So, What is Matched Betting?
Matched betting is a technique that allows you to mathematically guarantee a profit by manipulating free bet promotions offered by sports betting companies. It's one of those things that sounds a little scammy when you first hear of it, you think "what's the catch?", or "why would a company give me free money?"
But in simple terms, that's exactly what it is. These large companies occasionally will make it possible for you to make free bets (in which its impossible to lose if you play the system right) in the hopes of making you a returning customer in the future, thus making their money back off you. It's an incredibly lucrative system for them, they make a lot more than they lose with this system. However if you know how to play the system you can end up making over $1,000 a month.
A brief overview of how this works
Lets have a look at a the welcome bonus example. These companies often offer welcome bonuses to new customers. For example you get a free bet of $30 if you bet your first $10 on some sort of sporting event, a free bet meaning non withdrawable credit essentially. Lets say for example its a football match, and team blue is playing against team red. You bet $10 of your own dollars on team red, and the odds are 50/50. Now the website gives you your free $30 bet, which you also bet on team red. You now have $40 bet on team red. Now you go to a different betting site, and you bet $40 (your own money) on team blue, odds are still 50/50. You have now spent $50 altogether of your own money. For this example we're just going to assume only two outcomes can happen, a team red or team blue victory. You can easily engineer this system to take a draw into account also but we're just trying to stick with basics for now.
So at this point if team red wins, you win your $40 dollar team red bet, returning $120 to you (You win $80 and get your $40 bet back. But you lose $40 from your blue team bet. So you net $80.
If the blue team wins, the same thing happens, you win $120 but lose $40 and net $80.
This $80 is now withdrawable. Considering you put $50 of your own money in to begin with, you have only made $30 profit. But this is still considerable amount for minimal effort.
Keep in mind the numbers are a little idealistic for this example, in real life you wouldnt have exactly 50/50 odds and you would also have to take the possibility of a draw into account, but the basic principal remains the same.
You can continue to do this for each and every betting company you can sign up for, until you've used up every welcome bonus, in which case you can switch the other promotions.
This is all completely legal and tax free, as I said betting companies make insane profits off these kinds of promotions in the long run, the house always wins.
I found this great blog a while ago which helped me when I was starting out, give it a quick read if your considering doing this.
I'm happy to answer any questions anyone has, thanks for reading!