Matched betting: Free money - Example

A guide to matched betting

Last updated 22nd April, 2007

I've explained already how we can use matched betting to extract free money from the bookmakers - but now we'll run through a real life example to show you how it's done. You'll need to sign up to Betfair - the largest betting exchange with the best market rates. They offer you £25 back once you've betted £25 yourself. Now we need to sign up to a bookmakers with a good deal. Totesport is probably the most straight-forward, and they offer to give you a bet equivalent to your first stake, up to the value of £25. That's a potential £50 on offer after we've made our first bet.

Then make sure you load some money into each account. For the bookmaker (totesport), just deposit £25, and for the betting exchange around £100. You need this much extra money in your betting exchange account to cover any liabilities on your lay bet. Your now ready to start matched betting.

Finding the odds

On this first bet, your qualifying bet, it's very important to find odds for both bookmaker and betting exchange to be close together. Let's consider the Tottenham v Arsenal match from last Saturday. Totesport was offering both Arsenal and Tottenham at odds of 2.63 for the win and match drawn odds of 3.3. However comparing these to our betting exchange (Betfair), I found that the lay odds for an Arsenal and Tottenham win were much higher, around about 2.75 for Arsenal and 2.95 for Tottenham. This would have meant we would have lost the difference in odds in money. However for the draw, the current rate at Betfair was 3.35 which was very close to Totesport's odds of 3.3. It looked like a good bet.

Intuition is a good indicator, but with matched betting you really have to work on hard figures. So rather than me saying it looks like a good bet, we have to use a small utility(pending), or an online converter. So let's fill in the values. My back stake is £25, and the odds offered by the bookmaker are 3.3, and this bookmaker like most others charges no commission. Then fill in the values for Betfair: The lay odds are 3.35 and Betfair charges 5% commission on our winnings. Click the type of stake that it is, in this case it's a qualifying bet.

The screenshot now displays all the important figures having entered our values and submitted the form. Probably the most important is the bottom box that tells you your net profit overal, and the percentage retained. In our case we can see we stand to lose £1.25, which is 95% of my original bet. These are fairly good figures, though with hunting around and betting with lower odds our loss could be reduced further. The other boxes show us how much we must stake at the betting exchange to cover potential losses. In this case I should also stake £25 at the betting exchange and make sure I have a total of £83.75 available in case my bet loses. The middle box simply shows the calculations, and how the winnings in one case are very close to the losses in another case.

So now you've made your qualifying bet and lost a pound or so, now let's see how we can make our money back using free bets.

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