matched betting – how to make money betting each way horse racing

Jul05
by TFS on July 5, 2018 at 12:28 pm
Posted In: Gambling, Matched Betting

 

I’ve been doing the Each Way Horse Racing Betting, otherwise known as Each Way Arbing or Each Way Sniping (I’ll be calling it just “Sniping” from here on in for ease and it’s the one I like best) for about 4 months now and as I approach and break through the £10,000 in profit barrier I think it’s high time I wrote a little bit more about it. I don’t say this lightly but it is without doubt the best side hustle I’ve ever had the fortune to stumble upon (so far at least).

I’ve had a few questions in the comments after my monthly updates, so in future I can just point anyone to this resource rather than write up half assed replies with limited info!

Before we carry on I would like to emphasise my usual disclaimer:

Each Way Sniping is basically gambling, not matched betting. You could in theory lose every penny you “invest” into it. It’s highly unlikely of course but still worth knowing and really thinking about this fact before deciding this is for you or not. Further, there are big winning and losing swings from day to day and even week to week. If you can’t stick something out for at least 2 weeks with a potential big losing streak, this is not the side hustle for you.

I feel it’s worth underlining this point further with some real life numbers:

Between 21st and 22nd May I lost £1,013.98

Yep you read that right, that’s over a grand in two days! I am now at around £20 each way bets (total stake for each bet is £40) and I did do a few rather questionable multiple bets during these two days. Obviously it is not recommended to start with anything near these stakes, but even if you started off with one tenth of the stakes I am doing, i.e. £2 each way, you would have still lost £101.39 during this 2 day period, if you did the same bets as I did.

For an example of a slightly longer term losing streak between the 16th and 22nd May I was down £632. I hope these figures illustrate that you should start with a very small stake, and only increase once you are comfortable with both the process, losing streaks, and obviously once your bank has increased nicely.

Now with all that negative nancy stuff out the way, why do I like Each Way Sniping so much?

  • It’s simple – All you have to do is put a bet on. No laying off, no checking off offer T&Cs like with “normal” matched betting
  • It’s quick – Therefore you can dip in and out of it very quickly. If I have a quiet 5 minutes at work I can just fire off a few bets, likewise if I’m on the train or just watching TV in the evening.
  • It’s lucrative – *Not so humble brag alert* Errrmmm did I mention I’ve made over £10K profit in 4 months? 😀
  • It works on gubbed bookmaker accounts – All those accounts you’ve written off are now back in action making you money again (and probably more than you were making on the “offers” anyway!)

Before we go any further though, here is a quick primer on how to make money in general with gambling, which provides the basis on what sniping is and why it works.

How can I actually make money gambling!?

It’s the holy grail and people generally do not believe it’s possible. Even my friends don’t really believe me and yet I’ve been in the game turning (admittedly small) profits year in and out since around 2005. Yet it is unbelievably simple to do. There are two ways of doing this. Please note that neither of them rely on deep understanding of any particular sport or hours of stats analysis and number crunching 1

  1. Find Arbs and back them without laying it off – An Arb (or Arbitrage) opportunity is where the price of 2 sides of a bet are different enough so you can back both of them and guarantee a profit whatever the outcome. Matched bettors should be familiar with this when they back a horse or football team and then lay at the exchange to guarantee a profit. However if you are laying on Betfair, where the majority of the liquidity is, the commission is 5%. So every time you lay off you are locking in an extra 5% loss on the Expected Value (EV) of your bet. Why not just back the value bet and keep that extra 5%? Obviously people (i.e. matched bettors who are trying their arm at Arbing) don’t like the volatility that comes with that, and prefer a steady stream of profits (which is fair enough). But if you are planning on being in this game for any amount of time, over hundreds of bets the volatility will even itself out and you should see that extra 5% ROI. Get big enough turnover and 5% extra can be massive. I’m easily turning over £10,000/month now with fairly modest stakes, so that’s an extra £500 a month worth of profit I can expect to be making compared to those who are laying off every bet.
  2. Back prices that are way out of line with every other bookmaker – This is the same concept as Arbing, you are simply looking for bookmakers offering exceptional value prices. For example if 20 bookies are offering 5/1 and one is 10/1, without even looking at a Betfair market (Betfair does not cover every single market so often you cannot compare) then I know with fairly good certainty that the 10/1 bet is a good value bet. I’ve backed 1000’s of these kinds of bets over the years so even though I’ve had many many losers the winners should outgun the losers fairly easily. The best example of this is when I backed AaB Aalborg to win the Danish Superliga at 1000/1 when all other bookmakers were a top price of 33/1. Promptly forgot about the bet for 9 months then logged into my bookmaker account to find £5000 sitting there. Apparently they’d won the league! I am still shocked to this day they didn’t just void the bet (see below) as the price was well out of line, but obviously I am very glad they let it stand!

So why isn’t everyone just doing that then? There are two main reasons:

  • You will get shut down relatively quickly. Bookies will easily spot people that only place these sorts of bets and shut down your accounts ASAP. It varies from bookie to bookie how quickly but accounts won’t last that long if all you do is back Arbs and way out of line prices.
  • Sometimes bookies will just void the bets anyway (and then close your account to rub salt in the wound!) so even if you think you are on a great value bet, even after it has won, you can’t bank on them actually paying out. Yes, legally they are allowed to shirk out on paying out on any bet as it’s not a legal contract as such. You could appeal through IBAS but it’s probably not worth the time or effort unless the bet was definitely a winner and worth a lot of money.

 

Why is Each Way Sniping any better?

Each Way Sniping means you are still backing value bets but the value is spread over the win and place part of the bet. This nullifies the two major drawbacks from above:

  • You won’t get shut down as quickly as you will probably look like a “normal” racing punter for quite a while at least, especially if you are using smaller stakes. The prices will never really be that out of line, instead of being ridiculous 50-100% Arbs you are just eeking out 5-10% arbs and going for higher volume. This allows your account to fly under the radar for (hopefully) a longer time. Also if the Arb is split over the win and place part, this somehow seems to help you fly under the radar as well. I don’t know why bookmakers software can’t just work this out, but for now at least, it seemingly can’t detect each way Arbs as easily as win only Arbs.
  • Because the prices aren’t way out of line as mentioned above, you will almost never get a bet voided. Much less hassle than backing stupid prices (which are sometimes just genuine mistakes on the bookie part) and just hoping the bookie doesn’t spot it and void, so you can just back a load of them and wait for the profits to roll in.

One final question that many may have at this stage is:

But why does the Betfair (or any other Exchange) price really matter?

Because bookies will ban shrewd punters, for example people with “inside knowledge” such as horse race owners, trainers, or their friends, or just people who do a lot of stats analysis and so on.

This means that the only way for these shrew operators to get a bet on is via Exchanges, because Exchanges aren’t the ones actually laying bets, so no one ever gets banned. So we can assume that if a horse price is shorter on the exchange compared to a bookmaker, there is at least some evidence that that might be the “Smarter money” and we’d do well to back the bigger price with the bookmaker. There are a few other reasons such as the wisdom of crowds and exchanges being more like an “efficient market” place as well, but I truly believe that the whole “smart money” thing is the main driver of us getting value bets out of this method.

 

That’s the ground work theory of what this actually is and why it works, now how do you actually do it!? While it is pretty much as simple as checking the OddsMonkey (or other provider’s) each way matching tool and placing bets… there is slightly more to it than that. So let’s get started…

 

Each way sniping: Getting started

Of course, first of all you will need an account with Odds Monkey (<– affiliate link) so you can use their Each Way Matcher tool 2. Here is a quick screenshot of what it looks like:

Hopefully the first few columns should be self explanatory, and the only other one worth paying attention to for each way sniping is “Rating” which shows you the expected value of the Arb, which is a combination of the expected value of the place and win parts of the each way bet.

Just to be clear you can safely ignore the “Arb Rating” column which is the expected value of the win part of the bet only. OddsMonkey suggest that you only go for bets with an “Arb Rating” of below 100% because they think this will help with the longevity of your accounts before they are gubbed. Personally I can’t be bothered with that as there are so many accounts out there to get through, so I’ve never paid attention to it. You can obviously do what you feel is best on that one though.

The Max profit can also be confidently ignored because that is for wimps people who are laying off to guarantee a profit on each bet, which we are not doing.

Here are a few basic tips to get you started:

Selection Criteria (i) – Ratings and Exchanges

I use the following selection criteria for going ahead and actually placing a bet:

  • If both Win and Place exchange are Betfair and Rating is over 95%
  • If both Win and Place exchange are Smarkets and Rating is over 98%
  • If Win and Place exchange is a combination of Betfair plus any other and Rating is over 97%

Why these combinations? It’s because the rating is worked out including commission, and Betfair commission is 5%. Seeing as we are not laying off the bets, then a >95% rating actually becomes a >100% rating for us, which means we have positive EV (Expected Value).

You might think what is the point in backing something with, say 0.05% EV (in other words a horse that has Betfair in both columns and a rating of 95.05%) but in my experience so far, it is actually worth backing everything above these settings, especially for horses that have higher odds (see point #2 below). If you feel like only doing ones over, say 100%, that’s fine and I’m certain you will still make money (and perhaps have a higher ROI percentage) but you might end up making less overall because you will have less bets than I do, i.e. less turnover. There are normally quite a lot of selections over 100% throughout the day anyway so if you’d rather “play it safe” and only go for the higher EV ones, that’s cool 🙂

 

Selection Criteria (ii) – Odds and Bookies

Hit the “Filter” button and you will get the following slide out section, which is great to filter out the bookies you don’t have accounts for. Personally I find it overwhelming and frankly unnecessary to include more than about 7-8 bookies at a time, you will get an ample amount of bets using this (maybe even just go with 1-2 when you are first starting up to avoid confusion… up to you of course!).

Here is what my settings are set to:

As you can see the only thing I’ve really changed (apart from selecting certain bookies which you can’t actually see from the above screenshot) is setting the minimum odds to 4.0

The reason for this is that on the main each way sniping thread on the Odds Monkey Forum the thread starter states that over 3770 bets the EV looks to go up the higher the odds, so personally I don’t see the point in backing anything below 4.0 (or 3/1 in fractional odds).

This is borne out by my own experience so far as well, take a look at my breakdown of returns broken down into, admittedly rather arbitrary, odds groupings:

Now obviously the takeaway here is not that we should avoid any bets in the 10-15 range as they’ve returned a -3% profit. But you can see that the overall trend is that the higher odds tend to be returning better ROI*

*I’m ignoring the 3-4.99 category’s 70% ROI as the stakes are way too low to draw any conclusions, basically because so far I’ve very rarely backed anything with that low odds. However I have started to try them out again now, as an experiment to see how they fair. So hopefully in a month or two I can provide you with an update on these figures! Also will be interesting to see if 10-15 makes a come back!!

And again it’s not worth just filtering out the odds above, say, 20/1 because they are providing much higher ROI in my sample, because A) it’s just a small sample still and B) why wouldn’t you want the 15% ROI on the 15-20 group or even the 8% ROI on the 7-10 group. It’s all profit…!!! I am certain that 10-15 will also prove positive in the very long run as well and the others will start to merge closer in terms of ROI, but that the higher bands will remain slightly higher.

Here is the graph from the Odds Monkey Forum post by the way:

 

Placing Bets

Once you’ve found a few bets you want to place it’s as simple as clicking on the link, navigating to the racing section, finding the race and horse and then entering your stake (see below), remembering to tick the each way box 3 and hitting “Bet” or “Confirm” or whatever. Simple as that really but the difficulty here tends to be that bookie website layouts can sometimes be very confusing so it’s hard to actually find the correct race in the first place. I guess my only advice here is that the more you do it, the more you become used to each layout so even though it may take a while at first, you will soon be zooming through a number of bets in a few minutes once you get the hang of it!

On the move – The great thing about this is that you can easily do this on your mobile while you are out and about (or in the toilet at work 🙂 ). Many bookie websites are actually easier to navigate on your phone anyway (others… are a complete disaster!) but you should be able to get a few bets on if you check every hour. Just make sure you remember to track all of your bets when you get home at the end of the day (see below)! I know traditional matched betting can theoretically be done on your mobile but with all the backing and laying I find it just way too much bother on my phone, so EW sniping trumps MB in this respect as well in my opinion.

 

Staking Strategy

You need a solid staking strategy and you need to bloody well stick it young man/woman!

I’d recommend starting with a bank, say £100, and doing 1% per bet, so with our example £100 bank that would only be 50p each way (£1 total stake). Once you have say doubled your bank, you can consider doubling your stake although I would say that might be a bit aggressive, and it might be better to just go up 50% on stakes every doubling of the bank, in which case you are then baking in even more margin for a long losing run not to wipe you out completely.

Some people use lower stakes for higher odds but from the stats above on the odds bands, tells us to just do level stakes across all bets. Still, it’s hard to stick £20 each way 4 on a 100/1 shot, so I tend to use slightly lower stakes once the odds are really high i.e. over 50/1. You can fiddle around with this as you wish but just make sure you stick to whatever you decide because you can’t be doing £1 each way on one 20/1 bet and then £5 each way on another 20/1 just because you feel like one is better than the other.

 

Tracking it all down

I’m pretty slack at tracking my matched betting activities in general and do not track every back and lay like some people do. I just tot up my account balances at the end of each month and if it’s gone up since last month, that is my profit.

However… I really think it’s worth tracking every single bet you make either in a custom built spreadsheet – google sheets is obviously my SS of choice as you can access it almost anywhere – or even using the OddsMonkey built in tracking software. All you need to do it click the “Open Calculator” button then “Log Bet” and it will log it for you. You will still need to go back and tell it whether it won and what your profit was once the race has won though, which is why I personally would rather just use a spreadsheet as entering that info is quicker (once you get the knack of it).

Here is an example few lines of my spreadsheet to show you what info I’m tracking. Of course you could add more if you like, such as what race track the horse was running on, what the Rating % was on OddsMonkey Each Way Matcher… and so on… but I’ve kept it as simple as I could for what I personally wanted to track.

The only formulas are simple ones to calculate profit automatically once given the returns, and the totals at the top (SUM’s) and then the ROI in the yellow box at the top. I also have some formulas to calculate the profit per odds banding as shown in the table above. It’s all pretty basic but if people would like a copy to see how it works let me know and I’ll stick a link to a blank version you can copy and use for yourself in the next post in this two part mini series…

 

Part ii coming to a blog near you…

Which brings me on to the end of part i as we are now well over the 3000 word mark!

Apologies if any of the above was a bit basic if you’ve already tried your hand at each way matching, but part ii will be digging a bit further into more strategic stuff and more of my stats.

I just wanted to write something to cover the “hand holding” stage of it, and also some of the theory which I personally find really interesting.

Cheers and see you shortly for part ii

As usual any questions (and if you would like to know something specifically in part ii) let me know in the comments below!

 

 

Notes:

  1. Although it must be said that there are armies of people out there doing exactly that and turning a profit as well, it’s just way more time consuming so why bother? Those people are true professionals staking thousands of pounds, which makes it worth the extra time investment for them. For us mere mortals stick to the quick and easy methods. ↩
  2. There are other tools out there of course but I can only really vouch for the Odds Monkey one as it’s the only one I’ve used for this. Also Odds Monkey throw all their tools in for one monthly price, whereas the other Matched betting providers tend to charge you extra for each extra tool you want to use, which is obviously not as good a deal. Anyway, I’m sure you can still make lot’s of money using other tools but will only be talking about the OM one here ↩
  3. Seriously I’ve forgotten to do this quite a number of times… haha! ↩
  4. As that is the stake I am up to now ↩
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