How to make money from free bets with Matched Betting
Free bets…
Ahh, the holy grail of sports betting.
Everyone loves free stuff, but none more so than free bets. The bookies actually giving their customers something. That’s unheard of. It’s usually them taking all our hard earned cash and stashing it away in their own pockets.
What are free bets?
Free bets are as simple as they sound. The bookie credits your account with a certain amount of money, usually in return for something. This can be as simple as opening a new account or staking a certain amount on a horse race.
It’s very unlikely you’ll be given a free bet without first having to qualify for it. The bookies aren’t stupid, giving out free money is a false economy.
Different types of free bet
There are numerous types of free bet the bookies hand out to different customers. It’s easier if we split these into two categories. Sign up offers and reload offers.
Sign up offers
These are free bets which are given to new customers as an extra incentive to sign up. The aim is to get as many new accounts opened as possible. Below is the current Coral sign up offer.
Coral offer new customers a £20 free bet when they sign up and stake £5.
For new gamblers this offer is incredibly enticing. The thought of receiving a free bet before you’re even a member draws a lot of folk in. People often think ‘all I need to do is stake £5 and Coral will give me a £20 free bet. How easy is that.’
It is easy, it’s designed to be. That way the bookies know they’ll get you signed up and add you to their ever expanding customer list.
Each bookie spends £1000s offering and advertising these free bets. It’s in their interest to do so. Each customer is potentially worth £100s. Granted, there are plenty of occasional bettors, people who sign up and stake a tenner just on the Grand National each year, but it only takes a few high-rollers to cancel these punters out.
These free bets are advertised everywhere, across a whole range of medium, from the TV to local billboards. You can’t seem to get away from them.
However, that is all part of the bookies master plan.
Reload offers
These free bets are given to existing customers to incentivise them to keep betting. The bookies don’t want inactive accounts. It just adds to their costs. They want bettors winning and losing money, because in the long run bookies know they’ll win.
Similar to sign up offers, the bookies want something in return before they hand out free bets. So, you’ll have to qualify for your bonus before you can use it. Below is a typical example of a reload offer which I’ve made up.
Bet £20 on the Leicester City vs Man Utd game and Ladbrokes will give you a £20 free bet to use during the next week.
In this example, you simply need to bet £20 on the stated game and Coral will credit you with a £20 free bet which you can use on any market during the next week.
There are hundreds of reload offers, similar to the example above, available on a daily basis on a large range of sports and events. You have to be living under a rock to miss these offers!
Why bookies offer so many free bets?
Ever since the bookies started handing out free bets so readily this question has come up time and again.
The answer really comes down to the immense competition in the gambling industry. Once an incredibly monopolised market with a just a few high-street brands such as Coral, Ladbrokes and William Hill, there are now hundreds of online bookies all competing for the same business.
Thanks to advancements in technology, barriers to entry have been severely reduced meaning it’s easier than ever to start a new bookie. This has led to no end of online bookies sprouting up. However, this has its own impacts on the industry. One being the huge competition between bookies.
Bonus culture of modern gambling
It becomes a lot harder for companies to gain new customers and therefore they have to do more to open new accounts.
Ben Cleminson, from Square in the Air, says bookies are willing to spend £300 on average to gain one new customer. A high proportion of this ends up in offering and advertising free bets. This goes to show the extent bookies have to go to to open new accounts in the modern world of online gambling.
There are people and bookies, believe it or not, who completely disagree with the bonus culture of modern gambling. Geoff Banks, who runs his own bookmaking website, said:
‘I don’t approve of free bets or bonus offers. From a gambling perspective I think it’s an unfair inducement to gamble. But to open any new accounts these days you have to offer these inducements.’
From a bookie’s point of view, it seems it’s incredibly difficult to get anywhere in the industry without offering free bets and bonuses to entice customers. Punters have to come to expect these offers and without them they are likely to bet somewhere else, where there are offers available.
I think this bonus culture is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future unless the Government comes down heavily on the betting industry, like they did on the Tobacco industry. With the latest triennial betting review been and gone, it’s fair to say free bets are going to be around for a while.
Other types of bonuses
It’s not just free bets the bookies use to incentivise new and existing customers. There are numerous different promotions and bonuses the bookies use, such as price boosts, enhanced odds, risk free bets etc.
We go into the details of these different promotions in other articles and within our tutorials section in our members area.
If I said there was a way to make a guaranteed, risk and tax free profit from these most of these promotions and bonuses, you probably wouldn’t believe me…
But there is!
Matched betting and free bets
Matched betting is a way of making a guaranteed profit from bookies free bets and promotions. It’s one of the most popular risk free betting techniques out there and is still growing at unprecedented rates. There are 1000s of people using this method to make a second income online.
With the huge number of free bets available, it’s a shame to waste them. With no risk matched betting, we can profit from these offers on a daily basis.
How matched betting works
You’re probably wondering how anything related to betting can be risk free. I had the same confusion when I first came across matched betting back in 2015. However, after looking into the technique in more detail, I soon realised how this method worked.
Matched betting is based around a concept called back and lay betting. This involves placing two bets on the same market. We place one bet at a traditional bookie and one at a betting exchange. These two bets effectively cancel each other out meaning we don’t win or lose any money, regardless of the outcome of our bets. Obviously this is great when we are qualifying for our free bets. We then use the same process when we’re using our free bet, allowing us to make a risk free profit.
We use a matched betting calculator to help work out the required stakes for each matched bet. Unlike other matched betting sites we keep our calculator free for anyone to use, allowing you to work out your own bets.
For more information about using the calculator and making the most out of this brilliant tool you can sign up to The Sure Bettor. It’s free to join us!
Wider love for Matched Betting
Here at The Sure Bettor we love matched betting, but we’re not the only ones. There are plenty of other sites out there who document the success of matched betting. Below are just a few examples.
Finding all these free bets
With so many free bets available across a huge range of bookies, finding these offers is not easy. To maximise your profit from matched betting, you need to complete as many of these offers as possible.
This is where using a matched betting service comes in handy. Here at The Sure Bettor we have a team of people constantly scouring the Internet for the latest and greatest matched betting offers. Once we’ve found them, we post them to our site for our members to work through. Each offer has an in-depth tutorial, written by our matched betting experts, walking you through the whole process. You’re always in safe hands.
Making money with matched betting and free bets
I’m still waiting for someone to tell me of a better way to make money online. Matched betting has it all. It’s incredibly profitable, you can do it anywhere and it’s easy to learn.
But don’t just take my word for it. Why not try our free trial today and see for yourself how brilliant this method is. You’ll even make some money during your free trial period.
We’ll see you on the inside very soon.