Is Matched Betting Sustainable Long Term?

Matched Betting is without doubt one of the best side hustles out there. It’s quick and easy once you get the hang of it, it offers comparatively high profits for the time required, and you can do it from the comfort of your own home, without even having to leave the sofa.

But how long can you keep going? Once the initial rush of sign up offers are complete, is there still enough profit available to make Matched Betting worth your while? And surely bookies will catch on to you before long?

In this article, we’ll go over all these considerations when it comes to long term sustainability for Matched Betting - but the answer is that yes, Matched Betting can be sustainable long term. You just have to be smart about it.

What Is Matched Betting?

To start off with, Matched Betting isn’t gambling. Matched Betting does involve using betting sites, but it allows you to completely remove the element of risk (provided you do it correctly), ensuring that you make a profit regardless of the outcome of a match.

Matched Betting works by taking advantage of the offers and bonuses offered by bookmakers, designed to lure in new customers. By betting both for and against the outcome of an event, you’re able to turn a free bet into guaranteed profit.

Most offers run along the lines of ‘Bet £10 and get a £10 free bet’. By matching the first bet, you break even - and you’re then able to make a profit on the free bet.

On average, matched bettors make between £300 and £1000 a month - all entirely from home and whenever is convenient, though the more time and effort you put in, the more you can make.

Our detailed guide to Matched Betting takes you through everything you need to know - but if you’re keen to dive straight in, our free trial takes you step by step through how to make your first profits from Matched Betting.

Why Matched Betting Can Be More Difficult Long Term

There are a couple of reasons why it can get a bit more difficult to make as much profit in the longer term than when you first get going.

New Customer Offers Vs Existing Customer Offers

The first reason is that the most generous offers available from bookies are for new customers. This is hardly surprising - it’s natural that bookies will be most willing to give away free bets when they have the chance of drawing in someone completely new to betting.

Once you’re an existing customer, you’ll move on to what are known as ‘reload’ offers. They’re usually a bit lower in value than the sign up offers, or a bit more complicated - though you do also see some very high value reload offers, especially during major events, such as the Cheltenham Festival.

To make the most of reload offers, you’ll need to keep a sharp eye out for opportunities and be willing to accept some offers that don’t make you huge profits. Once you’re an experienced matched bettor, you’ll probably find that it doesn’t take any more time to make the same level of profit as you did from sign up offers, as you’ll have the experience and confidence to place your bets much more quickly.

Don’t be discouraged, though! Once you get the hang of reload offers, there’s tons of profit to be made. We find that our customers are usually making £300 - £1000 a month from reload offers, which isn’t bad going for a few hours’ effort a week!

Account restrictions

Account restrictions, also known as ‘gubbing’, strike fear into the heart of every matched bettor. Bookies aren’t too keen on customers who only ever take profit away from them - they’re in business to make profit, after all - so they go to incredible lengths to detect matched bettors and boot them off their sites. They’ll usually start by simply stopping a customer from taking part in their offers, but they’ll sometimes progress to restricting the stakes a customer can place, and they may even ban a customer altogether.

The indiscreet matched bettor may find this happening to them fairly quickly, and if you lose too many accounts this can seriously hamper your profit-making in the long-term. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to disguise yourself and blend in among all the regular punters, allowing yourself to continue to make your Matched Betting profits sustainably.

Common Bookie Tactics To Combat Matched Bettors

Bookies use every tool at their disposal to protect their profits, and they do have quite a number of tools. They invest heavily in both software and staff whose sole aim is to spot customers who follow certain patterns, or who just seem to be making too much money generally.

• All bookies use software that detects arbitrage betting (or arbing), which is a sure sign that a customer is profiting from Matched Betting, rather than simply a keen gambler. Arbing involves taking advantage of events where the back odds are higher than the lay odds available at an exchange, meaning an instant profit for the bettor. But because this is usually down to a bookie being slow to update their odds, they’ll notice if a customer starts betting repeatedly on selections just before their odds are revised downwards, and they’ll be quick to hand out a gubbing to any such customer.

• Their software will also detect signs of Matched Betting. Solely betting on offers is, of course, one of the primary signs, and a pretty obvious one, but things like betting on wildly obscure events can be another red flag for a bookie. Regular sports bettors tend to be actual sports fans, so aren’t particularly likely to start betting on Brazilian women’s basketball having never shown an interest in basketball before.

• Bookies also keep tabs on the profits customers are making. Plenty of their customers will have a run of good fortune based on sheer luck, but even so bookies don’t like to take chances on these things. On occasion, they will therefore gub perfectly ordinary customers who just so happen to have done a lot of winning recently.

Strategies To Keep Your Accounts Healthy For Longer

You might be thinking at this point that, with all these provisions in place at the bookie’s end, the odds are stacked against the matched bettor. However, you have the advantage of being able to sign up to a large number of bookies in the UK, meaning that a gubbing from just one or two won’t have a significant impact on your profits.

There are also strategies you can employ to extend the life of your accounts, which are very useful with particularly profitable bookies. Our guide to avoiding being gubbed gives you a detailed breakdown to every measure you can take, but here are some of the most important tips to keep your accounts healthy for longer:

• Avoid arbs. Arbing is one of the easiest habits for bookies to detect, so it’s always best to steer clear of any match where the bookie’s odds are higher than the exchange’s.

• Place mug bets. By this, we mean bets that don’t stand to make you any profit - like a regular punter would do. These are best to place on major events, or regularly on a particular team (choosing a favourite team is a good idea, even if you’re not really a fan), to imitate the betting patterns actual gamblers usually follow. You should still match those bets, of course, to ensure any losses are minimal and won’t have any real impact on your profits.

• Avoid obscure events. Again, looking like a regular bettor is the goal, and regular bettors usually do most of their betting on popular events and competitions, like the Premier League or major racing festivals. When finding matches, try to avoid obscure international leagues, even if the odds are tempting.

• Limit withdrawals. Frequent withdrawals can be a flag on a bookie’s system - so try not to withdraw your money every time you win with a bookie. That’s not to say you shouldn’t ever withdraw at all - a regular gambler would certainly take out their winnings after a particularly successful bet - but doing this all the time may cause you to stand out, which is what we’re hoping to avoid.

• Bet more than you need to. If you’re doing, say, a ‘Bet £10 and get a £10 free bet’ offer, it can be wise to bet a bit more than the minimum amount to qualify for the free bet. This makes it look more like a normal betting pattern, as opposed to only taking advantage of available bonuses, and again can contribute to your account’s longevity.

Ways To Make Use Of Gubbed Accounts

If you’ve been restricted from taking advantage of offers with a particular bookie, you might assume that bookie’s now useless to you - but that’s not necessarily the case. There are still opportunities to make profits from those accounts - and without the worry about being gubbed. Here are a few of the best options:

Extra place offers

Most bookies will still pay out on extra places, even for a gubbed account (the known exceptions are BoyleSports and Bet Victor, but some of our members have reported still getting paid out even with these two bookies, so it’s worth doing a test with a small stake to see if that’s the case for you).

Extra places offers are for horse races where, instead of the standard number of places, a bookie will pay 1 (or more) extra - for example, 4 places instead of 3.

If you place a bet on this race, and lay the original number of places, you have the opportunity to win both your back and your lay bet if your horse does indeed come in the extra place. Of course, the chances of this happening are relatively low - but over enough bets, you stand to make significant profits if you make extra place bets on EV+ selections.

Our Extra Place Catcher and Extra Place Master tools track down the best opportunities for you, so you can quickly and easily place your bets and take advantage of these offers.

Arbitrage betting

While arbs should be avoided on healthy accounts, you can take advantage of them on an already gubbed account. Use the Oddsmatcher to track down arbing opportunities - setting the bookie filter to include only bookies where you’ve been gubbed - and simply lay your bet at lower odds to make an instant profit.

Bear in mind, though, that consistently arbing is likely to result in stake restrictions being placed on your account. For this reason, it’s best to avoid too many arbs, unless you’re happy to allow an account to die altogether.

Value Betting

Value betting is a betting strategy that gives you an edge over the bookmakers by finding odds that are higher than they should be - perhaps because something has changed (e.g. a star player has sustained an injury) but the bookie hasn’t yet updated their odds to reflect the change. It involves accurately working out how likely an outcome is, then using this information to find ‘overpriced’ bookmaker odds and betting on these.

Unlike with Matched Betting, you won’t lock in a profit when placing a value bet. But, if you can consistently find bets that have value to you – known as positive expected value (+EV) bets – you can make fantastic long-term profits from value betting.

Casino Offers

Just because a bookie has gubbed you from their sports offers doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to take advantage of casino offers. Although these aren’t technically Matched Betting, and aren’t risk free, they’re an excellent way of making long term profits.

If you’re thinking of moving on to casino offers, take a look at our ultimate guide to casinos, which talks you through how casino offers work and how best to take advantage of them.

Price Boosts

Price boosts are one of the easiest ways to make a profit through Matched Betting, so if you aren’t doing them already, give them a go! A price boost often results in odds that are better than the prevailing lay odds - making for an immediate profit, just like an arb. Unlike an arb, though, a price boost is specifically intended by the bookie to attract customers, so taking advantage of it isn’t nearly as suspicious.

The great thing about price boosts is that you can take advantage of them using gubbed accounts as well as healthy ones. If possible, though, place some mug bets as well, as betting on nothing but price boosts is likely to result in stake restrictions, which will significantly impede your profit-making.

Outplayed Customers Who’ve Been Matched Betting For Two+ Years

If you’re still not sure whether Matched Betting long term really is realistic, we’ve rounded up testimonials from some of our most experienced matched bettors, who’ve managed to keep up their Matched Betting for at least two years - and in some cases, far more!

Summary

Matched Betting definitely can be sustainable long term - but it does require some work. You’ll need to be careful not to draw attention to yourself as a matched bettor to keep your accounts healthy for as long as possible, and sometimes that means sacrificing a bit of short term profit for the sake of long term sustainability.

Even if you do lose some of your accounts to gubbing, though, that doesn’t mean all is lost, as there are plenty of ways to make money from gubbed accounts too. If you stick with it, in a couple of years’ time you could be another of our members hitting a £25,000 milestone, or perhaps even more!