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How to Use Oddsmonkey to Optimize your Winnings at the 2019 Cheltenham Festival

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With the 2018 Cheltenham Festival only a few weeks away we want to get ourselves as prepared as possible for the event.

I wrote a full article of my tips for the Cheltenham Festival 2018 but I wanted to compliment this with a guide showing how we can use the tools available at Oddsmonkey to really make our lives a lot easier.

If you don’t have a Oddsmonkey account yet, then you really should get one for the 2018 Cheltenham Festival alone, but I’ve also written a full Review of Oddsmonkey in a previous article.

I’ve tried to break down the process that each matched bettor will be going through during the festival and given examples of how the Oddsmonkey software is really going to help you during this period:

Finding Offers at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

There will be hundreds of offers available with the different bookmakers over the 4 days of the 2018 Cheltenham Festival.

You won’t be able to play all of these offers so you need to focus on playing offers that match your current skill level, your risk tolerance and also the size of your bank.

Luckily the Oddsmonkey team have thought about this and laid all of the offers that are available on a Daily Offer Calendar 

Each of the offers has the following information:

  • Categorisation as Easy, Average or Hard to play
  • Indicator of whether the offer is potential or guaranteed profit
  • Link to discuss this offer on the forums
  • Link to the offer on the bookie’s website

​Understanding the Cheltenham Festival Offers

The next step is to fully understand the terms of each offer and understand how you should approach these offers.

Again, Oddsmonkey have a Horse Racing Guides section, which gives you details of how to play each offer type:

How to Find Close Matches at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

OK, so you’ve got a good understanding of the offers that you want to play, and you understand how to play them.

The next step is looking for close matches so you can quickly back/lay your bets for minimal qualifying losses.

The Oddsmonkey Racing Matcher really takes the pain out of this process for you:

2017 Cheltenham Festival Racing Matcher

I didn’t have this tool available last year so had to manually compare all of the odds between bookies, whereas in the Oddsmonkey Racing matcher all you have to do is scroll through the races available each day, choose a bookmaker and check if there is an option with a small qualifying loss.

Cheltenham Festival Calculator

If you click on one of the matches then the calculator will show you the back and lay stakes and also provide you with links through to the bookies/exchanges.

This whole process can take less than a minute, which is key when trying to find close matches.

If you prefer to do this more manually you can also use the Oddsmatcher and filter this to show races just at Cheltenham each day to show you all the matches across the bookies.

Use the Eachway Matcher to line your pockets at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

The Eachway Matcher is going to be another major tool in your arsenal during the festival.​

Cheltenham Eachway Matcher

You can use this in 2 ways:

  • Keep an eye on the tool and use this to place bets which will give you a good profit regardless of the result- Use this to benefit from the extra place races.
  • Click on the ‘Extra Place Only’ filter, and if there is a close match get on this, and hope that the horse comes in that extra place to bring in the big bucks.

How Should I Use my Free Bets from the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

After the festival has finished, you’re going to find yourself with lots of free bets that you will need to use up in a short amount of time.

The general rule of thumb is that you should be looking to extract 80% from your free bet if possible.

The first tool that you can use to find good matches for your free bets is the Oddsmonkey Oddsmatcher

Sort the results by clicking on the ‘SNR %’ column.

The higher the number is here, the better for you, as it shows how much you can extract from your free bet.

Don’t go for a match that is over 100% as this was count as an arb and is likely to get you banned from the bookmaker.

You should be able to use up a lot of your bets using this filter, however, if you want to make sure you can extract 80% of you free bets each time and also stay under the bookies radar then you should read this post, which shows a technique that uses doubles or trebles to extract maximum value from the free bet.

Dutching Extra Place Races

OK, so this is a more advanced technique where you try to capitalise from the extra places that the bookies are offering and relies on you backing every horse in the race and not laying any of them.

Depending on the race, this can lead to big bucks for you and is really worth keeping an eye on the forums to see which races people are advising to look at.

Again, there is a handy guide that you can read, and also links to a number of spreadsheets to use for this technique.

Tracking Your Progress at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival

OK, this one isn’t provided by Oddsmonkey but is a spreadsheet that I put together based on my experiences last year and should help you to prep each day for the different races and also keep track of your free bets and winnings. Download the Spreadsheet for free here

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Summary

Whilst you can do all of these different things manually, there is going to be a lot happening during Cheltenham so speed is really important and with the massive selection of tools that Oddsmonkey has to offer then you’d be crazy to miss out if you haven’t got an account yet.

The monthly fee for all of this is £15 and you can sign up hereOf course, if you have an account already, then you’re the clever ones and are going to have an easy time during this years Cheltenham Festival.

Have fun guys!!!

January Update

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It’s been a busy few weeks with the festive season and lots of things to focus on so I wanted to give a bit of an update on where I’ve got to with my plans to become a digital nomad and develop passive income streams.

I’ve got so many projects ongoing at the moment that it’s really hard to focus on one thing and dedicate the time that I need to these projects so I’ve decided to focus on one main thing in the short term, and put my other projects on hold for the moment.

The idea that I want to dedicate more of my time to moving forward is:

eBay Dropshipping

ebay Dropshipping David Vu

If you’re not sure what this then you can read all about it in this article that I wrote recently or you can go and check out David Wu’s course on Udemy

Over the last couple of months I’ve made the following progress:

–          Built out my store to have 500+ products listed

–          Switched to a business account and set up an actual eBay store

–          Hired an experienced eBay lister on Upwork

–          Added my products to SKUgrid.com (an automatic price/stock tracker)

–          Investigated the use of Hydraliser (an semi-automated eBay listing tool)

The great thing about this business model is the more products that I add to the store, the more profits I make and when you get to a certain threshold you can hand this over to a VA to fully automate the process. I completed David Vu’s  VA Training course, which shows you the easy steps to do this.

To be honest the guy that I have found in Bangladesh can list lots of products really quickly, but his attention to detail is terrible and he isn’t very good at optimisation of titles. Still, at 30c per product listing I shouldn’t expect too much.

My store has been going for 6 months now and have 100% feedback with over 100 items now. I haven’t tracked my earnings that well but I think I’ve probably made about £1000 so far over these 6 months.

My plan now, is to really build out the store as much as possible. I will probably upgrade the store to the next level so that listings only cost me 4p in eBay fees.

I’m going to give Hydralister a try out and then expand my store to 1500 items fairly quickly and then have a bit of a pause to gauge how much additional work this will cause me ie customer enquiries, returns etc.

I’m only making about 15% of the sale price on each item, however, if you are selling 10 items a day, that quickly adds up to a decent side income, and definitely something that could sustain you whilst travelling.

Niche Websites

Trying to build out 3 websites (including this one) is just unfeasible from a time perspective. I’m going to keep this one going, but I’m going to leave the other Service based website alone for a while. It’s only got 10 articles on the site, and I have a great plan how I can build this out in the future, but for now I’m leaving it well alone.

The other website that I bought from Human Proof Designs is now live. To be honest they’ve done a good job of setting up the base level content and site, however, there is a lot of work to do to get it up to the standard that I would like. Again, I’ve developed a great content plan for this site, and can’t wait to get building it out in the future. I think for this site in the Sports Niche, I may even try to automate the whole content creation process in the future and use it as a test site.

For www.mylifestyledream.com I have lots of ideas for content again, but I’m just struggling for time. I’ve added some affiliate links for Oddsmonkey, which are bringing in a few bucks each month, but nothing huge at the moment. In the long term matched betting and betting related products look like something worth promoting and fit well with my blog at the moment.

Matched Betting

Matched Betting 2016 Review

I’m still regularly matched betting, which continues to bring in a decent side income and the best thing about this is that all earnings are tax free!!!

My latest favourite thing to do is place No Lay Accumulators. This is a technique where the Oddsmonkey software finds matches for you that have a good chance of coming in. The theory is that you don’t need to lay these bets, and over a longer period of time you will profit from these accumulators.

Over the past 3 months I’ve placed over 65 Accas, and have made £850 from this. Well, it seems to be working at the moment and as it only takes a couple of minutes per Acca, so this is a great use of time.

On top of this I managed to get a payout of £200 from an extra place race where I dutched the whole field using this technique

Through the Oddsmonkey forum I’ve also found a unique way to ensure that you can extract a minimum of 80% (ADD LINK) from each bet using doubles and triples.

On the downside I finally lost my Bet365 account and even worse, they stake restricted me, which means I can’t even use the Eachway matcher on this account any more!!! I think it was because on one Saturday I placed bets on every race of their Channel 4/1 offer, and ended up winning a couple of races.

I’m itching to start learning about Betfair trading as another potential revenue stream that doesn’t rely on having accounts with the scumbag bookies, but am putting this on the backburner again as this requires a huge amount of time to get your head into.

If you’re not sure exactly what matched betting is about then you’ll find most of the answers in my Guide for Beginners

The 4 Day  Working Week is here

So, you’re probably bored of me bleating on about not having enough time, so I’ve decided to do something about this and have requested that I go down to a 4 day working week, so I can focus on setting up these other revenue streams and start to build my business up with more gusto.

Upsizing

The final change that I’ve decided to do is to sell my flat and try to upsize. Now, according to all the advice in the best seller ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’, a property is a liability and not an asset as it is constantly costing you money.

However, in this case I slightly disagree. My plan is to upscale to a 2 bedroom flat and take on a bigger mortgage in this period of ridiculously low interest rates, which I will lock in for 5 – 10 years. I plan to be travelling for 3 – 6 months of every year and whilst I am away will be renting out my property. The bigger the place, the bigger the mortgage I need, but the bigger the rental income and profit I will be making, which in my mind, makes this an asset as well!

So, exciting times are ahead, and I’m hoping this extra time is really going to set me on my way and accelerate the growth of these businesses over the next few months, so I can finally quit my job in September and head off into the sunshine!!!

Anyway, enough about me, what about you? If you’ve been killing it online recently, or are having issues getting started then we’d be keen to here from you in the comments below. What are you doing to make money online in 2017?

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