most out of the hundreds of Cheltenham Festival betting offers available?

Yes, that’s right, we’ve just witnessed the world famous Cheltenham Festival, alternatively known as a Matched Betting Paradise, where the average punter was losing thousands and the matched bettor was making hundreds each day.

The Cheltenham Festival

The Cheltenham festival has grown in popularity since its initiation at Prestbury Park in 1911, and since 2005 has expanded out into a massive 4 day long horse racing celebration. This year 70,000 people came to watch the 7 races each day of the festival, which gave out over £4 million pounds of prize money, and like most matched bettors I wanted to make a bit of money myself.

I must admit that after the stress of the last few days I’m actually glad the Cheltenham festival is over and I can return to a life of normality. This was the first horse racing festival that I’ve ever been involved in where I’ve had any knowledge of matched betting and I have to say it was an eye opening experience.

From what I have picked up on the various social networks a lot of the more experienced matched bettors have earned anywhere between £1 to 2.5k over the past 4 days of racing using various matched betting techniques, which is pretty good going, especially as this is tax free income.

Personally, I was nowhere near that amount and the money that I did make was more from luck than judgement. I’m sure that I could have made more money, but wanted to focus on a restricted number of bookies and also stick to offers that I could understand.

The Cheltenham Festival Betting Offers

In general there were 4 types of betting offers that I opted for:

Money Back on 2nd place

Money Back if you pick a winner

Money Back if the Favourite Wins

Money Back if you Lose

There were lots of other offers available such as price boosts and bookies offering an extra place for each way bets, but I thought if I focused on these offers first of all then I’d be better off.

My Strategy

For each race if there was a decent back/lay match available I would try to do the following:

Favourite – Use the BFSB and Bet365
2nd favourite – Use Will Hill or Ladbrokes
3rd favourite – Use Will Hill or Ladbrokes
4th favourite – Use Betstars if available

My rules were that if the qualifying loss was over 10% of the free bet, then I wouldn’t take the bet, so on the William Hill offer for example there was a £25 free bet, so I wouldn’t go over a £2.50 qualifying loss.

Getting Organised

Each day I became more and more organised so by Day 4, I was pretty much in the groove of what I was doing, and had developed a really handy spreadsheet to keep track of what the heck I was doing. You can get a copy of it here: Cheltenham Festival Betting Tracker

In preparation for each day I would:

Fill out the spreadsheet with the details of the offers that I was likely to go for – See ‘Day 1’ Tab
List each race in turn, and underneath each race, I would list out the different bookies that I would bet on
For each of the bookies I would simply pre-populate the stake and the basic terms of the offer (ie back a winner over 4.0) so that it would be easier for me to fill out on the day of the race.

The next step was to try and find decent matches and in this case I found there was no point in using the odds matcher as the odds were changing so quickly and the site only gets updated every 30 minutes, so I had to check for back/lay matches manually.

In one browser I would open smarkets, and in the other browser I would have all the different bookies sites loaded on different tabs. Then I would simply go through each race and compare the top 5 horses on Smarkets against the bookies. If there was a good match then I would take it and record it in my spreadsheet, adding the odds and the horses name.

I would repeat this process about 5 times a day:

The evening before at 10pm
Race day morning 8am
Race day afternoon 12pm
Race day 1.30 onwards

This basically meant that my spreadsheet gradually got filled up with matches and I could even do a lot of this whilst at work. It also meant that I could clearly see where I had placed my bets and which races I still had holes in. Check the ‘Day 4’ Tab to see an example of the workings.

The Results

I ended up spending a lot longer on this than I thought I would do, and was constantly going back to the bookies and looking for decent matches. It also wasn’t that easy to find decent matches for the top few horses on each race, so some times I either had to skip the match, or go over my 10% qualifying loss to cover it.

On top of this I found that, especially on Day 3 and 4, most of the 2nd places were going out to horses with a lot higher odds than I had anticipated. There were lots of cases of 33/1 shots coming in 2nd and due to the large fields, it kind of ruined my overall approach, and meant that I suffered because in a lot of cases I was making a 5 – 10% loss on my qualifying bet.

When you consider the number of bets that I put on, these qualifying losses add up and start to cancel out any winnings you may get on the refunds or free bets.

My Numbers

Total bets placed: 97 back / lay pairs
Total money wagered: £4773
Total bonuses won: £475

BFSB – Bets Place 11 – Refunds 3
Bet365 – Bets Place 10 – Refunds 0
Ladbrokes – Bets Place 17 – Refunds 2
William Hill Bets Place 19 – Refunds 6
Betstars Bets Place 5 – Refunds 1
Skybet – Bets Place 4 – Refunds 4

On top of these refunds I made:

Betway – £20 free bets
Netbet – £25 deposit bonus
Stan James – £10 free bets

I’m not sure how accurate my calculations are but by the time I have extracted the money from the free bets I think I will have made in total about £350 – 400.

Now, this isn’t exactly ground breaking and involved an incredible amount of stress, however, I learnt a lot from it and can use this knowledge in future festivals.

What Did I Learn?

So overall what did I learn from these 4 days?

Make sure you have a good strategy

Looking in the forums a lot of people would use their free bets on punts instead of laying them. A lot of people would try to cover the whole field to make money out of each way bets, others used the price boosts to make good money, and other people were underlaying or overlaying bets. To be honest I’m not sure I follow a lot of the strategies and some of them starting verging more towards the gambling side of things, which is something I want to avoid

Be organised

On the first day I wasn’t very well prepared, had no strategy and wasn’t really sure what I was doing. By the fourth day I had a much more measured approach and was going through clear steps with each bet I was placing, so that I was less prone to errors

Keep your exchanges well stocked

Having a big enough balance to play with is key if you want to make decent amounts of money. Of course, you can go from one race to the next, so that the bets get settled and hopefully go back into the exchanges, but if like me you wanted to try and place as many bets in advance as possible, then you are going to need a good float. In the end I needed nearly £2k in my Smarkets account

Make Sure you have the Right Bookies

It goes without saying but make sure that before the festival you have accounts open with the leading bookies. This year most of the decent offers came from these guys:

Skybet
Betfair SB
Apollobet
William Hill
Ladbrokes
Bet365
Paddy Power
138.com
Betbright
Fun88,
12Bet
Betstars
Betway
Netbets

Don’t be greedy

There is so much going on during these 4 days, with offers and changes in prices flying around everywhere, that it is easy to try and jump on every offer. The problem with this is that you start to lose control a little and if you are trying to place bets too quickly this will often lead to mistakes. For example, on Day 3, I suddenly thought that it would be a good idea to place the £100 bets on the favourite for the 188bet refund offer. At the time, I was thinking the offer was that you get refunded if you get a first place, but the offer was actually for a second place refund, so I lost out lots in my qualifying losses.

Try to Relax

As a relative newbie, I found this almost impossible to do and was constantly checking the odds. Probably a better idea is to do this in short bursts so you don’t end up getting totally stressed out

What Didn’t I Enjoy?

Stress

Without a doubt #1 on the list was the amount of stress this caused me over the past few days. Maybe this is because I’m a newbie, maybe it was the stress of trying to find a decent match, maybe it was the stress of keeping track of everything, maybe it was the stress on not really knowing what strategy to follow, maybe it was the stress of trying not to get caught doing some of this at work, whatever it was, this was definitely an extremely stressful week and by the end of Day 4 I was glad it was over!

Paperwork

Even though I’m a project manager by trade, I certainly did not enjoy having to track all of the bets and offers and then at the end of the evening having to go through all of the exchanges and bookies to check where all the money had gone to and check that I had made no mistakes. It was also key to do this at the end of each day so you know where the bonuses would end up

Reading the T’s and C’s

Luckily most of the offers were repeated for each day of the festival so after you had done them once they were pretty easy to repeat. What I didn’t enjoy, however, was reading the T’s and C’s to ensure that I knew all of the rules and things like when my bonuses would expire

Addictiveness

Maybe it’s something to do with my character where when I see an opportunity I want to make the most out of it, maybe it’s just because I’m greedy, but I really didn’t like the fact that once I’d got into this, I found it hard to pull myself away from it and wanted to find more and more offers to play with. It felt a little bit too like I was getting involved in gambling, although of course I knew that I was actually winning overall. Maybe it was because the 2nd place offers also have an element of gambling to them and are not guaranteed profit, unlike a lot of the football offers that I am used to

What did I enjoy?

Learning new ways to make money with matched betting

These last 4 days have certainly inducted me well into matched betting for horse racing and I feel that I now have a much better understanding of these kind of bets. Am looking forward to doing this at a more leisurely pace over the weekends in the future and hopefully some of the stress I have had this week will put me in good stead for future offers

My Winnings

Even though I didn’t make a fortune out of it, I still made an overall profit, which always goes down well. Judging by other peoples earnings i will be able to increase this a lot more in the future with a bit more experience as well

The Matched Betting Communities

I found that the members of the different Matched Betting communities were a great bunch, always willing to help each other out, provide tips and resolve problems.

These were also the best source of information to go to each day where they’d usually have a list of offers :

In particular I found these groups most useful:
• Matched Betting 101
• Matched Betting for Free

Summary

After 4 really intense days of matched betting, I was absolutely exhausted. I think that was mainly because I’m a newbie and wanted to make the most out of the occasion that I could do. I made a few mistakes along the way, but now that the dust has settled I think overall it was a good experience.

I certainly learned a lot and managed to get my stripes as a matched bettor, which should help me in the future. Making nearly £400 over the 4 days from the various Cheltenham Festival Betting Offers, will come in handy but I think in the future I’d try not to do this whilst at work, and would try to be a little bit more prepared before the Festival started.

My Social Trading Dream : Chapter 3 : eToro Bonuses

28th February 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Ok, so as you know from the previous chapter I’ve been watching a number of eToro traders over the past couple of months and have added them to my watchlist.

Up until now I’ve been using my Virtual Portfolio to invest and was just about breaking even overall. This isn’t too bad to be honest, because I’d invested $1000 of fake money in each of 20 different eToro traders, some of whom were a lot higher risk than I would usually invest in.

So, this month I finally took the plunge and decided to make my investment. eToro do a great offer of giving you a really large bonus on your deposit, which varies depending on the amount you invest.

If you invest:

$300 – $999 they will give you $100
$1,000 to $2,499 they give you $300
$2500 and over and they give you $1,000 bonus

This is given in eToro points. Basically the eToro points means that you can use this money to invest in other traders, however, you will not be able to withdraw it all until you have made a certain number of trades, over a certain value. Basically, with each trade you make, you chip off of the total.

I’m not 100% sure how long it will take for this to be knocked down, but I’m in this for the medium to long term so figured I will be ok.

Originally I only wanted to invest $200 in 5 to 10 investors, however, the more I looked at this offer the more I was tempted by the $1,000 bonus and in the end I was suckered in investing $2,5000, which meant immediately my account was credited with a total of $3,5000 to invest in eToro traders.

How Did I Choose Traders to Invest in?

Well, I explained most of the process I went through in my blog post https://mylifestyledream.com/best-eToro-traders I wrote on choosing the best eToro traders and featured in this video:

I used these same techniques and then simply sent messages out to a number of the traders on my shortlist to see how responsive they were and getting a feel for whether they thought it was a good time to invest…. Of course all of them said it was, because they get a commission if I start following them!!!

So, the burning question on all of your lips is “Who did I invest in?”

Which Traders did I Invest in?

I decided to invest an initial sum of $350 in each of the traders below, keeping my Stop Loss at 70% and for most of the traders I didn’t copy their open trades.

The reasons I chose each of these were:

Sameerah786 – Seems like a consistent performer and has a good overall knowledge
Dimitirios1 – I like his investment style of only jumping in when he sees an opportunity
AnnaSerafini – Solid performance in the pasty and comes with good recommendations
Doew85 – Hard to resist with the consistent returns he is making
NoasNoas – Has a lot of experience and a lot of followers
HugoOchoa – Has had a bad few months but am confident he will pick up and balance this out
Misterg23 – Has had a really bad start to the year, but seems to be very knowledgeable and is a social trading expert

This leaves me with about $1,050 left to invest, so I’m going to keep my eyes peeled for some more potential investors. Am also tempted to take a punt on the markets myself, especially as the stock market is so beaten, however, I want this to be an experiment in Social Trading rather than my own investments.

Last Month’s Goals

Make the initial investment – COMPLETE
Understand eToro points – COMPLETE

Next Month’s Goals:

Find 3 more traders to invest in
Start to look into Zulutrade

Balance Sheet

+ $984 – Includes the eToro bonus

« Previous Page