Lesson 1: Why Does Matched Betting Work?

It all centres around value!

To make this work you’ll utilise two types of websites! The first, bookmakers, which are essentially large corporations that allow you to bet on markets. Over recent years, they have developed significantly, specifically regarding the markets that we can bet on, and their reach to society.

The issue with these sites is that they have built in profit margins (overrounds). You may have won an individual bet but that does not mean the bookmaker is down financially. This is because they have won the stakes from other punters on all the other losing bets. This is a fairly simplified definition, but it seeks to illustrate that bookmakers are profit-making machines which meticulously calculate value and offer prices accordingly.

Luckily enough, the UK is an ultra-competitive industry with nearly 100 bookmakers. To entice custom, they offer a variety of concessions. Some are purely aesthetic, such as better interface, some more social based, such as allowing you to bet on accumulators with your friends, but some are focused around offering higher value they causes the bookmaker to take a financial loss (this is how we profit with matched betting).