Disclaimer: Readers who have or have had issues with gambling addictions, matched betting may pose a problem for you. Please check out some of our other posts and if you need help with a gambling addiction, you can find help here.
Australia is a nation with a strong gambling culture. The bookmakers know this and use many techniques to extract money from everyday punters. But there is a way to make some risk-free money off the bookies – matched betting. There are a few types of matched betting you can use to make money. The first one used by many is taking advantage of sign up offers.
Many bookies offer generous sign up bonuses to try and get more punters into their ecosystem; either from other bookies or new bettors.These offers range from deposit $100 and get $100 in bonus bets up to 50% deposit bonus up to $500 in bonus bets. Using the back/lay method you can easily extract 70-80% of the bonus bets as cash and retain 95% of your original deposit. With the large number of bookies in Australia this cash can add up. When I started this in March 2018, I earned over $6,000 during roughly a 3 month period.
I would estimate I spent about 120 hours during this time learning the method and using it over the 3 months. That is roughly $50/hour, and its all tax free as gambling profits are not taxed in Australia. Now to learn and perform matched betting quickly I used some very useful tools from the guys at Bonusbank.
Bonusbank have some great tools for the the back/lay method, finding matches and more advanced tools for other matched betting techniques. They have a free subscription which is a limited version; but is perfect for your first bets and they have a tutorial to guide you through. Once you have done your first bets you can sign up for a paid subscription to get access to the full suite of tools. I believe this easily pays for itself in the time saved otherwise this wouldn’t be a viable way to make some extra cash. Often they are running a 7-day trial of the premium subscription; so you can give it all a try and see if you like it. I’m sure you will when you see the extra cash roll in.
Let’s go over the steps briefly to earning some extra tax-free cash!
Signing up to a bookie and Betfair
First you need to sign up to a bookie that has a nice sign up offer. TAB usually has a nice sign up offer for beginners, only requiring a $100 deposit and getting $100 bonus. After signing up you will need to verify your ID and the card you are using for deposit. Note: if you use a credit card it will be charged as a cash advance, so it’s better to use a debit card. Most of the the bookies have auto verification through green ID but some have more manual processes.
To take advantage of the sign up promotions you generally need to turnover your initial deposit amount before you can withdraw. Generally bookies require that you need to bet the amount you have deposited at 1.5 odds or more. This means you are likely to lose some money on the deposit; but you will make it back with the bonus bets. Additionally winnings from bonus bets generally have the same requirement and can reduce your profits a little.
Once you have signed up you can move onto signing up to Betfair.
Betfair is a betting exchange where bets are backed and layed against other bettors instead of against a bookie. This allows us to find better matches to retain more of our deposit and extract more cash from the bonuses.
The Matched Betting Back/Lay Method
So the back/lay method involves finding betting events where the odds between backing (the event results in winning) and laying (the event results in losing) are as close as possible. Being as close as possible means you lose less deposit and get more cash from bonuses. Finding a good match from the thousands of events happening each day as you can imagine is difficult. Luckily Bonusbank have an oddsmatcher tool which scans most bookies sites for odds as well as Betfair. This allows it to find the best matches that you should bet on, much better than doing it manually!
Once you have found a good match its time to work out how much you should back and lay. Again Bonusbank have another great tool for this – the back/lay calculator. Basically you plug in whether it is a qualifying bet or a bonus bet, the amount of bet, back odds and lay odds. Once done it should output how much you should lay on Betfair at those odds. Keep in mind when laying a bet on Betfair you need to have the full liability of the bet, as you are taking on the role of a bookie. After you place your bets, its time to sit and wait for the money to roll in!
In an ideal world the bet would lose and you just collect your money from Betfair; however it is not always so easy. If the bet wins at the bookie you will generally be required to turnover the winnings from the bonus bet twice at 1.5 odds or more. This cuts into profit a little bit but you will still be making heaps of extra cash from 70-80% extraction of bonus bets.
Summary
Matched betting has been a fantastic source of extra cash for me; the first $6,000 from sign up bonuses was fantastic. I recently started matched betting again using different techniques like dutching, horse racing promos and multi promotions. These techniques provide some more long-term income compared to the sign up offers. You can see how much I am getting from this in some of my income updates. I’ll likely write a post about these techniques as well as they have been quite profitable for me. Again the tools at Bonusbank have been a great help for all of this income. I highly recommend you check them out to help you make some extra cash!