As always if you need a reminder of the reasons behind this matched betting challenge have a read of the about me page. If you’re new here you may want to head to either my Matched Betting or Advantage Play explainer pages to familiarise yourself with the concepts.
What a cracking start to my matched betting challenge journey! My best month to date by an absolute mile, although not entirely surprising considering I was completing my first full month with no holidays or downtime. I managed to only miss a few days, getting offers completed on 28 days out of the available 31.
I’ve gone way over my target for this first month (£416.67) which gives a nice buffer going forward in case I have some bad months or have a reduced amount of time to complete offers because of work commitments, holidays or any other engagements.
January’s Matched Betting Profit
In terms of January’s matched betting profit breakdown, I nearly quadrupled my Advantage Play profits to £217.78 for the month with £65 (the large spike on the graph near the end of the month) coming from the one of the Virgin Games 150% deposit match offers.
Total Profit: £609.42 Average Transaction Value: £3.22 Days Active: 28
Cumulative Percentage of Overall Target: 12.19%
Cumulative Profit: £609.42
Under/Over Monthly Target: + £192.75
Casino Offers
For those of you who don’t know Virgin belongs to group of websites run by a company called Gamesys who give out 150% bonuses (sparingly) on £40 deposits with only 2x wagering! A quick 120 hands of Blackjack later and I walked away with £65 for 20 minutes’ work, not bad!
In terms of other big casino wins, I rinsed William Hill Casino for £80 over the space of two days with their “Wager £20 get £10 bonus on Jackpot King Slots” offer. I used Vikings of Fortune both times, which seems to have fairly consistent bonus rounds which made wagering a doddle. Or so I thought.
After what seemed like this slot was a license to print money, I promptly lost £20 the next day with a £20 deposit match offer on William Hill Games. After receiving two bonus rounds early (as had been the pattern before) I then proceeded to receive not even a decent wild win (never mind a bonus round!) over the next 400 spins! That’s a good way to teach me to never get attached to a slot again!
Sports Offers & Price Boosts
Sports formed the rest of my profit and is still by far my biggest earner. The hybrid bet and spin offers from Ladbrokes and Coral are still nice earners although now you no longer get a £5 bonus, just spins on Frankie Dettori’s Magic 7 now. A decent amount of bet and get offers sent to my inbox before the weekend’s games helped keep things ticking over nicely as well as two £25 free bets from Betway just for depositing.
As I mentioned last month, something that has really become a great income booster lately are price boosts. I think these are going to form a key part of my profits for this matched betting challenge going forward. For example, on the night of the Carabao Cup semi-final between Arsenal v Chelsea I made £50 from boosts alone, and underlaying likely events (such as Hazard scoring) really helps maximise profits.
Matched Betting Mistakes
Mistakes for the month, again only one and this was actually on a slot not a sports offer. I opened up a slot to wager for the “Wager £1 for 5 free spins tomorrow” offer from William Hill Games. I set the bet to 20p but then it had something called a “bet bonus” which read like it would give me the chance to win £20 but reduce the amount of bonus rounds/wilds so I gave it a click to see what happened.
How wrong I was…it was bet £20 not win £20!!! The slot went on a mini auto-play and rifled through 5 spins returning me a whopping £1.60, and took £20 off me for the trouble! Lesson learnt, ignore all slot changes and just play the normal game, at least I know what I’m doing then (I think)! It was hard to lose £18 in the blink of an eye 😢.
But we move on, ego-bruised, on to February which will form month 2 of my matched betting challenge. It’s my birthday on the 6th and we have booked ourselves a short break away so I know already that I’ll be missing 4 days or so in advance. I am also attending a conference in Loughborough towards the end of the month for work but this takes place on two days (Wednesday/Thursday) which are traditionally quiet days for me matched betting-wise. Hopefully this won’t impact too much on my profits but regardless, I can’t see me being anywhere near the dizzy heights of this month! I’ll report back in March with my progress. Click here to see Month 2’s results.