Anyone do matched betting?

[AintNobodyHereButUsChickens]

And can explain to me, slowly, how it works? I've been watching lots of how-to videos but I'm still quite confused Maybe I'm just really dim

Dunno why it's delete central here. Spambots?

Anyway I did it for a bit, but eventually I got gubbed by a couple of bookies (when they basically say no more free bets for me). Might try it again when the football season starts. (If you do horses you need to bet on race day or non-runners will void your bets; football you can do the evening before.)

Sites like OddsMonkey are the people selling shovels in the gold rush, so they hype up how much gold is in them thar hills. Really it's beer money stuff, I'd get a hundred quid on a good month.

You need a starting "float" of one or two hundred, and you need to understand it and be careful. The risks are either making a mistake or losing money to a fraudulent bookmaker. You don't need to know the sport because if you do things right you have no interest in the result.

The deletions are because people keep posting on here with dodgy links. When it comes to MB, it’s important that people understand it properly, not get sucked in to making dodgy mistakes.

My MB days are behind me now, but I’m glad that I did them. I’ll always keep an eye out for threads with dodgy links, I hate the thought of anyone following something that’s not genuine. Am glad to see someone else got there before me this time!

wow there’s a lot of deletions! I only trust odds monkey these days since team profit sold out (not that they are a scam) but I think it’s my last year with odds monkey as they keep hiking the price up despite less and less offers from the bookies and gubbings. They charge so much now

I ended up subscribing to Profit Accumulator when I did MB, and found their calculators and advice forum incredibly helpful. They helped me stay on track. Not sure what they’d be like now, this was some years ago.

I’m done with it all now but I truly did make a lot of money with it (well, a lot for me — about fifteen thousand altogether). It was lovely having that extra money; I miss it! It did get pretty time-consuming though, and I remember feeling stressed out by it in the end.

It’s like anything, you have to invest a fair bit of time and effort. And you have to know when to stop.

I've been doing it, and made £1100 since mid August. I was made redundant then so I threw 3 hours a day at it, did all the bookie signups (I use Outplayed which was formerly Profit Accumulator for their guides, calculator, oddsmatcher etc)

Going forward I expect to spend about an hour a day and aim for £200 a month from it. Should be achieveable and for me, doing it whilst the telly is on, it's covered my bills whilst unemployed and when my new job starts, will help to pay down debt. Worth if, as if you're doing it right, you can't lose money.

Also, don't feel disheartened when it takes you bloody ages to do your first few signups. I did a new one last night and it took me 10 minutes, I made £7.50 in those 10 minutes. At first it's slow whilst you learn what to do, and feels not that profitable in terms of your time vs the profit for that bet, but you will get much faster

Surely there's only a finite number of bookies to sign up to? So after a couple of weeks the free bets must dry up, no? Or you get gubbed?

This is a really depressing thread between gambling addicts. Hoping anyone not immersed in this world can see that. The people on here are probably the OHs of people in the Relationship threads in tears about how their partners threw away all their money and got them into debt, before divorcing. It worries me that people legit think that gambling is a hobby.

@Fahbeep

Matched betting isn't gambling though is it? That's the point. It doesn't matter who wins the 4.30 at Newmarket because you've laid it off at the exchange. Unless you've booked the lay bet wrong it's risk free. It should be viewed as a tax-free income top up; or a "side hustle" in MN parlance.

Even if you can't lay off the complicated accumulators/bet builders it doesn't matter - it's a free bet. If it wins and your £50 up, great, if not you've not lost a cent.

@TheThingIsYeah if you say so. To me it looks like a gateway into the normalisation of making bets and using gambling apps. A bit like how alcoholics start with beer and move up to spirits. It's really sad to see people thinking it's entertainment.

I'm not the only one who thinks its problematic. Since I wandered into this thread MNHQ have started deleting posts for breaches of their talk rules...

They delete posts linking to subscription sites which are against MN rules unless they pay to advertise.

MB is legit though - it's not like gambling because you don't care about the outcomes of the match/race/whatever.

I'm not sure what the problem with normalising the process of placing a bet though - most people who bet are occasional bettors not gambling addicts.

Now casino - that's where the real money is

And it's not entertainment! Trust me - nothing more tedious than waiting for a horse race to finish. It's making money!

Yep I made £8k in a year but then quickly got gubbed by the bookies.

You are better watching the videos but tbh if you find them too complicated then it's probably not for you as they do break the process down and in a way that's easier to explain in a thread.

Just to add.. it's not gambling and if it was then the bookmakers would not ban you! Why do people insist on joining a thread when they have no knowledge of the subject matter whatsoever!

It's not investment though is it. Are you all claiming then that this is the only form of betting that you engage in?

I made a few hundred off it with Team
Profit but it was time consuming and once I got to Accas I lost interest.

Its definitely not gambling. I make the same from a free bet (usually 70-80% of the bet amount, so say £3.50 from a free £5 bet) whether X team win or dont win. If X team win, that profit is in my account with the bookie. If they draw or lose, its in my exchange account.

The issue is when (if!) someone decides X team are definitely going to beat Y team so does a back bet and doesn't lay it. THAT is gambling and that's not what we do

I'm an accountant and had a dabble at this in lockdown. It is confusing and time consuming. Can be quite fun. I would say you need to be really diligent.... at your matching obviously and treat it like a job. I didn't really give it enough time. I did make a little bit of money though.

Matched betting isn't gambling though. The bets are matched so you don't lose or win, you just make a little from the free bets.

Here's a link to someone talking about matched betting and gambling addiction.

community.gamcare.org.uk/forum/new-members-intros-forum/gambling-addiction-as-a-result-of-matched-betting/

Was not difficult to find.

The betting companies may not like it as an abuse of their free bets, but free bets should be illegal anyway. It's like free cigarettes or free shots (designed to get you hooked, not a gift). Betting companies dislike of it a lil so does not mean that it isn't a slippery slope into addiction, which they do like and cultivate shamelessly.

Yes! I'm not remotely interested in sport, why would I start betting?!

I think if you have any sort of tendency to addiction then it's probably not sensible as the temptation to not do it properly, and to gamble instead, maybe too much. But done properly it is absolutely not gambling - your effectively betting on all possible outcomes of a match or race. By definition that's not gambling!

I'm done with it now as the offers are no where near as good and haven't ever placed a bet which wasn't part of an offer to make me money.

I also have never even been on a gambling site since. It's not gambling but a regimented way of making tax free money.

It was lucrative - the most I made was around 14k on a single bet offer during one of the World Cups. I made around 80k in about 3 years. All risk free.

@titchy I don't think you have to be into sport to gamble through online slots etc. I hope what you say is true for you though and it doesn't become a problem.