Lightspeed Panel

Money for Surveys

You may remember I signed up for a bunch of survey sites a while back. I haven't mentioned them much because as a rule I tend not to qualify for surveys. Apparently I'm not in many companies target demographic.

I have finally managed to complete enough surveys to see some cash though. I've done 5 surveys with Lightspeed Panel and have been payed £5 for my trouble. The easiest way to get the cash is via pay pal, but you can get slighty more cash for your points if you get amazon vouchers.

Second Quidco Payout

Quidco comes through again

Received another payout for quidco to my bank account and this ones a beauty. £122.50 has been transferred into my bank account. At the moment I only expect £50 or so next month, I'll have to do another trawl and see if I can spot any new deals.

Bet365 £25 Mobile Offer

The Deal

Bet365 offer a refund of 50% on the average stake of your 1st 5 bets by mobile phone, up to a maximum of £25. So you download their phone application, place 5 £10 bets using it. Once you're done you send an email to Bet365 to claim the bonus and they credit your account by £25.

The Result

I'm backing the same result more than once lately to avoid unneccessary effort, so I found 3 matched bets and did 2 of them twice. I was fortunate enough to find an arb which meant that I actually made a profit on my qualifying bets of £0.28.

I then sent an email to Bet365 asking for the bonus and they credited my account with £25 the next day. Including the small profit on the qualifying bets the profit on this deal was £25.28. This was a very easy offer to work through, I hope the next bookie is as good!

Finished the Bet365 £200 Bet Basket

Raced through the last 2 free bets

I was working harder than I needed when placing qualifier bets by trying to find a different match for each one. I decided to try and make it easy for myself and have finished up by placing two seperate £50 bets on any match I found. This didn't cause any problems and saved me a lot of effort.

I've placed and been paid for the 2 £50 SNR bets. I made £40.62 from the first and £41.67 for the second. The big suprise was that I also made a profit of £2.53 on the last 10 qualifying bets. This gain came as a result of some sizeable arbs on 3 of the bets. I had 2 £50 bets on one match that made me a £1.50 profit each and an even better £3.35 profit on a bet on scottish football bet.

Thoughts

So at the end of the offer I'm now £174.32 richer! I found Bet365 a great bookie, deposits and withdrawals were processed very quickly and finding matches is relatively easy.

One thing to be aware of is that there is no notification that you have qualified for a free bet. I ended up making one extra qualifying bet than I needed to which probably cost me about £1. Just keep track of how many bets you've made and this one is easy to avoid.

To make the most from a SNR offer you want to have at least 6 times the bonus amount so you can place the bet and then lay it off  at odds of 7 or less. This means you'll want a float of at least £300 to make the best of this deal. A larger float will be more convenient as you'll spend less time transfering cash about.

Finished the WBX £25 Deal

Asta la vista, WBX

I've moaned a few times about the difficulties I found getting through the WBX offer, but I managed to finish the requirement while working through the 888 Sport bet basket. 

WBX's less than excellent liquidity and prices made it difficult to get the most from the free bet. I ended up taking a match at odds of 8.2 at WBX against a lay of £20.37 at odds of 8.6 at BetDaq. I made a net profit on this of £19.76, but I had to pay £1.20 to deposit cash at WBX in the first place. So the final return from WBX is £18.56.

Thoughts

The liquidity and prices at WBX aren't great, I found it a pain to have my cash tied up in there and had difficulty finding a decent match. The offer is still well worth doing, but I'd recommend saving it until you've got a float big enough that you won't mind having £100 or so sitting in there. With a little luck you'll also be better than I currently am at finding matches by then and will find the whole thing a lot easier.

Finished the 888Sport Bet Basket

£50 Bet Basket Complete

I qualified for and placed the last £20 SNR bet from 888Sport yesterday. I got the back bet in at odds of 7 and layed at BetDaq for £16.74 at odds of 7.2. I won at the exchange to net £16.24 profit from the bet.

The overall profit from the deal (including qualifying bets) was £23.83. This would have been £14 higher if not for the mistakes I made along the way, but I've learnt a few lessons from it. With the offer complete I've zeroed my balance at 888Sport and will now look for my next target 

Another free £50 from Bet365

What I've been up to

I've been continuing to work through the deals at Bet365, 888Sport and WBX. The road has been a little rocky this last week, but I've got through it ok and have learnt to be extra cautious.

BetDaq

On the advice of the bookies info spreadsheet. I sent an email to BetDaq asking questions about commission. They quickly responded to inform me that my commission would be reduced to 3% for a couple of months. Keeping the costs down means more profit so this is a bonus and I recommend anyone who has a BetDaq account does the same.

888Sport

There's bad news. You may recall I'd mistakenly made a lay bet on the wrong match. I figured I could lock in a loss of £8 or so and move on, but instead I decided to try and be a little tricky. I backed for £15 worth a 888Sport as I figured I might as well get another qualifying bet out of it and the odds there were only slightly worse than betfair. I then figured I'd hold off placing a back bet for the remaining amount require equalise my profit/loss until after the game had started. I thought that after the game had run a few minutes the price might improve. I couldn't have been more wrong, Arsenal scored very early and the price dropped to nothing. The end result was me being down £14 instead of £8. I was obviously gambling in the hopes of recouping the losses from my mistake and I paid the price. Never again!

This mistake means that my profit from 888Sport is reduced to just £7.59. I take consolation from knowing I'm only a bet away from the final free £20 bet so I'll still end up ahead by a reasonable amount.

Bet365

Better news from Bet365. I survived unscathed from my error with them and earned my 2nd £50 free bet. Betfair and BetDaq had the same lay price so I matched most of it BetDaq. I couldn't get the whole bet on there so I filled the remaininng £5 or so at Betfair. The bet won at Bet365 at odds of 6.5 for a profit of £41.18. I almost feel sorry for them as it seems a lot of my bets with them have been winning.

There's another free £50 bet waiting for me after another 5 bets. Onwards!

WBX

I managed to finish the requirement for the free bet so now I just need to grab the cash. Once again low liquidity is causing problems and I'm having trouble hitting the 80% retained target I've set myself for SNR bets. Once I've found a decent match and grabbed their cash I'll be walking away from this crowd.

Cho Yung Cashback

The Deal

It's been a while since I've done one of these, so I thought a quick flick through the cashback offers was in order. WePromiseTo are offering £7.50 for taking up the 14 day trial of a diet tea call Cho Yung Tea. I had a quick look at the other cashback sites and they are offering a higher cashback, but only payout if you don't cancel before 18 days. At around £35 / month I have no plans to hang around till after the trial has expired.

You do have to fork out £1.99 for postage, so the profit on this one will be £5.51. I signed up and gave over my details. I stuck a task in my rememberthemilk account to remind me to cancel in 7 days from now. I didn't even bother lying about my weight, the site tells me my weight is healthy, but tea will make me even healthier!

If you fancy taking advantage of it yourself, why not help me out and sign up via my WePromiseTo referal link, which will make me a cool £1 per person.

Another free bet from 888 Sport

Working my way through the offers

I've been working on the 888 Sport offer, the Bet365 offer and the WBX offer over the last week or so. The WBX offer in particular has been hard to get to because I've had issues getting a decent match at that exchange.

888Sport

Nine £15 bets were required at 888 Sport to get the 2nd free £15 bet and I hit the target just before easter.  I made a net loss of £3.16 on the 9 bets, or around £0.36 per bet. I could have done a lot better than this if I hadn't taken some less than ideal matches against WBX as well as a blunder I made last week that meant I lost £0.93 on a single bet (More on this later).

Having aquired my free bet I stuck it on a football match at odds of 9 for both back and lay. The high odds meant I kept £12.74 of the free bet. Netted against the cost to earn the free bet I've made a profit of £9.58.

I'll earn another free bet of £20 after I've placed another 5 bets and then my time with 888 Sport will be over.

My blunder

I mentioned earlier that I made some mistakes last week. Everyone seems to say that you'll make a mistake eventually, but I was trying hard to be the exception. Unfortunately this was not to be as I made 2 mistakes in quick succession.

The first was when I was working through the 888 Sport offer. I placed a bet on the Arsenal v Villareal game and layed it off at betfair. The alarm bells should have been ringing, as I had found what I thought was a reasonably large arb of £0.60 on a £15 bet. It wasn't until after I'd placed both the back and lay that the penny dropped that Arsenal would play Villareal twice. I had placed a back bet on the first match and then layed on the second!

So I had 2 bets to fix. The first was easy. I placed a lay bet on the correct match for my 888 Sport bet to lock in a £0.92 loss. Not great, but no disaster. The lay bet is a much bigger problem though. The spread between back and lay prices at betfair were very large (another warning sign I missed) so just backing the same market would lock in a loss of about £8.00. I didn't want to take the hit, so I've just bided my time hoping the odds would improve. The game plays tonight and not much has changed. I will give it a bit more time before locking in such a large loss, but I think I'm going to be left without much choice. I'm trying to treat it as a lesson and be grateful that I didn't make this mistake with a much larger bet.

And another one

Despite this error being fresh in my mind I then went on to make another mistake. I'm also working through the Bet365 offer and found a nice match against a market at BetDaq. I didn't have quite enough cash in my BetDaq account so I topped up another £10 from my MoneyBookers account. Everything seemed to work fine so I placed my back bet and then went to lay at BetDaq. Insufficient Funds! Turns out that BetDaq take around 24hrs to process MoneyBookers transactions. I gave them a phone call and they got the money credited to my account, but by this time the market had dried up. There just wasn't enough money in there for me to match the bet! This left me in the situation where if my back bet won I'd be up around £10 and if it lost I'd be down by the same amount. That's not matched betting, it's gambling!

Fortunately the bet did win at Bet365 which was a let off for me. It did however teach me a couple of lessons. The most obvious one is don't use MoneyBookers for BetDaq, not only are they slow but they also charge you money for it! The more general lesson was to be absolutely sure you have the funds ready to make the lay bet before placing the back bet. It also highlights that caution is needed when betting in low liquidity markets.

WBX and Bet365

This post has gotten pretty long so I'll wrap up. Just a quick update on where I'm at with the other 2 deals I'm pursing at the moment.

I'm very close to finishing off the WBX requirement. Another £15 bet should cover it, then I'll take my money and run.

I placed the last bet required to qualify for my 2nd Bet365 free £50 bet about half an hour ago. I'll match the free bet when it comes through and then continue on to the next free bet.

Stan James Mobile Offer

The Deal

Stan James sent me an email recently offering me a free £10 SNR bet for placing a £10 bet on my mobile phone at any time in April.

The Result

I found a good match on football with back odds of 2.25 and a lay of £10.47 at odds of 2.2 at betfair. This won at Stan James for a net loss of £0.06.

It took a day or two for the free bet to show up in my account. When it did I placed it at odds of 8 and layed for £9.03 at odds of 7.8. The lay bet won for a £8.58 return.

I'm liking Stan James, their offers are easy to do and finding a match has been easy. Net profit on this offer was  £8.52. In total Stan has made me £55.10.

Quidco Pays Out

Good News
Remember all those cashback deals I was doing a while back? Well they haven't been quick, but they're finally starting to turn into cash. Received my first payment of £13 yesterday.

The deals that have turned into cash are

Audible
eMusic
Napster UK

Hopefully next months payout will be even more!

Bet365

The Deal
Bet365 are offering a free £50 bet after you place a qualifying bet of £50 at odds of 1.5 or more. They then offer another free £50 bet after you've placed another 5 £50 bets up to a max of 3 times. So a possible £200 on offer.

The Plan
I'll claim the first free bet and then start working my way through the remaining 15 bets required. I want that full £200!

The Result
Took a while to get this one going. Bet365 are pretty keen on validating your account, but less clear on exactly what's required. I ended up typing my passport number in on one of account pages and that sorted it out.

I then placed my first £50 bet on football with back odds of 1.66 and layed it at betfair with a stake of £50.92 at odds of 1.68.

Before this game had even been played I got an email telling my free bet was ready. I found a great match up with back odds of 12 and a lay of £48.03 at odds of 11.5 at BetDaq. To cover this bet I needed a wopping £500, but I couldn't resist the odds so I quickly deposit some extra funds.

The free bet game finished before the qualifier and won at BetDaq, allowing me to pull my extra float back out straight away, along with the initial deposit I opened the account with. All the cash at BetDaq is now winnings and I look forward to doing the same at Betfair soon.

The qualifier won at Bet365 and made me a net loss of £1.63. Netted against my winnings on the free bet I made a profit of £44.00. Not bad at all!

The Follow Up
I've made a start on getting the next free and have placed a £50 bet at 3.1 against a lay of £52.24 at odds of 3. This will give me a net loss of £0.09 and leave me with 4 bets to go until my next free £50 bet.

WBX and 888Sport
I'm still pushing on with the qualifiers for WBX and 888Sport. WBX is the real ball and chain here, it's not easy to find a decent match with them. I'm halfway through the £100 requirement though, so I'll stick with it.

I'm laying off some of the 888Sport bets against other exchanges and finding some decent matches. Even made a £0.20 net profit off one of the matches (which makes me think warm thoughts about arbing later on when I've got a bigger float). Currently 5 bets in, so 4 to go before another £15 free bet.