You’ve done it, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it. We’ve gone down to the local bookies, or used our favourite betting app to on a Saturday morning to take advantage of an accumulator offer which we think is a “dead cert”. Knowing that even if one team lets you down you will get a free bet to cover your losses.
Yet roll around Saturday evening and a few teams have let you down badly, leaving your special accumulator offer ruined, and you nurse your loss until you do it all over again next weekend thinking, “well surely that can’t happen again!”.
In this guide we are going to look at how we can use matched betting to secure a profit from every accumulator offer you can think of.
If you are new here, make sure to read up on what matched betting is here so you are up to speed.
How to Profit from Every Accumulator Offer
There are a few methods with which you can profit from accumulator offers, however there is only one way in which to take a guaranteed profit. I’ll run through the riskier methods first so you understand how they work and then move on to my preferred risk-free method.
In order to take advantage of these easy offers you will need to be using Oddsmonkey’s Acca Finder.
Lay Sequential
This is where you will use the Acca Finder to build an accumulator in which the all the matches take place after each other. The hope is that either they all win leaving you in profit or one team will let you down, leaving you with a small qualifying loss and a big free bet up to £25.
Of course this not risk free as if two teams let you down you will end up with a qualifying loss and nothing to show for it. Sometimes if the odds move against you this can end up being quite hefty.
The method is simple and the same for almost every strategy we will discuss below. You lay before the start of each match and then record the result when it is finished as this will decide the next step.
Once you record one loss in your accumulator you stop laying and hope the remaining teams you backed win. Leaving you with a qualifying loss of at least a few pounds but with a bet of up to £25 depending on which offer you are completing.
In the screenshot below of the hypothetical accumulator offer we placed with McBookie (remember this bookie is only available to residents of Scotland) Celtic failed to beat Kilmarnock and so we stop laying and pray that Gremio and Bayern Munich can get the job done.
In scenario A below, Gremio were unable to fight off a late comeback from Ceara who managed to secure a late equaliser (I’ve got a wild imagination, I know). This leaves us with two losses and our quest to get the free bet refund is over. We skulk away with a fairly heavy loss of £4.21. Less than ideal.
In scenario B Gremio destroy Ceara and Bayern sweep aside bottom of the table Augsburg to go top of the table ahead of Dortmund (ok I’ll stop now), leaving us with that same loss of £4.21, except this time we’ve got a nice fat £25 free bet to use. So after that qualifying loss and and getting an 85-90% retention on our free bet you are looking at a tasty £18ish profit for a few minutes work a day.
The issue of course is you could do 20-30 of these and there is every chance you may only get 10 refunds. But by the same token you may end up with 20 out of 30 refunds. This is why you need to do the accumulators with the highest EV (expected value) possible and hope for the best.
Some people prefer this method because the potential profits are very tempting. However, variance can bite you, and bite you hard, leaving you a large amount out of pocket.
Lay at the Start
Probably my least favourite method of them all is lay at the start. This method is the Ronseal of accumulator offers, it does exactly what it says on the tin.
You pick your accumulator offer. You build it using the Acca Finder. You back it. You then go and lay every single match in the same accumulator and hope for the best. This usually only works if you’ve got a healthy expected value. As you can see from our hypothetical offer with McBookie we would actually expect to lose money, to the tune of £1.03.
As you can see the probability is broken down in percentages, and although those figures on the right hand side looking tempting they are also very unlikely. In fact, the most likely scenario is us losing £14.26, which is not something I am interested in doing!
You can secure a guaranteed profit if the odds are good enough but in my experience so far this very rarely the case.
Lock In
This is by far my favourite method because you guarantee yourself the profit for a few minutes work each day.
It works in the same way as the lay sequential above except we continue to lay until we have TWO losses (instead of one) and we change our stakes (the Acca Finder does this for you) to ensure we walk away with a profit.
In the example below, in addition to Celtic failing to get the job done, Espanyol hang on to a battling 0-1 lead and cause a huge upset against the champions-elect Real Madrid (ok last one I promise).
This leaves us with a guaranteed profit of £4.04 no matter what any of the results are in the remaining games. Now you might think that’s nothing to write home about, and you’re fair enough in that assertion.
However, you can usually do one per day, per bookie. So let’s say you had 5 accumulators on the go per day with 5 different bookies. Using the profit figure of £4.04 that’s £20.2 profit a day. Over a 30-day month that’s over £600 guaranteed profit.
Now are you interested?
This example isn’t even the best available, you can often guarantee in excess of £6-£8 depending on which accumulator offer you go for.
Scaling Up Your Accumulator Offers
Now I know what you are thinking, 5 accas and 5 bookies sounds like a lot of work per day, but in reality it’s not as hard as you might think. Often you will be looking for the start and end of the same matches across your different bookies. Remember that they often copy each other’s odds, so it’s likely you will be constructing very similar accumulator across each bookmaker.
In terms of remembering the matches, simply set an alarm or reminder on your phone for the end of the match or set up push notifications from sites such as FlashScores, check the result and take the next required step.
Like I said, it is likely that you may be taking that step at 3 or 4 bookies at once, cutting the down the amount of time you need to devote to this. 2 minutes later you’ve layed the necessary amounts, and set a reminder for the next matches and so it goes on.
Having said of all that I’m not going to lie to you; these offers do require concentration and focus.
It is crucial that as soon as those alarms go off you go to your laptop or phone and take the next steps. It is easy to get distracted and muddled up with which bookmaker you have what match with. Although it is only a few minutes per day, you better make sure you are 100% switched on otherwise you run the risk of losing your entire back stake.
It also goes without saying that you need to make sure to keep detailed records in the “My Accas” section of the Acca Finder or within your own custom spreadsheet, that way you can keep tabs on every stage of each accumulator offer as it progresses.
REMEMBER: For Lay Sequential and Lock In methods make sure that none of your matches overlap or play at the same time.
What to Do If the Odds Change
This will happen to you fairly often and there’s nothing you can really do about it. But one thing I will say is it goes both ways, so if the odds drift on one team and your profit starts to look very small, it can be saved something like a star player such as Cristiano Ronaldo returning from injury to make the Juventus bench and drastically shortening their odds (ok, I lied).
It’s a case of swings and roundabouts, but it is something that you need to be aware of before you start doing these offers on a regular basis.
A Word on “No-Lay Accas”
You will see this term banded about the Oddsmonkey forums and there is probably whole thread dedicated to this topic somewhere.
The method is simple, place an accumulator with a high EV and hope for the best. The idea is that they will win much more than they lose and you end up with a nice profit at the end of it all, without having to dedicate anywhere near as much time.
Here’s my problem with them.
Remember at the top of this guide, I described what I used to do and probably what all of your mates do every weekend. Lump a chunk of change on an accumulator that’s (in their opinion) a certainty to come through.
You may be picking specific teams that have a fantastic EV combined but you are still essentially doing the same thing as those mugs on Saturday morning. Whilst I have no problem with accruing bags of EV and riding the variance when things aren’t going your way with casino offers, I don’t have the same faith when it comes to football matches.
With casino offers you are just spinning against a computer code, there is no human element. But on a football pitch anybody can beat anybody, and what’s more, it happens all the time. You may be able to rack up some EV but it will take you months to get the same amount as you can from casino offers and a lot of football matches aren’t priced at their “true” odds, meaning you’re not racking up their “true EV”.
There are bucket loads of human factors which skew the odds and teams are often priced without complete information which doesn’t give you the true value.
Don’t believe me? Sit and watch the odds of two teams in a cup competition on an exchange where one is a big favourite and the other team is a big outsider.
Take a note of their prices in the morning and then wait until about an hour or so before kick-off. Notice what happens to the odds when the teams are announced. If it’s the league cup and a favourite fields a very weak team their odds will drift dramatically, and if their strongest line up shows up, they will come in like a steam train.
People trade on these price differences for a living so they are not insignificant!
Upsets in football happen on a daily basis. Results that should never happen take place nearly every weekend, in every football league around the world. It’s why we love the sport so much, because on that specific day, anybody can win.
Conclusion
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading this guide and learnt a lot about what it takes to get regular guaranteed profits from accumulator offers along the way.
As I’ve said before, they do require organisation and intense concentration for a few minutes a day. But I think you’ll agree making a guaranteed £5 for a two minutes work a day is worth it. That’s £150 per hour!
If you enjoyed this guide you may want to give my anti-gubbing guide or my guide on how to maximise price boosts a read.