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. =)

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.

Bet24

The Deal
Bet24 have a 50% deposit bonus up to a maximum of £30. They charge a fee for direct debits, but not for Moneybookers.

This is the first of the more complicated wagering requirements I have done. Before you are allowed to withdraw any funds you have to wager 4 x the bonus. At the maximum bonus of £30 this means £120 worth of bets. To count towards the requirements bets have to be at odds of 1.5 or above.

The Plan
I'm after the max bonus so I'll deposit £60 via money bookers. Once the £30 bonus shows in my account I'll find a £90 matched. With a little luck I'll lose at Bet24 and the money will end up in my exchange account.

If I win at Bet24 I'll need to make another £30 bet to finish the wagering requirement. Whether it wins or loses I'll pull all my cash out of Bet24 after it has settled.

The Result
Deposited the cash via moneybookers and then worked out I needed to send in ID before I'd be credited with the bonus. I scanned a copy of my passport, blotted out a couple of numbers and sent it in. The bonus was credited about half an hour after my email.

I found a matched bet on football for the 22nd at 1.9 vs 1.9 at Bet Fair and slapped my £90 on it for a £2.18 loss. The back bet won so I needed to place another bet to get at my cash.

Found another game on the same night at put the remaining £30 of my wager requirement on at 3.15 vs 3.05 at Bet Fair. This match was a tiny loss of just £0.08.

Won at Bet24 again and pulled out the full £235.50 via Moneybookers. I'm pretty happy with this one as I managed to hang on to £27.74 of their £30 bonus cash.

MoneyBookers

An easy way to move cash
I'll keep this blog short and to the point. Up until yesterday I was depositing money at the bookies by debit card. There's a couple of problems with this.

1. It's harder to keep track when bookie deposits are in amongst every day spending.
2. Withdrawals from bookies can take a few days to show.
3. The bank may not think it a positive that I'm constantly sending money to bookies.
4. Some bookies charge a fee for depositing via direct debit.

Number 4 in the list is what prompted me to action. I've created a moneybookers account that I plan to use for all my matched betting. This will let me avoid deposit fees and also enable me to shift money between bookies a bit faster.

I couldn't find a sign up bonus for them, but they do have a referral program. So if you feel like helping me out, sign up via my moneybookers referal link.