As always, if you’ve landed and don’t know what matched betting or advantage play is, you may want to head to the Matched Betting and Advantage Play explainer pages. You’ll also find everything you need to start matched betting here.
This month is what I would call a solid start to my matched betting journey. November’s matched betting profits came to £275.99. As you can see by the vertical start to the graph I hit some big offers on my first day which included both the William Hill and Ladbrokes sign up offers banking me a guaranteed £24.50 and £32.99 respectively.
November’s Matched Betting Profits Breakdown
In terms of the breakdown of the matched betting profits, the majority of the profits were made from sports offers. Advantage play only accounted for £34.94 of my earnings, a result of attempting 11 offers with an average net gain of £3.49. The biggest win being a “Wager £20 get £10 bonus” from Betfair casino. I completed the offer using Blackjack as it counted 100% towards wagering and netted a solid £19. The highest earners in terms of sports were the sign up offers mentioned above.
Total Profit: £275.99 Average Transaction Value: £5.11 Days Active: 13
Matched Betting Mistakes
As you can see it was steady progress until the 22nd where there is a funny straight line. Looking through my spreadsheet I can see I made a mistake. It was on Chelsea in the Champions League, a bet in-play offer from Betfred. I bet £10 on under 3.5 goals, and then laid the over 3.5 goals market.
If memory serves me correctly, they were playing Qarabag FK who aren’t the best of teams in the world but they also had a man sent off early on! Cue a massive goal-fest and my back bet and incorrect lay bet both losing (🙄). Luckily I had another free bet coming in from somewhere else which helped offset the loss and I was able to recover with some steady profits in the following days.
Other Lessons Learnt
But I had a bigger lesson to learn this month which was that free bets are SNR (Stake Not Returned). I had a few free £5 free bets with a few different bookmakers and I decided to punt them on what I thought were dead certs. Turns out my confidence was well placed as they all won. But when I fist pumped after seeing my result had come in, my joy soon turned to anger as I logged in to see I had won a whopping 65p and £1.11 respectively. Of course the winning bets had only returned the profits and not the original stakes (D’oh!).
Looking back now, I don’t know how I didn’t realise that this would happen, as simply entering the bets I had made on the Oddsmonkey matched betting calculator (in SNR mode) showed the results I actually achieved. Note to self, always use the calculator to reap the most profit out of my free bets! Without making any mistakes my matched betting profits would have been over the £300 mark (sigh).
Anyway, lessons learnt, pride still intact (just about), we move on to December. I know already that I won’t be doing a full month of matched betting because of the Christmas period. I will be travelling around the country seeing family and friends during the festive period so I reckon I will get 23 days in maximum but we shall see. I’ll update you in early January with my results!
See how I got on in my post December’s Matched Betting Profits.