Matched Betting Part 1

I decided it would be a good idea to post about this. In this first post, I'll try and outline the concept behind Matched Betting. Before I do that, this post does come with a warning, whilst effectively risk free, human error can cause the loss of £100s and as a result, matched betting should be undertaken with the knowledge that you could mess it up and lose your money. Ok, now that thats over, here is what we're doing:

Matched betting - The Theory

Suppose we were to bet on the outcome of an event, lets suppose this event is the world cup final. I'll use the 2010 one as an example; there are clearly only 2 possible outcomes: Spain wins, or Holland wins. Usually, when somebody makes a bet, they place a bet on just one team, covering one outcome and then they step back and pray. This is obviously going to lose you money in the long run and so is a bad idea. What if we cover both outcomes? Again, bookmakers will almost always guarantee that it is impossible to make money in this way. There is a way around this however.

 Bookmakers often give out free bets either to existing customers or more commonly, new customers. If we use these free bets as insurance policies, we can guarantee a profit regardless of the outcome!

So, lets consider our example, Holland vs Spain. Suppose out bookmaker was offering even-odds (2.0) on both outcomes, in other words the bookmaker thought the outcome was 50/50 (in reality the odds would be slightly worse since the bookie wants a profit, but for the same of this lets suppose they are perfect)

Now lets suppose we have a £10 free bet - we'll also assume we don't get the free bet stake back (i.e we don't get the £10 free money back - this is usually the case)

What we'll do is place £10 of our own money, and the free bet on the event.

So we'll put our own money on Spain at 2.0

and the free bet on Holland at 2.0

Here are the possibilities: 

Holland wins: Using the £10 free bet, we get a £10 return, since the original stake was not included. Total Profit: £0 

Spain wins: We placed £10 on Spain, so we get a £20 return. Total Profit: £10

 In our example, it was a win 10 or lose nothing situation, in reality, we'd have staked slightly less on Spain, that way we'll actually make a guaranteed profit!

In part 2, I'll show a step-by-step guide demonstrating how to go about doing this in reality as the real-life mechanics of this are more complex.