£100 Deposit Bonus from BetAfterbet

The Deal

BetAfterBet offer a 100% deposit bonus of up to £100 for new customers. After claiming the bonus you need to wager £800 at odds of 2 or more before you can withdraw.

The Plan

I figured the way to go for a deal with a wager requirement (WR) was to lay slightly less than required to even up the returns. That way if my first bet loses I'm out for around the same loss as if I'd taken a small hit on all the required bets, but I'd have done it with a lot less hassle. If the back bet wins then I've made a little more profit for my trouble.

The WR of £800 seemed achievable, I figured I'd need a £300 float to cover the first bet and around £800 for the 2nd. Just within my current means and I was happy enough to tip in a little extra if I needed a small 3rd bet to complete the WR.

The Result

Warning, long post ahead. If you feel lazy you can skip to the summary.

BetAfterBet turned out to be a bit of a roller coaster and I risked far more than I would have liked. There isn't a huge selection of sports to choose from and the odds are often sub par. My first bet was at odds of 2.38 vs 2.42. I underlayed to take an easy £85 profit and make a meagre £5.18 profit if the back bet won.

Murphy's law being what it is I won at BetAfterBet and found myself with the better part of £500 there. This had a big affect as I realised that even at odds of 2 I'd need to add some more cash to the pot to be able to cover my next bet. I was also really struggling to find a match. The football season is mostly over and they've been my bread and butter for matches. I tried other sports but couldn't find anything that suited. When you are dropping near £500 on a bet you need a very favorable match to ensure you are losing a lot of cash on the spread.

Finally I got lucky and found a great match, 3.55 at BetAfterBet vs 3.45 at Betfair. There's still Betfair's 5% commission to consider but a loss of just £3.85 on a bet of this size was a great find. The odds were much higher than I'd have liked and I had to top up even more to cover the bet, but I was happy to have found a good match to work through a big chunk of the WR. So happy, in fact, that I didn't stop to think about underlaying.

The education continued as a last minute goal forced the draw leaving me with nearly £1700 at BetAfterBet! So much for covering it with my original float! I still had over £100 of WR left to go and my accounts at betfair and betdaq were empty. There was nothing for it but to get the bank card ready and go looking for a final match.

I hunted around looking for the final match and finally found one with 3.4 vs 3.474 at betfair. At this stage underlaying wouldn't gain me anything, so I kept it even for a £7.09 loss. I was very relieved to have gotten the WR over with and quite happy with the result. A profit of £94.24 is a great return. However my fun wasn't quite over.

I hit the withdraw funds button, put in my password and pin, only to see a 'communication error' message. I tried again with no luck. I clicked on their friendly looking live chat icon and got taken to an email form. Thinking I'd phone them up I went to the contact page and saw their number listed as 123-456-789.

To say I was concerned is an understatement. I used the form to send in a query and got a response the next day saying they needed my id before they could process a withdraw. I sent it in and then waited. And waited. I sent a few emails chasing info and was told that they were 'processing an unsually high number of withdraws', so my request may take longer than usual. That didn't exactly reassure me. I had visions of the bookie collapsing under the weight of all the bonus hunters that had signed up and me being one of the unlucky ones who lost their cash. With just shy of £1600 in there I'd be well and truly in the red.

7 days later and it has all came good though, I just got a wonderful email from moneybookers telling me about the money that was now in my account. Phew! I learnt a lesson here, the biggest one being 'be realistic about the investment required to get at a bonus.' I was fortunate that I had the extra cash or I wouldn't have been able to cover the bets needed to release the money.

The other lesson is in how to handle wager requirements. If I was doing this over (and I wouldn't unless I had a substantially larger float, I won't go at another deal like this with less than £2000) I'd look for higher odds on my back bets. This is for 2 reasons. First it improves the chances of busting out and avoiding any extra effort. Secondly, it improves the return on underlaying, meaning if you don't bust out you'll get more than just a quid or two to show for it.

The Summary

Anyway, this blog has been long. So I'll wrap up by saying that despite the nervousness I experienced, the BetAfterBet deal is a good one. I netted £94.24 and learnt a few lessons about how to deal with wager requirements. Just keep clear until you've got the funds to be comfortable doing it.

Free £50 SR bet from BetChronicle

The Deal

BetChronicle are offering a free bet equal to the value of your first bet up to £50. You can't miss it, the offer is all over their home page.

The best part of this offer is that the free bet is a stake returned (SR) bet. This is different to the usual stake not returned (SNR) bets offered by bookies in that if you win your account is credited with both the winnings and the stake.

This makes SR bets ideal for matched betting as you don't need to match the free bet at high odds and therefore don't need a large bank roll to take advantage of the offer.

The Result

I matched up my first £50 bet at 3.15 vs a lay at betfair of 3.25 for a net loss of -£3.24. The freebet was added to my account shortly after and I matched it at 2.01 against 2.06 at BetDaq which locked in £48.03 from the free bet.

So a profit of £44.79 from this one. The great part is that my maximum exposure was £50 x 3.25 = £162.50 which is a great return. This is a top deal for people new to matched betting who might struggle to find the approx £400 required to get the best return from a SNR bet of the same value.

Bet24 £12 refund on Man United v Arsenal

The Deal

Bet24 sent me an email yesterday about an offer on the Man United v Arsenal game. They offered to refund a bet of exactly £12 on either Man Utd or Arsenal provided the game was not a draw.

The Result

A refund on lose offer is basically the same as an SNR bet, so long odds give a better return. I therefore backed the big underdog, Arsenal, at odds of 6.65.

Balancing out the SNR as normal, I layed at BetDaq at 7.6 for an £8.70 profit if Arsenal or Man Utd win. I still needed to cover the draw, so I backed it at BetDaq for £2.40 at odds of 4.3. I figured this would lock in a profit of £6-£6.30.

I realised my error after the game finished as a draw and I was only up £4.37. I had forgotten to subtract the draw stake from the draw returns. Done properly I could have locked in closer to £5.80.

I'm still happy though, as this was a very low effort offer. Having no choice on the game to back meant the only work I did was a quick check to see whether BetDaq or Betfair were offering better odds and a couple of minutes calculating the lay and draw bet.

Betclick £15 Offer

The Deal

Betclick normally offer a £10 refund if your first bet loses for new accounts. Get yourself refered though and this get's bumped up to £15. There's no minimum odds or other catches. The bet should be treated as a SNR to calculate the lay bet.

The Result

A nice simple one. Stuck £15 on at odds of 6.8 at BetClick and layed at BetDaq for £12.19 at 6.8. The bet lost at the bookie, so I got my £15 back and netted £11.82 profit after commision.

If you want to get refered for this one just stick a message in the comments.

Expekt £25 or €35 Deposit Bonus

The Delay

It's been a little while since my last post. Don't worry, I haven't lost interest in material things and joined a monastery. My laptop had a serious case of the 'Blue Screen of Death' and I then went on an awesome holiday to Amsterdam.

I'm back now though, and ready to start grabbing cash again. Here's one that ticked over since I've been offline.

The Deal

Go to the Expekt site and you'll see an offer for a 100% deposit bonus of up to £25 or €35. Before you can withdraw you need to wager three times the deposit + bonus, so £150 or €210 at odds of 1.5 or more. 

The other caveat is that you cannot deposit via moneybookers, so I signed up for NetTellers. If you want a referal let me know. (You'll get a bonus £5 for it)

The Result

I deposited £35 via NetTeller as I was hoping that they'd match the lot. However they stayed consistent with their offer terms and only gave me £25. I had a think about the wagering requirement and reached the conclusion that I'd ideally like to just lose all my cash at the bookie and then I could ignore the requirement.

With that in mind I underlayed my £60 bet at BetDaq so that if the bet won at the bookie I'd make a profit of £8 and if it won at the exchange I'd make a loss of £3.74. The thinking behind this was that if I have to bet the full requirement I'll probably lose £3-4 along the way. By doing this I'll either get out with the expected amount in one go or I'll make extra profit for my trouble.

The bet lost at the bookie, so I pocketed £56.62 at BetDaq. £35 of this was my original deposit, so a profit of £21.26 from a single bet. Nice and easy. =)

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.

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.

I've discovered matched betting

Discovery!
I've been a little slack on the postings of late, but it's not because I've lost interest. My money hunting has uncovered a method of making money called matched betting.

Bookies offer hundreds of pounds in sign up offers trying to attract new customers. These offers usually are something like, bet £10 and get a free £10 bet. Now you could sign up and place the 2 bets, hoping that at least one will we win. It makes it more likely you'll win, but it's still gambling.

How it works
There is a way to get your hands on that free £10 that doesn't require luck though. The easiest way to explain is with an example. Let's say there's a game on between Arsenal and Man United and the current decimal odds are 2 for Arsenal to win.

You go to a bookie site and deposit £10. You then go to betfair and deposit £10. Your total outlay is £20.

At the bookie you place a £10 bet to back Arsenal to win.

At betfair you place a £10 lay bet on Arsenal to win. A lay bet is when you play the part of the bookie. If Arsenal don't win you'll take get the £10 stake, if they do win you'll have to give the stake back plus an additional £10.

If Arsenal win your bet at the bookie wins, you'll have £20 in that account. You'll lose at betfair though and that account will be empty.

If Arsenal don't win you'll lose at the bookie, but betfair will win and you'll have £20 there.

So regardless of the outcome of the match you won't win or lose anything. That may seem a bit pointless, but the trick is that by doing this you have now qualified for the £10 free bet the bookie was offering.

Simply repeat the trick above and you get to pocket that £10 with zero risk!

Matched betting in action
So I decided to give matched betting a go. I signed up for betfair via quidco and with a refer and earn £50 promotion (that has sadly just been reduced to £25 now). I'll get £30 from quidco for this one. If you want to join betfair definitely go via Quidco, but when you are signing up you can put in my referal code WWNET4LNK to get an additional £25 bonus.

I then joined the bookmaker Jaxx. They have a bet £25 get a free £25 bet offer and you also get £25 for signing up via Quidco. I matched 2 football games, Man Utd v Inter and Juventus v Bologna, for a cool £21.08 in profit.

I joined BetDaq, another betting exchange. Quidco is £20 and I used a promotion code of gom1 for a free £25 after I've bet £25. (I think this code expires at the end of march.)

Signed up for BetUK, who offer a bet £50 get £50 free bet.
Matched another 2 football games. The first against BetDaq to qualify for the free £25. The 2nd against BetFair, qualifying me for their £50 offer. The bets themselves netted a profit of £31.32. (Probably a bit short, but the odds at BetUK seem really bad.)

In order to do all this I've deposited £400 at the bookies and exchanges. All my bets at the bookies have lost, so my cash is all at BetDaq and BetFair. I could withdraw it now if I wanted, but I'm leaving it there so I can lay off more bets at a time in future.

So all in all I've got
Cash in Hand: -£300.00
Quidco: £75
Betfair: £50
Jaxx: £21.08
BetDaq: £25
BetUk: £31.32
Total Profit: £202.40

Will I be doing more of this? You better believe it!

The Tally
I've plunged more of my own cash into the matched betting scheme, but I'm confident that it will soon make enough profit that I can pull out my original stake and continue matched betting with my winnings.