For sports betting it is important to calculate which size stakes to make both for backing and laying your qualifying bet, but also your free bets. There seem to be free calculators bet biggest betting sites uk you can use, though I can’t attest to their quality. Assistance for all of these topics are provided by matched betting subscription services which are covered in the next section. Several services exist which can help you through the whole matched betting process. I’ve used ProfitSquad and Outplayed.com* for years and find them invaluable.
Now that we’ve covered how matched betting works, you’re probably eager to get started! To make money you have to do three main things: Have a strategy and calculate stake sizes (mostly for sports offers) Since starting matched betting I’ve personally always used a subscription service (Outplayed.com: an affiliate link) since they help with the whole process. Further down this matched betting guide are all the reasons I subscribe. In case you want to go it alone, here is a quick summary: After sign-up offers there are offers on a daily basis that bookmakers advertise, so it remains profitable! When signing up make sure to tick yes to receive future promotions. I simply wouldn’t have known where to start without using one and even now I pay an annual subscription because I can make far more money using them than they cost.
Just like sporting bookmakers, casinos are keen to keep their customers active and offer loads of offers for existing customers. There are loads of types of ongoing offers for you to get involved with so look out for them in your emails. Though be aware to either check they’re actually profitable or only use ones which are posted on your subscription service if you subscribe. Sometimes they’ll even just put free (withdrawal) cash in your account! One casino, Mr Green, currently is adding money to my account every week: The final category of offers are for bingo.
These aren’t as common now as they used to be but are still certainly worth doing, in July this year I made £130 on one of these! Bingo offers are usually +EV (see above) rather than being risk-free so I wouldn’t advise starting on them. Even so, the offers are so good that you’ll usually quickly make a profit. An example offer is this one from Foxy Bingo: You deposit and wager £10 on anything (expecting to lose about 4p if wagered on something like Blackjack) and get £40 to spend on bingo. Do make sure to read the instructions clearly and watch out for wagering, even so these offers make sense to do. Both have short trial periods in case you wanted to give it a go. The service I use, Outplayed.com*, has the perks of: Teaching you the fundamentals through matched betting guides Telling you which offers are worth doing – saving so much time! Walking you through each offer step by step – invaluable!
There is variation so you often won’t reach the expected profit of an offer. Then every so often you’ll hit a big win. Doing a large number of these offers can really help even out variation and boost your profits. Expected Value = Bonus Value – (Wagering Amount * (1 – RTP)) Using the RTP of a game, it’s quick to calculate if an offer is worth doing given the wagering requirements. Playing a slot machine with an RTP of 97.5% and wagering £2000, we can expect wagering losses of: Therefore the expected value is £50 – £50 = £0 So we deposit £10, get £50 free but would expect on average to lose all the bonus: the offer isn’t worth doing with this slot machine.
But, we can try this offer with table games such as blackjack with an RTP of 99.58%. Not all offers will allow you to use table games hence why slots are still an important consideration. Wagering, on blackjack, we can expect to wagering bet no deposit bonus no wagering requirements losses of: £2000 * (1 – 0.9958) = £8.4 <- Much better! There the EV with blackjack is actually £50 – £8.40 = £41.60 Therefore, as you can see, it’s really important to know which offers are good and how to best tackle them. The good news is that there are services you can subscribe to which do all the maths for you and simply find you the profitable offers and display the EV. Calculators for stake sizes, expected value and more advanced techniques A calendar of upcoming offers for existing customers to keep Weekly emails with the most profitable offers A customer service team to answer any questions Discussion forums to chat with other members, discuss offers and see motivational posts of recent winnings I’ve used subscription services since day one of matched betting and don’t think I’d have ever been comfortable starting without using one.
You can keep on using the same £50 (on lots of small wagers) but to be able to withdraw you’ll basically have to have spent £2000 with the casino. Which yes, is a lot of money and potentially also a lot of time, so it’s important to figure out how profitable the offer may be. For this offer you can play table games such as blackjack which has a really high return to player (RTP) rate, more on that in a second, and so the expected profit from this offer is around £42. We do a walkthrough of how to determine profitability of this offer shortly. It’s up to you whether or not this money is worth that potential time.
If the offer were for slot machines you can usually set it to spin automatically so you get the game going and leave it to it. How would you know whether or not this offer is worth doing? There are two factors which we’ll now discuss. Casino games, on average, return a certain proportion of winnings to players. Under normal circumstances without any offers, you’d expect to leave a casino with less money than you started with. Especially as a student, going through busy and stressful periods, it is so handy to get spoon fed profitable offers. I started matched betting seriously with ProfitSquad and used it for several years with great success.
| Free Bet Value | Odds Used | Profit if Win | Effective Conversion Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| £10 Free Bet | 2.00 (Evens) | £10 | 50% |
| £10 Free Bet | 5.00 (4/1) | £40 | 80% |
| £20 Free Bet | 3.00 (2/1) | £40 | 66.7% |
| £5 Free Bet | 10.00 (9/1) | £45 | 90% |
Sadly as of May 2021 it has ceased offering much functionality including its calendar and guides for offers.
Midway through 2020 I decided to go back and try Outplayed.com: the original matched betting subscription platform and one I used way back in 2016.
There are a huge number of high quality guides for every level of matched betting experience, plus it has a useful forum to ask questions and learn from other users. As a beginner, you can’t really go far wrong with Outplayed.com, especially since the trial is free! This may bet best betting offers sign up all sound like a sales pitch, but I really do believe it offers fantastic value for money. If you don’t like matched betting, you can just not carry on a subscription! The amount of money you can make from matched betting correlates reasonably directly to the amount of time you spend doing it. The good news for students looking to get started with matched betting is that you can easily fit it around your studies. Most offers aren’t really time sensitive, you could fit them in whichever time of the day suits you best. Certain offers, like Bet365’s very nice £50 in-play free bet offer (so roughly £35 profit) on certain football matches are always on evenings and appear roughly every month. For certain offers luck may have an effect on the amount of money you’ll make but the key is doing lots of profitable offers.
| Bookmaker | Offer | Claim Method | Maximum Win | Wagering Requirement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Betfred | £10 Free Bet | Sign up & verify account | Variable | 1x |
| MansionBet | £5 Free Bet | Use promo code | £100 | 5x |
| SportNation | £5 Free Bet | Register via affiliate link | No max stated | 1x |
If you get stuck in and do lots of offers you’ll quickly begin making decent profits. Well if you do lots of new customer offers you should be able to make at least £1000 and beyond that you could potentially make hundreds of pounds a month depending on how much you get involved and the availability of offers.
This is the house edge and is exactly why you should stay away from gambling! For slot machines the best games have an RTP of 95-98%. Good slot machine games include Blood Suckers and Starburst. To put it simply, even for the best slot machines, for every £100 wagered, you can expect to lose £2-£5. For table games, blackjack is particularly good with a typical RTP of 99.6%.
This means that for every £100 wagered, you’d on average only lose 40p. Games like blackjack can be really handy for offers with lots of wagering as we’ll see shortly. Using our new knowledge of wagering we can now calculate the expected value of an offer. The expected value is the average amount of profit (or loss) to be expected for a given offer. Importantly this is averaged over many attempts. I started matched betting the year before starting my PhD and in two years I had made £5000 profit: You can see that I did a fair amount of matched betting in the first year of my PhD. During my second year of being a PhD student, I eased off matched betting for a while.
| Term | Typical Requirement | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum Odds | Qualifying bet must be placed at or above specified odds | 1.80 (4/5) or greater |
| Validity Period | Time to use the free bet after it is credited | 7 days from issue |
| Wagering Requirement | Number of times bonus must be turned over | 1x on sports (for free bets) |
| Eligible Sports | Markets where the offer can be used | All sports, sometimes excludes certain markets |
| Payment Restrictions | Minimum deposit and eligible payment methods | Min £10, Skrill/Neteller often excluded |
I had already made a fair amount of money and wanted to prioritise making the most of my student experience.
Then check your emails and text messages for ongoing offers. Things like wagering requirements, maximum withdrawable winnings etc can completely destroy the value in taking part in certain offers so be careful. A really important part of the process is making stakes of the right size. You want to maximise your long term profits and don’t want to take any more risks than necessary. Before starting an offer make sure you have a clear strategy and stay organised: write the offer down and know the steps to proceed. It’s worth pointing out that I could have tried to make my first £5000 over a much shorter period, but making money isn’t always my first priority. Clearly it is possible to make money matched betting as a student! Since 2018 I’ve continued matched betting here and there (see the section below).
But now that I have some savings it isn’t really my priority: but I’m keen to help other people reach this position! Here is how the three different offer types contributed to my first £5000 profit from matched betting: Most of the money came from sports offers, but I also mostly did sports offers: When we work out the average profit per offer, you actually see that sports offers have proven the least profitable for me. Even so, they’re certainly worth doing! Almost all of my profit from that £5000 of winnings came from either very low risk offers.