What is Matched Betting?
If you have ever gambled before, then you know how talented casinos are at pretending to be generous. They will offer hundreds of dollars in ‘bonus money’ that always inexplicably disappears.
Matched betting is simply the process of extracting that bonus money and converting it to cash. In the US, where legal sports betting is still in its’ infancy, sports books offer thousands of dollars worth of sign up offers. Caesars Sportsbook, for example, offers a $1,250 risk free bet as a sign up offer. This can be converted to roughly $600 in cash in exchange for minutes of work.
Matched Betting USA
Matched betting isn’t a common practice (yet) in America, but in Europe it is an extremely well trodden path for making easy money. A simple google search will yield hundreds of articles about matched betting in Europe, forums, and an extremely active subculture. The European matched betting crowd even has its own jargon, which I will ignore for the purposes of this article.
Online gambling is still in its infancy in the U.S. and that is exactly why now is the best time to start matched betting. You may not have realized, but since the SCOTUS decision in 2018, sports betting has been growing like wildfire. Analysts expect the industry to grow by 2x, and exist in 80% of US states by 2025. As a result, US sports books have extremely generous introductory offers, and since matched betting isn’t common in America, they are extremely easy to take advantage of in comparison to offers by European books. In my gambling friendly home state of New Jersey, there are about 20 books offering sign up offers worth $9,000 in total from the sign up offers alone.
How does it work exactly?
Through sports betting. The beauty of sports betting is that there will always be multiple books offering similar odds for the same game.
In other words, you can bet on one team with one book, and bet on the opposite team with another book. In a two outcome game like tennis or baseball, where there’s two opponents and no possibility of a tie, you can place two bets in such a way that you’re not actually betting on anything at all.
Let’s do a (not so) hypothetical:
Up until very recently Betrivers a 100% deposit match up to $250, when you use the code 250MATCH.
Now imagine there is a baseball game tomorrow with odds +107 for team A against team B on Betrivers, and -110 on Betmgm for team B to beat team A.
In order to fulfill the terms and conditions of the bonus, we will bet 500 dollars (250 deposit + 250 bonus funds) on team A. Now, if team A wins you will earn 1035.
….Now what if player A loses?
In order to guarantee profit in both scenarios, we will need to hedge our bets. Open up another browser, and log into our hedge book and find the opposing bet to the same game: team B to beat team A; with this book you see the odds for this bet are -110.
In order to hedge away our risk, we will want to make sure that our return is the same in either scenario. Place your bet on player B, making sure that the payout if player B wins is $1035 IE the same as what Betrivers will pay you if team A wins. This will come out to a bet of $542.
You can arrive at the hedge amount through trial and error, but using a matched betting calculator is much more efficient. I prefer BowtiedBettor’s Matched Betting Calculators, since they include a calculator for every major promotion type and can be used to hedge bets with more than two outcomes.
Now lets look at the possibilities
If team A wins, you lose all of your money with Betmgm, but you get $1035 from Betrivers; since you only put in $792 (remember the remaining $250 was free bonus money), this means your net profit is $243. If team B wins, your money in Betrivers goes to zero, but your money betmgm is now $1035, which means that you again made over $243. No matter who wins (and remember that there are no ties in tennis), your profit is guaranteed to be between $243. Not half bad for setting up an account and doing a calculation your 8 year old brother could do.
A Word of Warning
Matched betting works 100% of the time only if you are 100% sure of EXACTLY what will happen in any given scenario; this means knowing how each books bonus policy works. Now lucky for us, books legally have to give us this information in their terms and conditions.
Make sure to read through the T&Cs of the bonus very carefully before you place any bets. Understand any play through requirements, and what exactly you need to do to unlock the bonus. The good news is since there aren’t hordes of people doing matched betting in the US, most offers are pretty straightforward compared to Europe, where they’re actively trying trip matched bettors up. I’ll go through how to read T&Cs in future articles, but for now, be cautious.