Matched Betting Guide Page 3
An Example of a Matched Bet using your own money:
Say the odds of Chelsea winning the Premiership are 3, or 2/1. These are the odds of them winning at the bookmakers. To lay at the exchange Chelsea winning the Premiership the odds are the same, 3.
If you placed £10 on Chelsea to win the Premiership at the bookmakers, and then lay £10 at the Exchange, both outcomes will have cancelled each other out.
If Chelsea win the Premiership, then you get £30 from the Bookmakers (£20 profit, and the £10 bet is returned with the winnings.)
With the lay at the Exchange, you will have to pay out £30 (Their £10 stake and the £20 winnings from the bet).
Therefore you would have £20 profit at the Bookmakers, and £20 loss at the Exchange. This means you are back to square one, and have neither gained nor made a loss.
Just to confirm, had Chelsea not won the Premiership, then you would have lost your £10 bet at the Bookmakers, but you would have won the £10 lay at the Exchange, again cancelling each other out.
All of this is of course pretty pointless, unless you were using a free bet.
Important: In the above situation, you can see what happens when the odds to back an event are the same as the odds to lay an event. Both bets cancel each other out, on one hand you might win £20 at the bookmakers but at the other hand you will have to pay out £20 at the betting exchange. This is a perfect bet for matched betting, where the odds are exactly the same, meaning you won't lose any money at all - plus you will earn around £20 profit from the free bet (as long as you find matching odds for the free bet too).
An Example of a Matched Bet using your own money and a free bet:
We will use the same scenario as before to keep things simple.
The odds of Chelsea winning the Premiership are 3, or 2/1. These are the odds of them winning at the bookmakers. To lay at the exchange Chelsea winning the Premiership the odds are the same, 3.
If you used a free bet stake of £10 on Chelsea to win the Premiership at the Bookmakers, and then lay £10 (your own money) at the Exchange, then no matter what happens you will have made a profit.
If Chelsea win the Premiership, then you have won £30 (as long as the free bet was stake-returned). You would then have to pay out £20 at the Exchange for the lay. This means that you have an overall profit of £10 (£30 winnings minus £20 lay loss).
If Chelsea don’t win the Premiership, then you have lost your free-bet (no actual loss though as it didn’t cost you anything) but you will win your £10 lay, so you will have £10 profit.
From this scenario, you can see that by using a free bet you can guarantee to gain nearly almost of the free-bet amount back. There are a few issues that mean its not always possible to extract the full amount back. At the Lay Exchanges they often charge commission on any winnings on a bet or lay. At the most popular Exchange, Betfair, the commission is usually %5.
Another issue is that sometimes the free-bet is SNR or Stake Non-Returned. This means that if you were to place a £10 bet on odds of 3 (2/1), you will only receive £20 back, and your stake isn’t returned.
Both of these and any other issues are easily solved, thanks to the spreadsheets and programs made freely available for people to use when working out their bet matching. These usually make a field available for you to enter a Non-Stake Returned figure (or Stake Forfeit), as well as allowing you to enter the rate of commission at the Exchange.
Often when entering the odds into the spreadsheet, most programs will only accept fractional odds and not decimal odds. Though most Bookies are able to offer fractional odds upon request, it is simple enough to convert between the two.
If the fractional odds were 4/1, you divide the top by the bottom and then add 1.
4 / 1 = 4 + 1 = 5.
Or if the fractional odds were 5/4:
5/4 = 1.25 + 1 = 2.25
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