Wow, wow, WOW! What. A. Month. Just when I needed a big month I absolutely destroyed my previous best month (£609.42). If you wish, you can read the profit report for that month here. The combination of the arrival of the World Cup and a few big wins on casino offers saw me tip the £800 mark with a small £2.85 win from some free spins in the final few hours of the month!
As always if you need a reminder of the reasons and rules behind this challenge have a read of the about me page. To see last month’s matched betting profit visit May’s results post here.
I’ve always been one of those people who look at the monthly profit threads in Oddsmonkey and just think how on earth can I possibly make those sorts of figures. It’s weird that now I made nearly made £1,000 tax-free cash last month it wasn’t even difficult.
Ok, there have never been so many offers lumped together in one month since I started matched betting, so maybe it isn’t that surprising. But I wasn’t putting any more than 2 hours a day.
Matched Betting The World Cup
Ok so let’s start with the big one. As I mentioned at the back end of my last profit log I accrued a large amount of free bets in May that would not be credited until June. Therefore, May’s figure was a little low and this month’s profit figure is probably inflated slightly.
I used most of the free bets up in the first couple of days which got my month off to a really positive start (you’ll note from the graph that I didn’t even start until the 4th).
That flat line is then the days I spent setting up bets on outright markets that would pay every time a certain action happened. This was mostly when a certain player scored a goal I would get a free bet, but it was also a free bet every time a team won.
I went with Griezmann, Suarez, Neymar, Gabriel Jesus, Lukaku and stupidly not Harry Kane! Imagine if I had swapped Jesus with Kane! Jesus didn’t even manage one measly goal. I was so pessimistic about England’s chances before the tournament that I didn’t back him. How wrong I was.
In terms of free bets for winning the games I went with France, which since they went deep into the tournament that proved to be a good guess!
Then there was at least 3 or 4 free bets available per game. The best of which was probably Coral’s “Bet £10 get £5 Free Bet for every goal X team scores”. The first game Russia banged in 5 goals! £25 thank you very much!
After the person responsible for the offer was taken out of Coral’s office and shot at dawn the next day (not really…but possibly), they scaled back the offer and only allowed a maximum of 3 bets per game afterwards and no team really delivered.
Then there was the daily Paddy Power refunds if a certain team won, or a player scored. I think these had a roughly 80% hit rate in June, so well worth doing.
Qualifying for these bets had the added bonus of getting the Paddy Rewards £10 Free Bet every week for betting 5 x £10, something I was yet to achieve before because normally the qualifying losses would just be too high to make it worth it.
Ladbrokes had a £10 refund every day for First Goalscorer, Anytime Goalscorer, and Correct Score. I pretty much backed and layed 0-0 every time and that score never came in so that meant I could cash in on £10 in free bets every day, yes please!
Betfred, Boylesports and William Hill had decent boosts daily as well, I underlayed a few of these as well for bigger profits.
Of course the World Cup is still on-going and although the offers are now few and far between they are still making a decent chunk of my July profit so far.
Total Profit: £801.39 Average Transaction Value: £4.33 Days Active: 25
Cumulative Percentage of Overall Target: 63.66%
Cumulative Profit: £3,183.06
Under/Over Monthly Target: + £384.72
Royal Ascot
As if the World Cup wasn’t big enough, there was also one of the biggest festivals of the horse racing calendar – Royal Ascot. There were several big offers during this week.
The best one was Sky Bet who were offering £20 refund if your horse came 2nd, 3rd, 4th or even 5th!! I am annoyed to report I only hit this twice but free bets from Paddy Power and Ladbrokes helped to improve this dramatically.
There were also some incredible price boosts, and because this is such a big event the prices stayed stable on the exchanges, meaning better matches and improved profits.
I made close to a tenner just on one of the midday William Hill Flash Odd alone. To give you some context, those boosts are only usually worth £2-£3 each.
Biggest Ever Casino Win
Now those of you who follow this blog closely will already have seen the post about my biggest single casino win so far (head to the Advantage Play section of this website if you haven’t).
It was just a simple free offer. William Hill have been running a “daily scratchcard” promotion which you can do every day (obviously).
I simply scratched and received my pre-determined prize of 5 free spins on “Laser Fruit”. I opened up the slot and won nothing on the first 4 free spins. On the last spin something quite remarkable happened.
I got 3 free spins symbols pop up which meant it started a bonus round. I have had bonuses on this particular slot before that have returned pitiful amounts so I wasn’t too excited. It then went to the random wheel of spins and stopped on 40 free spins. Nice!
But as expected I didn’t really have much to write home about about ploughing through the first 30 of those bonus round spins until I had 8 spins left and I suddenly nearly filled the screen with free spins symbols. This took me back to the free spins wheel. 50 more! Now we are talking!
After a couple of huge wins during those 50, I received another 20 and played through those to end up with a grand total of £108.24. All from 5 free spins. Just shows how important it is to always accept free spins as you never know where your next big win is coming from!
But my luck didn’t stop there, after feeling the wrath of the variance gods in May, they certainly smiled on me this month! First, a simple Sky Bet “Wager £10 for a £5 Free Bet” turned in £54 in profit after a huge free spins bonus round on Jack Hammer 2.
Then I accidentally qualified for a casino bonus from Ladbrokes for betting on the World Cup. This is stated as between £2-£50 on the offer, and I received £50! A short while later (playing on premium blackjack) I was able to turn that £50 into £87!
Lessons Learnt
I think the biggest thing I will take forward into the next month is to go after absolutely everything. I had been guilty in the past of ignoring offers for small free bets (£2-£5), but June showed me that sheer volume will make these small figures soon add up.
I even had to sit down and say to myself “Look, £5 in free bets per day is £120 a month you didn’t have before the 1st of this month” (based on 80% retention – but I often get way better matches looking manually) and it seemed to do the trick.
I think the sunshine we’ve been having has just made me become more positive about life in general and I’m now constantly looking for offers to do, no matter how much profit they earn.
Looking ahead, I know July will not return anywhere near this figure and I think this will be my record month for the £500 to £5000 challenge. But we shall see, that four figure casino win may be just around the corner!
Too positive? Thought so.
I’m just really glad that I’m back on track and I am comfortably over target for the deadline of December 31st. I’m hoping for a solid month in the £500 region. Fingers crossed and I’ll let you know how I get on in August! Catch July’s results here.