How to make money from a free matched bet

Sign up offers are the starting point for matched betting and this article will explain how to make money from a free matched bet.

Go to most bookmaker websites and you’ll be met with adverts encouraging you to sign up to receive a welcome bonus. Welcome offers come in many varieties, such as place a bet and receive a free bet in return, make a deposit and get a bonus added to your balance, receive enhanced odds on your first bet, and the list goes on.

Ultimately, you receive a free bet or bonus which effectively lets you place one or more bets without having to risk your own money. The typical gambler with try his or her luck at backing a winner which in most cases continues until the bookmaker has banked the deposit and clawed back the winnings from the free bets, if there were any in the first place.

At MatchedBets.com, we advocate using the free bets and bonuses to guarantee a profit. Why take the risk when there is easy money to made from a free matched bet?

Matched betting at its most basic level is a two-part process that involves qualifying for a free bet and then using the free bet to make a profit.

With the help of betting exchanges, it is possible to back all outcomes of an event. So when using your own money, you can qualify for a free bet for nothing, although it usually costs a few pence when taking into account exchange commissions. The free bet can used in the same way to extract a guaranteed profit from the whole offer.

The key is to find closely matched odds with the bookmaker and betting exchange. It’s not unusual to find you can lay a selection on the betting exchange at the same odds as available with the bookmaker. In such circumstances, you bet the selection to win with the bookie and lay it not to win on the exchange. This is matched betting.

You won’t make a profit doing this with your own money but you can qualify for a free matched bet that can be turned into a cash profit. This is achieved by placing the free bet and laying the bet to lose at the same odds to a lower stake on the exchange. By applying a mathematical formula to calculate an ideal lay stake, you can make the same profit regardless of the result.

Bookmakers provide odds for thousands of betting markets and it can be very time consuming trawling their websites and comparing the odds with a betting exchange. Considering a £25 free matched bet is typically worth £20 in cash, you won’t want to spend hours finding a good match. Better to use software such as our Odds Matcher to find suitable matches in an instant. It features an integrated matched betting calculator that does the maths so you won’t be too concerned about the result, just wait for your profit to hit your betting account or exchange account.

There are around 50 UK licensed bookmakers offering free bets and bonuses which can be used to make over £1000 profit and existing customer offers can be used make another £500+ or £1000+ every month, depending on how much time can be spared. How many gamblers will make that much each month? I can tell you, very few.