Matched betting is by far my most lucrative side hustle I have ever taken on. In just under two years it netted me £49,518 in profit! Why I stopped just short of £50,000 I do not remember but there was certainly more value to be eked out. Matched Betting is my number one recommendation as a way of generating a second income, its simple to learn, doesn’t require much capital to get started and has a lot more depth to it than most people think.

For those that want to embark on this journey this will be a regular series starting with the basics of Matched Betting before going through the more complicated techniques and offers out there.

For me Matched Betting contains the standard Matched Betting (sports offers), Casino Bonus Bagging (online casino offers) and Bingo offers (think you can figure that one out). To start with the focus will be on the sports offers of the traditional Matched Betting.

What Is Matched Betting?

Matched betting is a no/low risk form of gambling, mainly via sports betting, that’s used to make guaranteed profits. It centres around using a ‘back and lay betting’ technique to turn free bets and other promotions into cash no matter what the outcome of the event. While standard sports betting requires you to predict the right result, Matched Betting removes the risk (or gamble) of you getting the result wrong.

Backing & Laying

The way you eliminate needing to pick the winner is through backing and laying.

Backing – The back bet is the most traditional form of bet, essentially you’re saying “I think this will win”. If the selection you bet on goes on to win, then you’ll win your bet and collect your winnings.

Laying – A lay bet is a bet against an outcome — you’re betting that something will not happen. You can think of this as the opposite side of your back bet from the bookmakers point of view. If you back a selection winning with a bookmaker essentially the bookmaker has layed the bet and wants the selection you have backed to lose. You can place lay bets through online betting exchanges like Betfair or Smarkets. These work by matching up users who want to place back bets, with users who want to lay bets. The exchange makes money by charging a commission.

So when you place both a ‘back’ and a ‘lay’ on the same event no matter the result one of the back/lay bet will win and the other one will lose. As such you don’t care on the result of the event as it makes no difference to you. Either way you neither win nor lose any money. Now of course none of this is actually making us any money yet. So the real answer to the question of what is matched betting is the next section.

So Where Exactly Does The Profit Come From?

The answer to this question is ‘via bookmaker offers’. Often when you first sign up to an online bookmaker they will offer you what is called a ‘sign up offer’. These offers are how they get new punters through the door in the hope that you will use them regularly and overtime become a profitable customer them. They are in effect loss leaders that they know are profitable to the customer. So using Matched Betting we can lock in this profit then walk away or wait for more offers from them.

When we ‘back & lay’ an event using a free bet as our ‘back’ bet and our own money as the ‘lay’ bet then again the bets cancel each other out. This time however we only put in one side of the bet and we make money by collecting the free bet value that the bookmaker contributed. We just have to choose a specific lay amount so that we collect equal profit no matter what the result.

And that is Matched Betting. Backing and laying the same event to lock in profit from free bets independent of the result.

This was just a description of how it works. The next post in the series will go into the mathematics behind Matched Betting (it’s very simple I promise), as its good to know exactly how we extract the value and why it works. Plus how exchange commission and differing odds mean we can usually only extract roughly 80% of the free bet amount as cash.