My Matched Betting Journey – One month in

Matched betting isn’t a new phenomenon, it has been around for years now. I started matched betting one month ago now, and I have made a profit of £1,430. I decided to take the plunge and sign up for Profit Accumulator – they offer your first two offers for free as a trial and if you like it you can upgrade to monthly membership (currently £22.99 per month) or take out annual membership for £150. The great thing about matched betting is that it is both risk free and tax free!

Matched betting isn’t for everyone – if you don’t agree with betting or you don’t trust yourself not to sway from the system and start betting your own money then stay away. But remember that there is serious cash to be made.

The basics of matched betting

Bookmakers are always looking at ways to entice new customers and to keep people betting – one way they do this is to offer free bets. We can use these free bets to cash out bonuses with no risk and a guaranteed profit.

By matched betting you will open a new account at a bookmakers, deposit and make your first bet – the qualifying bet. You then go onto an exchange, such as Betfair, and “lay the bet”. Laying the bet means you are betting on a different outcome to whatever you bet on at the bookmakers. For example, if you were betting on a football match between Team A and Team B, with your bet being for Team A to win, laying the bet elsewhere means you bet that Team A don’t win. Note that you aren’t betting on them to lose, but rather that they won’t win. Because of the way that exchanges work, plus the commission they take, on this qualifying bet you will be losing up to 10% of your original bet. So if you are betting £20 then you will lose £2 – this is totally fine and a part of the process.

Now you are £2 down, but you then have your free bet. If the bookmaker offered you a free £20 bet once you place a £20 bet, you now have £20 to play with, free! You then find a place a bet on something else, remembering to lay the bet at your exchange of choice. Once that bet is settled and accounting for your small loss in the qualifying bet, you should walk away with 70-90% of the free bet – in this case you will be getting between £14 – £18, completely free!

What to bet on and how much to bet is covered by Profit Accumulator.

Won’t the sign up offers dry up?

Yes – eventually you will have completed all the sign up offers, but the good news is that bookies are constantly giving you reload offers. When the football season kicked off there were over 20 reload offers available!

Profit Accumulator have a list of these offers – at the time of writing there are 20 reload offers to complete. These can change daily!

How much money you need to start out with

You can start off with as little as £60. This is your float/bank and will naturally increase over time. The more you start with, the quicker you can earn cash. I started my first two offers with around £200, but I quickly deposited another £800 so that I could keep doing the offers. Remember that your cash isn’t at risk.

What if you don’t agree with gambling?

Matched betting isn’t gambling in the traditional sense. Gambling will never guarantee to make you money – you will have highs and lows, always losing in the long long. With matched betting you are simply utilising the free offers that bookmakers offer. If it isn’t for you then move on to something that makes you feel more comfortable, such as my top ten ways to make extra money.

How much can you realistically make?

This is another one of those “how long is a piece of string” questions. As you can see, I have made £1,430 from one month. How much you can make is also dictated by how much time you can put in. As a general rule of thumb, Profit Accumulator suggest the following time scales:

15-30 minutes a day = £500 per month
30 minutes – 1 hour a day = £1,000 per month
1 – 2 hours a day = £2,000 per month

I would agree that this reflects how much work I have put into matched betting within the last month.

How long does it take

For me, the longest part was registering at new bookmakers and making my first deposit. After the first handful I had to ring my bank as they had placed a block on my card due to suspected fraudulent activity as gambling sets off fraud detection software. Placing a bet from start to finish (finding the bet, calculating and then placing the bet) takes me less than 15 minutes in total, more often under 10 minutes.

Even if you can only commit a few hours a month, you can still earn some extra cash completely risk free and tax free.

Identity documents

To comply with various rules and regulations surrounding the gambling industry, you will often be asked to provide bookmakers with copies of identity documents. This is common practice, so before you start off it might be worth taking a few minutes to photograph and store some of your identity documents. Each bookmaker will require different items, so I suggest you save copies of the following onto your computer:

• Photo driving license
• Passport
• Bank statement (dated within the last 3 months)
• Utility bill (dated within the last 3 months)
• Front and back of the bank card you use to make deposits (you can blank out some information – each bookmaker will tell you their rules regarding this)

Profit Accumulator

I could not have achieved this without the help of Profit Accumulator. After completing my first two offers for free I immediately upgraded to platinum membership for £115 for the year. Not even a week later I had made profit even accounting for the premium membership. Platinum membership is now £150 per year or £22.99 per month. 

Profit Accumulator will do everything for you. Platinum membership includes:

• Instructional videos
• A long list of sign up offers with step by step instructions
• Reload offers updated daily
• Oddsmatching software
• Betting calculator
• Money back guarantee
• Unlimited support

The money back guarantee is great. Profit Accumulator state that “If you decide at any point during the first 30 days that matched betting is not for you and you haven’t made a profit, I will give you your money back, with no objections. AND I’ll go even further: If you actively attempt the offers we suggest and follow our advice for a full 60 days and don’t manage to make a profit, I will give you £100 cash. That’s just my way of saying “thank you” for trying it out.“

Other useful tips

I would strongly suggest that you open a new bank account for matched betting. There are a number of reasons for this – firstly it will help you to fully keep an eye on your profit. I used my normal current account until I got a new bank card in my married name for a separate account and I got in a complete muddle! Another reason is that if you are looking to apply for a mortgage in the near future then it is thought (I haven’t confirmed this) that some lenders will look at regular deposits into betting sites as a problem. I would suggest the Halifax cash card account for this.

Don’t waste too much time tracking every bet you place – you will need to have an idea of how well you are doing, but I was finding that I was getting so obsessed with tracking everything that I wasn’t spending time placing my bets. Profit Accumulator have some spreadsheets you can download to keep track of your overall profits.

Your bank may place a fraud block on your card soon after depositing into bookmakers. This is nothing to be worried about – you will just need to contact them, answer some security questions and confirm the transactions.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments. I can strongly recommend Profit Accumulator for their down to earth, helpful advice and oddsmatching software.