I signed up to Bonusbank after hearing your podcast. I’d always enjoyed a punt but had backed off quite significantly in recent years as I’ve been saving to retire early. It’s nice to have a team or a horse to cheer for again in each game and race again now.

I’d had prior experience using betfair to lay bets which helped immensely. Some of the people I’ve introduced to the site have not been able to get their heads around laying on betfair and have stopped matched betting thinking it’s too difficult.

When I first started it was football season so I did a lot of betting on the NRL and AFL, it was quick and very simple. Would take me 15 mins per week and I was making around $250 per week in profit on average. That lasted for a few months before some of the lesser-known bookies banned me (Bluebet, Palmerbet). This had little impact as their promos were few and far between. Then I lost Ladbrokes and Sportsbet a few weeks later. They both had amazing sport promos and after that my winnings dropped to $100 a week on average. Then I decided to give racing promos a go, these are much more difficult and the markets change quickly. Often by the time you use the bonusbank calculators the odds have changed and you’ve missed the boat. After a few weeks of using the calculators I got an idea of roughly what they’d say so just started using estimates to put the lay bets on. That made it much quicker and although you can get a slightly better or worse result on a race it seems to even out over the course of many hundred bets in the past 6 months. Once I got the hang of race betting my winnings increased dramatically to around $500 per week and over the spring carnival when there were many additional promos around I was routinely making $1,000 per week. Time invested was around 5-6 hours per week to get this level of winnings.

It’s important to put “Mug bets” on to keep your accounts alive. These are bets on non promotional markets that make it look less like you are matched betting. Pointsbet seem to offer the best promos but are quick to ban, my account is more than 6 months old and still going strong due to mug bets. You can often put several hundered dollars of mug bets on an have it only cost you $5 in losses. Obviously this is a tiny amount compared to what you are winning so well worthwhile. I have accounts left at only 3 major bookies now after losing Bet Easy today. I’ll still make $300-$400 per week I’d imagine from those accounts as long as they last.

Total profit now is over $11k. Biggest challenge is funding betfair. My total balance across the accounts is $21k so I’ve needed to lock up $10k of my own money in the past 6 months to keep rolling. Many people may not be able to afford to do this.

Interesting enough I’m always putting money into betfair – meaning my bookie bets are winning regularly. I’d be up $18k if I just bet with the bookies and never laid a horse on betfair. This would be stressful though as there are times I’d have lost several thousand in a day if I hadn’t laid.

I am starting a trial of non matched betting now as I believe I’ve identified a pattern in horses that have betfair odds close to the bookie odds that win enough to make it profitable. I’ll be starting with $5 per race though rather than $50 per race I’ve been betting to manage downside risk whilst I trial the idea.

Next I’ve got a friend who is opening some accounts for me to play with, will probably take it slower and use it to top up my cash flow when needed. Just bet a little to pay for a game of golf, a carton of beer each week etc rather than going hard at it again. Would be nice to see if I could keep those accounts open for years and just slowly milk them.

Thanks for the amazing podcasts – I commute a 6 hour round trip once per week and it’s always great when I see a new podcast from you pop up before I get in the car.

Cheers

Hi Matt,

I’m a really big fan of your blog/podcast. I cannot thank you enough for providing such high quality Australian FIRE content.

Anyways, onto my personal thoughts about matched betting.

For me, the matched betting podcast couldn’t have come at a better time. Due to my partner taking on a 6-month work contract at short notice earlier this year, I had to move my work from Sydney to Newcastle during this time. Since I run my own services business (locum health practitioner), I initially didn’t have many contacts in the area and hence didn’t have too much work lined up in the first month. I was, on average, working about 2-3 days a week.

It was during this time that I listened to the podcast and decided to give matched betting a shot as I had more free time on my hands. I signed up to the free 1 month trial at BonusBank, made multiple betting accounts under my own name as well as my partner’s and just did all the sign up bonuses. I made just under $3000 tax free and that was with some mistakes on my end (inputting the wrong numbers into the back/lay calculator). It was enough for me to make up for the shortage of work/income I had during the month and only took about 15 hours of my time. Most of this time was spent learning how it all worked, signing up to the various bookies and doing ID/bank account verifications.

There was also a weird sense of productivity that came about when I was watching sports and also matched betting. I remember enjoying a NBA playoff game knowing that no matter what the outcome would be, I would be pocketing a few hundred dollars. It definitely reduced the guilt of me sleeping in on a day off to watch the playoffs.

After the sign up bonuses, matched betting gets much more complex and the effort/hours required is significantly higher especially if you wanted to sustain it as a steady side income. Also, most bookies tend to pick up when you’re matched betting and I have been banned from quite a few of them. Luckily, by this point, my usual work picked up again and I didn’t feel that the increased effort/time involved with matched betting (beyond just the simple sign up bonuses) yielded enough income for me to continue.

Overall, it worked out well for me and I’m very thankful for you publishing the podcast. I feel most people should give it a try as it’s effectively just free money with very little effort especially if you just do the sign up bonuses. However, they should also be wary that errors can cause some huge losses if they’re not careful.

As a side note, despite matched betting being the main subject of the podcast, I think we can take a step back and look at the bigger picture. I viewed the episode as offering one of many ways to make a “side income”, which I’m sure some FIRE enthusiasts would definitely consider to accelerate their journey. Perhaps this can be the first in a new series of podcasts which focus on how various people create and sustain “side incomes” or “side hustles” (just to add to your already long list of things to do). Or perhaps, we as your audience could simply view the episode as a story about how the guest found his own unconventional path to FIRE through turning his own niche skills into a profitable business model, which I’m sure of us in the FIRE community will find interesting and perhaps even inspiring.

Nonetheless, I love your podcast/blog and thanks again for the amazing content (sorry for the long e-mail).
All the best

Hi Matt,

I have probably made the most money out of all your listeners from Matched betting. I knew nothing about matched betting before your podcast and joined bonus bank and started matched betting about 1 week after your podcast. So far I have made 14k profit after taking off all costs like bonus bank monthly fee and cost of a separate device I got to use for matched betting.

I could have made more money but lost about 1k worth with some silly mistakes. My overall profit got boosted due to me getting access to one of my family member accounts about 2 months back as well. Most of my profit is made in the last 3 months once I got the hang of racing promos and took advantages of all those spring racing offers. I have lost most of my own bookies but still got 80% bookies on my family member accounts so hopefully I can make a bit more money before calling it quit.

My end goal is to make 20k profit and my grand plan is to invest all the profit I made from matched betting to an ETF or LIC I don’t currently have in my portfolio currently(most likely argo) and turn on DRP and just watch this part of my portfolio grow over the next decade or so.

Thanks a lot to you for doing this podcast as well as putting lot of quality content on your blog. I have learnt a lot from your blog posts and podcasts.

Thanks

Hi Aussie Firebug,

Just wanted to reach out and say thanks for all the great financial tips and inspiration over the last couple of years, particularly for getting me on to matched betting. I’ve made $4200 in the last couple of months and counting – that’ll go straight to buying LICs!

I managed to get promo banned from nearly every bookie in Australia in the process though so I’m gonna wrap it up now that footy season is over.

Keep up the good work and good luck in the race to FIRE!

Hey Matt,

Hope UK is treating you well?

Matched betting. The first time I heard the term was on your podcast with Nico. My initial thoughts were this is s bit left of centre and suspicious. Nico however, came across as down to earth and genuine enough to spark my interest to explore further.

I read bonusbank in detail and researched more from other sources which all appeared to align. I decided to give it a crack. Chucking in $500+ into betfair was a bit scary initially but this soon was eased when I started to see the concept working.

I quickly learned that after sign up bonuses, the money is in horses. As experienced by everyone, horses were initially daunting however, if you stick at it you’ll grasp the concept and then go on to perfect it, which is what I did.

I started off making roughly $50 a week to quickly smashing up to $500 per week. I became more proficient in doing the betting on my phone and not requiring calculators to figure out the correct lays etc. This was great as I was able to access mid day promos whilest at work and then convert the bonuses on weekends. My biggest day was making x17 $50 bonus bets across multiple bookies in one day which roughly worked out to $600 after conversion. How crazy is that?

The main negative that I experienced with all this is time required. All the best promos are on Saturdays with all main races happening then and to access majority of them you have to devote most of your day to it. This was exciting initially however, quickly weaned. Over time I was doing less and less focused Saturdays and mainly doing few races on my phone whilst out and about. This was a bit annoying to my partner and anti social as we would be enjoying the days activity but I quickly had to pull out my phone to put a bet on. She loved it though when we would cover whole days expenses in a couple of bets!

The other negative is getting promo banned. There is plenty of tales on bonus bank forum and chat of how people try and prevent getting gubbed however, I saw majority of them required even more time to properly play the game. They may work but were not guaranteed. I did get gubbed by three bookies so far but there is still plenty of fish in the sea.

Overall, in a period of approx. three month I made $5,000. I was very happy with this! I could have made more if I tried harder but have been losing interest slowly over time mainly because of time required on the weekends which I was unwilling to sell.

Nico and his team have done a fabulous job in setting up the site and all the calculators. They are always there to answer any questions and I love how Nico is always on chat on Saturday mornings going through the race line ups with everyone and celebrating their achievements.

I have no negative comments to say about bonusbank or your decision to associat with them The concept and idea was nothing short of genius. It’s sad to see you’ve copped some criticism but as with anything there will always be people who see the glass half empty and want to critique others for their failures. The main issue I would see turning people off, as highlighted by Nico in his podcast, is human error. It’s very easy to make mistakes especially with horses and people may rather blame the system then themselves. This can be learned and mistakes minimized.

Thank you for bringing light to matched betting and for everything you do. I’ve said it before but it has to be said again, you’ve done a fabulous job with your blog and podcast! Be proud and I look forward to reading and listening to more of your content.

Enjoy the UK winter and if you can, visit Ireland and Scotland. Beautiful places!

Hey Matt,

Sue here. I tried it after your podcast. I live in Vic so not all sign up bonuses were allowed. Still made $1000 easy off the experience. Quit after all bonuses were used up. I would advise people who are bad with math to avoid it, it takes a bit to wrap your head around what’s going on with your money. Mistakes can be made and can be costly even with the help of the bonus bets website. I had a good experience and thanks for introducing me to it.

I tried out match betting and decided it wasn’t for me. I did find that while trying to close my accounts, Betfair asked me for a selfie holding my driver’s license as confirmation of my identity. Two weeks later my identity was used to open a Sportsbet account and a CBA transaction account.

The only reason this was discovered was the CBA sent a bank card to my address.
Both accounts were flagged by Sportsbet and CBA as potentially fraudulent before I received the card, but it still cost me almost a full day between dealing with CBA, Sportsbet and advising other agencies (Betfair didn’t seem particularly concerned that they were the most recent company to have my details, IDCARE, notifying the credit score agencies, and making a report to ACORN takes time).

I can’t say that I can recommend match betting after my experience, but I do acknowledge that identity theft isn’t unique to their industry, and far from the only source of it occurring. My issue stemmed from trying to close my accounts rather than the use of them.

Thanks for all the work you do with the blog and keep up the fantastic work!

Cheers

I have been match betting since Feb this year and have made $6500 so far. I have two mates that have been doing it for about 3 years and they would be about 20k up in total.

One of the issues is that match betting is that sign up bonuses have legally stopped so where I could get a $500 sign up bonus then convert it to $375 risk free these opportunities are limited. Also the agencies are on to people betting like this and they are quick to ban you off there promos that are required for this type of betting. Basically now I have only two agencies left to bet with. It probably makes it easier for people who are actually interested in sports and horse racing as I have been, otherwise it would be dead boring. But even if I only ever make this amount, who wouldn’t take 6.5 K free cash?

Other thing that people may need to be wary of as you have to shuffle money around at times, I recently applied to re finance my loan to a lower rate, but was knocked back even though I wanted to borrow only $200 k against a house worth 480 K and have a holiday house worth 350K that is owned outright plus 75K in shares!!! So people should consider this before getting into it.

Hi

I jumped on the matched betting bandwagon after your podcast. As it was right about the time that the welcome bonuses were drying up, I joined a whole heap of bookies all at once and had a lot of bonuses to work through in a short space of time. I found it pretty easy to get the hang of, I settled for some lower returns due to the time constraints, made a few mistakes not reading the T&C properly on some of the bets.

Once I had used all of my bonus bets, I found that the time involved vs the payout just not worth it to me. I tried as many different techniques as I could but it seems that horse racing is about the only way to continue beyond the initial profits and it was too time-consuming and less set and forget. Plus you are competing with all the other software users to jump on the horses once they hit the sweet spot so you don’t have long to get on board. I found the assorted matched betting websites quite helpful and there were lots of good how to guides.

All in all I enjoyed it and made about $2500 but have cashed out of all my accounts now. But thanks to your podcast as I had never heard of it before that.

Cheers

Hey Matt,

I gave matched betting a go with bonus bank after your podcast and made ~$500 from converting signup bonuses into cash and then extracting it which was about ~$430 after a couple months of bonus bank fees to use their calculators…

My honest feedback is that the site is really well set up, tutorials are fantastic and calculators work brilliantly.

However, the time and effort involved to extract a pretty small return in my view was just really not worth the effort – plenty of other side hustles or optimisation efforts you can make for a far greater return. I was based in NSW too which I think was one of the more restrictive states…

I gave up after the signup bonuses as they were supposed to be the low hanging fruit… I can totally see that if you are living in south east asia or something with all the time in the world on your hands and a cost of living <$50 a day or something that it isn’t a bad idea to play around with for a bit of extra cash… however if you are working full time, optimising your investments, living your life and looking for a high value side hustle – this isn’t it.

Hope that’s useful mate. Love your work – keep it up!