If you need a reminder of the reasons and rules behind this challenge have a read of the about me page. Click on the following link if you would like to view February’s matched betting profits.
Well one more month in to my matched betting challenge and yet again I’m comfortably over target, but my god did I have a slice of luck to get there (and no it wasn’t a big win on a casino offer!). I’ll delve into more detail later in this post as to why I was quite so lucky, but first I will elaborate on that huge flat line for 10 days of March! The gap should only be 7 days but extended to 10 with the help of the “Beast from the East” causing absolute chaos and mayhem across the North of England. The 7 days was our skiing trip to Austria that was entirely bought and paid for with matched betting profits!
My girlfriend and I hadn’t been for 5 years as this is one of the most expensive holidays you can go on. The lift pass is £300 for a week on its own! Then when you add in £200 of equipment hire you’ve got to fork out £500 before you’ve even booked flights, transfers and accommodation! You could certainly afford 2 summer holidays for the price of one ski holiday. Anyway, I’m getting off topic here. I will do a later post on our holiday with a costs breakdown and show how matched betting paid for it and I will try and include some pictures of us having fun on the slopes (smiley face).
So with that in mind I set my profit sights very low. The terrible weather meant I got stranded in the Peak District for a few days, only letting me do a limited amount of matched betting (some free spins if I recall) for the days before and after getting back. So I didn’t start in earnest until the 13th March, nearly half way through the month.
March’s Matched Betting Profits
Given the circumstances described above, in my mind I set my self £312.50 because this is 75% of my monthly target of £416.67. Even though I pretty much only had half a month, I still wanted to set an ambitious goal to go after since March incorporates Cheltenham Festival. I would have been on about that figure at the end of the month if it weren’t for a huge slice of luck (see below).
Total Profit: £515.49 Average Transaction Value: £4.12 Days Active: 20
Cumulative Percentage of Overall Target: 31.91%
Cumulative Profit: £1595.70
Under/Over Monthly Target: + £98.82
In terms of the matched betting profit breakdown, my return from advantage play offers was £216.88 which is insane considering I only had half a month and it’s less than a pound off my highest ever advantage play total. I am making a lot of money from William Hill’s live casino at the moment. Almost so much so that I depend on it! At the moment they have a weekly “Wager £10 for £5 bonus” that has 20x wagering on it. I have developed a strategy that usually sees me profiting about 60-70% of the time through these offers (go to the advantage play section of this website to have a read and see if it’s for you).
The other big advantage play wins were £32 off a £2 William Hill games bonus bonanza during festival week and then a mad £44 off a free 5 spins on Easter Surprise (WH again!) which wouldn’t stop giving me bonus rounds! I also got lucky here and I used the last spin winnings loophole to win an extra £24 (winnings were capped at £20) although I didn’t realise this until halfway through the bonus round.
William Hill Casino Loophole
For those of you that don’t know, for William Hill casino/games offers, if the winnings are capped at a certain limit and you are way above that limit, you can bet your excess balance on the last spin and you will keep any winnings from that spin, circumventing the winnings cap.
For example, the winnings cap is £20, I am £50 up on the offer with one spin of wagering left to do. I then place £30 on the last spin (as you were going to lose £30 anyway) and hope that it wins. If it does, you will keep the winnings minus your bonus stake. They have close this loophole on certain sections of the website (casino?) but I know it still works on live casino and the games section of their site.
Cheltenham Festival – £180 Profit
Sports was unsurprisingly the biggest earner this month as it was Cheltenham Festival. Having been on holiday the week before I couldn’t take it off work and I had several client meetings that week so I couldn’t really take advantage of the best offers but I did manage to make a whopping £180 over the 4 days by making the bigger offers risk free and guaranteeing profit. Had I been sat on the sofa for the week I think it would have been closer to £250.
I also used the week to create my own arbs with Ladbrokes and William Hill boosts which the bookies were giving out like free candy. I had built up a monumental balance in William Hill that I didn’t want to withdraw, every single boosted arb lost, leaving me with a healthy exchange balance and a nice profit to boot.
Massive Slice Of Luck
Now onto to my massive slice of luck, you’ll notice it on the graph as a massive vertical line. It was a normal everyday run of the mill William Hill Flash Odds Price Boost (can you tell I like William Hill?) where you back and lay the same horse for a profit.
But instead of backing and laying, I backed the horse twice! No idea how this happened, I went through the usual process, back at the bookie, work out my lay stake using Oddsmonkey’s calculator, and then I thought I’d placed the lay. It just shows you one second of going onto autopilot without concentrating can cost you big time. I was looking at a loss of around £45 (without knowing since I didn’t find out what had happened until I checked the results) but instead the horse won and I netted a cool £138 for about 60 seconds of (bad) work.
There’s not much more I can say on this, I was just a very VERY lucky boy 😳. I haven’t made a mistake of that magnitude before or since but it’s made me focus even more when matching bets quickly for time sensitive offers such as this one.
Lessons hopefully learnt, we move on to April, I’m hoping to have a decent month without too many interruptions. I do have a conference to attend for 3 days at the NEC in Birmingham which will significantly hamper my 2nd week, but apart from that I should be pretty free to get on and plough through as many offers as possible. I’ll let you know how I got on in May! Click here to see Month 4’s results.