How to Start Matched Betting

Bookmakers offer free bets promotions and bonuses in an attempt to attract new customers and keep existing customers on their platforms. You can use matched betting to maximise value from these promotions.

To do that you just need to: a.) Select an Offer, b.) Cover all outcomes and c.) Wait for Your Free Bet. Definitely, our Bookmakers Sign Up Offers Guides will help you.

As for any venture , you’ll need some funds to start, the professional bettors referred to it as ‘bankroll’. 

A large bankroll isn’t a necessity, but generally the more funds you have available, the more offers you’ll be able to do and the faster you’ll be able to progress.

We would recommend at somewhere between £50.00 to £75.00. With a small bankroll, you’ll just need to focus on the smaller welcome offers and work your way up.

If you’re new to all of this and don’t have any online bookmaker accounts already, you’ll be able to make over £1,000.00 profit from all of the bookmaker sign up offers.

If you already have a few bookmaker accounts, that’s not a problem. Beyond the sign up offers, you’ll be able to profit from reload offers. Check out our Reload Offers Guide. 

Betting exchanges can seem a little intimidating at first glance, but they’re actually very similar to bookmakers.

Let’s take Smarkets for example, the green column shows you the best available back odds while the blue column shows you the best available lay odds.

Let’s say, you are placing a lay bet against Everton would be betting that they won’t win. (A back bet, which is what you do at the bookmakers is shown in the green column)

So, there are two parts to every matched bet on a betting exchange. You have one person betting that Everton WILL win (back bet) and another person betting that they WON’T win (lay bet).

We offer guides for more than 15+ bookmakers sign up offers and bonuses. Our guides are really easy to follow and instruct you exactly what you need to do and when. 

You just need to go bullet point by bullet point with attention and you should be fine. Always, read the green highlighted disclaimer at the beginning of any guide. 

This is quite easy and will take you only 2 minutes to accomplish this. We highly recommend Smarkets Exchange due to a low commission tier – only 2 % for unlimited time period. Is easy to navigate, offers a wide variety of sports events and not only – they even offer odds for political events. You can use our link to Sign Up and claim also £10 bonus when you deposit a £20 by bank or card. 

Our advice for all matched betting newbies is to start with the smaller welcome offers and work our way up. A good example is the Coral Sign Up Offer. (you can find out full detailed guide here).

Coral are offering new customers £20.00 in free bets if we bet just £5.00. It’s a great welcome offer to get us started as we only need a bankroll of around £50.00.

As stated before, is always important to check the terms of an offer before placing any bets as there may be specific requirements we need to meet.

Looking at previous example, Coral Welcome Offer requires that our qualifying bet can be placed on any sport and must be placed at odds of 1.50 (1/2) or greater.

Qualifying bets should always be placed at low odds in order to minimise our qualifying losses. It’s also important, as with any matched bet, that we look for close back and lay odds.

To better understand exactly what we need to do, let’s consider the following example. In order to qualify for the £20.00 in free bets, we need to bet £5.00 on at Coral.

Let’s say that we are looking at our favourite football team which is playing this weekend. So, we need to place our £5 on Man Utd. To do this, we simply click on the ‘1.70‘ button underneath Man Utd (in Coral dashboard) enter our stake of £5.00 and click ‘Place Bet.’

Now, we need to work out our lay stake on Smarkets Exchange Market. For this we are going to use the ‘Qualifying Bet‘ setting on our matched betting calculator. 

So, we just need to simply click on the 1.85 lay button on Smarkets (BLUE column) and enter our stake – £4.64.

It tells us that our liability on this bet is £3.95 and it’s good practice to check this figure against the expected liability on the calculator. All we need now is to deposit at least the the liability amount in our Smarkets account. 

You can see also the expected profit which actually is -£0.45. This will be covered by our free bet profit. 

Our £20.00 in free bets (4 x £5.00) should be credited as soon as we place our qualifying bet. Again, it’s important to check the free bet terms for any specific requirements.

As with the vast majority of free bets, our Coral free bets are ‘stake not returned‘. This means that each £5.00 free bet will not be returned with any winnings. The free bets will be valid for 7 days.

The process of extracting profit from a free bet is pretty much the same as the qualifying bet we have just done.

The only real difference is that free bets should be placed at high odds in order to maximise our profit. As always, the closer the back and lay odds, the better. Also, keep in mind that the calculator should be used with Free Bet SNR option ticked.

Normally, the profit extracted from the free bet is around 70% for SNR and 80% to 85% for Stake Retuned offers. For our Coral example, we would expect to  extract £13+ from this offer alone.