How I earned over £200 betting on Euro 2008

I set myself a challenge to make as much money as possible from betting on the matches at Euro 2008. Now I could simply have used my knowledge of football to try and pick winners for each game but there is no guarantee that my predictions would always be right, so inevitably I would lose some of my bets and possibly ending up losing more money than I make. Plus if it really was that easy then the bookies would soon go out of business.

There is however a method of betting called ‘Matched Betting’ which if done correctly is a low risk way of extracting money from the free bets that are offered by nearly all bookmakers to encourage you to open an account with them.

Most customers that signup for these free bet offers tend to either be risk-adverse and bet on the favourite, or risk-seekers going for extremely high odds to maximise their returns. Favourites don’t always win and very few will win bets with very high odds (and those that do will share their success with everyone they know providing great advertising for the bookmakers!).

What Matched Betting does is use the free bet to back one outcome and then use a betting exchange to back all other possible outcomes (known as a lay bet). If you have never come across this idea then it can be very confusing at first, but if you read through the examples in my Euro 2008 blog posts it should hopefully make more sense.

Most bookmakers require you to stake some of your own money first (known as qualifying bets) before they give you the free bet and the first bookmaker that I selected for my Euro 2008 challenge required me to bet £20 of my own money before I got my £20 free bet. I used the same Matched Betting technique for the qualifying bet to cover all outcomes, although it is rarely possible to do so without losing some money and in this case it was £1 no matter what the result was in the game between Portugal & Turkey.

Once my first bet had settled I was then able to use the £20 free bet to back a draw in the Greece v Sweden game with the lay bet on the betting exchange ensuring that no matter what the result I would end up £13.08 better off.

The same bookmaker offered a further £50 free bet if I made five further bets of at least £10 each so I used the same technique to qualify for this offer resulting in a loss of just £2.54. I was then able to use the free £50 bet to back a France win in their crucial game with Italy. France were rubbish that night and lost the game but I still ended up making £30.87 from the lay bet I had used to insure the outcome.

Whilst this was the last free bet that this bookmaker was offering me I was still able to make another £13.75 by allowing someone to claim that they had referred me and sharing their bonus from doing so.

Having run out of ways to profit from this bookmakers account it was on to the next bookmaker which I found details of on this forum which discusses introductory offer loopholes. With this bookmaker it was simply a case of making my first £50 qualifying bet which I was actually able to make a small profit on and then I used the free £50 bet to earn £29.47 the very next day, it really was that quick and easy!

I did exactly the same thing with another bookmaker that was offering a £25 free bet converting that into £16.73 before signing up to my fourth and final bookmaker during this challenge which was offering a £50 free bet followed by a free £25 bet if I made five qualifying bets of at least £10 and then another £50 free bet if I made another five qualifying bets. I was able to convert the first £50 free bet into a profit of £34.75, the second free bet into a £24.12 profit before using the final £50 free bet to make a £32.66 profit on the final game of Euro 2008.

In total over the 31 matches of Euro 2008 I managed to make a profit of £200.41 using this matched betting technique (along with a couple of other small promotions on offer) from the four online bookmakers that I signed up with.

Three of the four bookmakers were also offering cashback so hopefully the final figure will be nearer £250 once they have all paid the cashback (can take a couple of months with some cashback sites).

So not only was Euro 2008 a great tournament to watch, it also proved very lucrative for MillionaireAdventure, and I will definitely be re-visiting Matched Betting as there are plenty of other bookmakers offering similar promotions.

 

I have not named the bookmakers that I signed up for as some class Matched Betting as abusing their promotions and have been known to close customers accounts. If you want to give Matched Betting a go yourself then a quick Google search will find you plenty of offers from well known bookmakers similar to the offers I used.