Many bookmakers offer free bets to encourage people onto their sites during particular sporting events or to attract new customers.Matched Betting is a technique used to ensure you keep most of this money.

What people often do with free bets is to try to bet on a 'dead cert', or to take a flyer at high odds. You can get lucky this way, However it is possible to use these free bets to make very easy free money, using a technique known as back/lay bet matching. As a general rule, you can get 95-100% of the free bet amount as real cash for bets where the stake is returned, and about 75% where the stake is not returned. This way, you win every time! It does take a little bit of getting your head around at first, but is well worthwhile as literally hundreds of pounds of real hard cash are available very easily.

So let's start with a word of explanation on how this all works.

When you make a bet with a bookmaker, you place a stake on an event at particular odds. For example if you were to put £10 on a bet on Team A winning a football match at 2/1 (decimal odds 3.0), if you were to win the bet you would receive a total of £30 back, i.e. your stake of £10 plus the bookie’s £20. However if you lost, the bookie would gain your £10 and you would receive back nothing.

Now imagine you as the bookmaker. In this case you could also offer the same odds to someone for the same outcome (team A to win the match), gaining £10 if the punter loses, but risking £20 of your own money. This is known as 'laying' a bet.

So if you were both to bet on the event and act as a bookmaker at the same time, something interesting happens: whatever the outcome, the bet side and the lay side of the bet cancel out completely:

Outcome 1 (bet won - Team A wins):

You win £30, i.e. your stake of £10 plus £20 profit.
Bookmaker loses £20

If you are both the punter and the bookmaker, your total profit is:
(£30-£10) - £20 = £0

Outcome 2 (bet lost - Team A does not win (draws or loses))

You lose £10, i.e. your stake.
Bookmaker gains £10,

If you are both the punter and the bookmaker, your total profit is:

£10 - £10 = £0

So you can see that in both cases, both the lay and the bet cancel each other out. You neither lose nor gain money.

Obviously this is useless for normal betting, but it is extraordinarily useful when going after bookmaker’s bonuses, as it allows you to place a completely risk free qualifying bet on any event you can both bet on and lay a bet on. And then if you repeat the same thing with a free bet stake, you will always magically come out with a profit that is roughly equal to the free bet stake – you can prove this to yourself by working out the profit and loss on both sides of a free bet. Taking the same odds as an example and assuming a £10 free bet.

Outcome 1 (Team A wins):

You bet the free bet of £10 at 3.0. Return is £30 with no outlay to you. On the lay side, your loss is £20, as before. Thus overall profit = £30 - £20 = £10.


Outcome 2 (bet lost - Team A loses or draws)

Your loss on the bet side is zero (as the bet was free). You gain the punter's stake of £10 on the lay side.

So regardless of the outcome, you have made £10.

Now in practice this is rarely quite as neat as the example. To lay bets, you use betting exchanges, and these generally never offer lay odds which are the same as those at bookies. Also there is a commission of between 1% to 5% payable on winnings at the bet exchange. Even so, it’s easy to use the technique to qualify for a free bet with a very small loss, and then to match out most of the free stake money without any risk at all.

The other slight complication is that sometimes free bet offers do not return the stake with winnings. This alters the calculations a little, but you can still make guaranteed money by looking for events with relatively high odds (above 7.0) and a close match for a lay. You should be able to clear about 75% of the free bet amount.

Once you have picked you first betting offer the first step is to check the Terms and Conditions. Find out whether stakes are returned with free bets, and whether there is a bet-through requirement before you can withdraw the bonus (for example you might have to bet deposit and bonus 3x through before it can be withdrawn - in this case you could try to arrange the bet so that you were more likely to lose at the bookie to avoid having to make 3 matched bets to extract the cash - since you lose a little of the free money each time it's best to minimise the number of bets you make to withdraw it).

If necessary e-mail customer services to ask, or post to ask on the newcomers thread. I usually find that the best approach when dealing with customer services is to present three options, i.e. stakes are not returned with winnings; stakes are returned with winnings and may be withdrawn; stakes are returned with winnings but can't be immediately withdrawn, and have customer services tell you which one is correct.

Now sign up to the bookie with the offer. Keep a record of your username and password and the offer you are going for (in three months if you get a follow up offer you'll need to remember this, and it's very easy to forget what offers you have used when you’ve been doing this for a while). If possible, set your preferences to decimal odds (i.e. 3.25) as it’s much easier to compare these at different sites.

Also sign up to a betting exchange. There are several of these: the most popular is Betfair, where you pay a 5% commission on net winnings (1% on some markets). A betting exchange is a gambling website acting as a broker between parties for the placement of bets. The concept is similar to that of a stock exchange or a futures exchange, where in this case the commodity being traded is a bet, rather than a stock or futures contract. Most betting on a betting exchange is a form of fixed odds gambling. So when you are laying a bet on the exchange you are in effect betting against someone else who has offered up a certain amount of money at those odds.

Then download my bet matching spreadsheet, which you can find here

You are now ready to look for and make the qualifying bet. The aim of the game here is to find a bet that you can match with a ‘lay’ at the betting exchange so that you lose the minimum amount of money.

I use football, and find the best time to look for these is 3 or 4 hours before the match, but other sports are just as good - horse racing is best avoided at first at least as odds change very quickly and there are some odd rules (Rule 4 in particular) which can screw things up if they don't apply equally at both bookmakers. There’s a sticky explaining horse racing on the main board.

Do make sure that the rules at each bookie are the same, i.e. football matches results tend to apply over 90 minutes plus injury time but not extra time; sometimes rules about tennis if there is an injury are different. Don't rush yourself into making a bet until you are confident about this, and if in doubt ask on this board.

What you need to look for is backing odds (at Coral) and 'lay' odds (at Betfair). Lay odds are the ones in pink boxes at Betfair when using the full view. The first time you do this it might take a while, but it's worthwhile getting a good one. For example let's assume you can back Liverpool to draw at Boro at 3.25, and can lay the same outcome at 3.45 at Betfair.

It's important to realise that you don't choose opposing outcomes. For example if you were to back Liverpool to beat Boro, you lay Liverpool to beat Boro too NOT Boro to beat Liverpool. This is because when laying bets, you are effectively acting as the bookmaker, so you are in effect gambling on that outcome NOT happening. This takes a bit of getting your head around at first, but the important thing to remember is to back and lay the same thing precisely.

If you load up the spreadsheet, you'll see you can enter a free stake amount. Enter 10.00 for £10. There is no stake forfeit on a qualifying bet, so enter the Stake Forfeit as 0.0. The back odds are 3.25, and the lay odds are 3.45. There is no commission at the backing bookmaker, so enter 0 for this, but your commission at the exchange must be entered (if using Betfair, the commission is 5%)

The spreadsheet will then work out the numbers for you. You will see that a lay stake of £9.50 will be highlighted, and the 'lay risk' will be calculated as £23.28. Whatever happens with the result of the event, you will have £9.22 returned, i.e. you will lose 78p. The ‘lay risk’ is the amount of money that is required in your betfair account to pay out the other person should you ‘lose’ your bet at Betfair.

On the betting exchange lay odds you will see a number in pounds, which is the amount of stake money actually available at the betting exchange. Make sure this is much bigger than the lay stake the spreadsheet before continuing, otherwise find another event which has money available for laying.

You will now need to deposit your £10 at Coral, and deposit an amount greater than your lay risk at the betting exchange. I usually deposit a fair bit more than necessary at the exchange in case odds change and you may need to recalculate the lay at higher odds, requiring more lay risk. The minimum deposit at Betfair is £10. BEAR IN MIND THAT CREDIT CARD DEPOSITS AT BETFAIR HAVE A CHARGE OF 3% - USE A DEBIT CARD IF POSSIBLE.

You now need to place your bets. Be extremely careful here, as mistakes can be costly. First place the bet at Coral, but do not confirm it - leave the window open at the final stage. Then click on the relevant lay odds at the exchange, and enter the value of £9.50 into the stake box - the exchange should calculate your risk at £23.28 or so. Now return to Coral and confirm your bet, then back to the exchange and confirm the lay. Check your account details at both sites to make sure
(1) the right bet has been placed,
(2) the amounts are right, and
(3) you have backed and layed the same outcome (in this case a draw). If so, you can sit back and wait for the end of the event. Some time later, your free bet will be credited, and you will have an increased balance at either the bookie or betting exchange (depending on what happened in the event) of £23.28 plus £9.22 (plus any surplus deposit money).

To extract the free bet money, you simply repeat the process with another event - if there is a bet-through at the backing bookie, back something at fairly long odds in an attempt to lose (if you do happen to win, you'll just have to repeat the process until you either lose or satisfy the bet-through.

And that's all there is to it! Easy money, without having to introduce the annoying element of chance into gambling. Once you’ve learned the technique - really just a case of putting your toe into the water - you should find it a very easy way to make a good deal of money.