Wagering Requirements in

Matched Betting: A Guide

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If you haven’t completed any Matched Betting offers yet, or have only done the basic offers where you simply back and lay a bet to receive a free bet, I’d advise that you avoid the wagering ones at the moment.

Wagering offers a higher level of complexity, as there’s increased stages in the process. These extra stages also mean that the offers will take much longer to complete.

If you’re limited for time, it’s advisable to stick to the simple backing and laying offers to unlock your free bets.

Yes, you will get to the point where you’ve completed all of the basic sign up offers, at this point you’ll have more experience to continue this. 

If you’re at that stage now, welcome to the wagering guide!

Wagering Requirements

Bookmakers have introduced wagering requirements, in an effort to stop people taking advantages of bonuses on offer. 

Fortunately, we can tackle the wagering requirements like any normal bet. In fact, Oddsmonkey have adapted their calculator to make tackling wagering even easier. 

A wagering requirement is a multiplier, which represents the amount of times you must play through your bonus funds, before the winnings are withdrawable.

For example, You receive £10 in bonus funds, with 10x Wagering Requirements.

You need to place £100 of bets, before you are able to withdraw any winnings. Obviously, if the back bet loses, the bonus is ‘completed’.

So, what’s the best way to extract profit from an offer like this?

High Odds bets, they never win!

When I started tackling sign up offers with wagering, I headed straight over to the high odds bets. 

I thought to myself, that horse with odds of 8.0 will never win, there’s an odds on horse which is going to storm it!

 However, it must be noted that if you’ve found this horse using Oddsmonkey’s Oddsmatcher, there’s a good chance that you will be taking ‘value’ on this bet, therefore getting very good odds on the horse.

Long term, you could potentially make money from doing that, which isn’t quite what you want when tackling wagering requirements.

 If you do opt for high odds, there’s a few important things to consider:

• If your bookmaker bets win, you’ll need to ensure you have enough money in your betting exchanges to cover more lay bets.
•  Some bookmakers maximise the winnings from Free Bets & bonuses. This could leave you exposed if your bets were to keep on winning at high odds.

 

Lock In your Profit with an Underlay

Underlaying against your bonus is a very efficient way of placing your bets. It almost brings a ‘win-win’ feeling, as underlaying protects your profit. When you underlay, your profit is protected as it ensure that if the bet wins with the bookmaker, your losses are minimised. Let’s do a quick example using Oddsmonkey’s Calculator Select Advanced mode on the calculator, which will bring you three extra boxes. You’ll see underlay, standard & overlay. Right now, we are going to focus on Underlay, comparing it with Standard.  A £100 bet at the odds of 5.0 would lose you £12.83 regardless, if you were to lay as standard. The benefit of this is that if the bookmaker bet loses, your bet has finished with minimal qualifying loss. However, the downside with this, is that if the bookmaker bet wins, you’ve lost £12.83 from your potential profit. 

Introducing the Underlay

Continuing with the above example, we are now going to see the outcome of the underlay.

If the bookmaker bet wins, there is absolutely zero qualifying losses. This means that the bonus funds remain intact, although your bookmaker balance will now be increasing. 

The good news is that the bonus funds are still exactly the same, as there’s no qualifying losses.

If the Exchange lay bet wins, you will have lost £15.55 from the bonus funds. This is around £3 more than if you were betting standard, but it’s a small ‘tax’ to pay, as you’re ensuring that you either have no qualifying losses, or a smaller extra fee to pay.

Personally, I underlay every time!

What is Underlaying?

I’ve shown you the effects of underlaying, but now I will tell you the science behind it… or the Maths maybe!

When you started matched betting, you would have been using the calculator on ‘Simple Mode’, which generates an even return whether you win or lose your bets.

Underlaying is an additional option, where you end up laying a little less than the Ideal Lay stake, so that if your Bookmaker bets unfortunately win, you are compensated with extra profit.

On the flip side of this, when underlaying and your exchange lay bet wins, you will forfeit a little bit of profit, but have the safety that the bet is completed.