If you are new to matched betting then a great place to start is with the sign up offers. You can see a great list of offers on our site by clicking here.

Matched betting sign up offers have two main steps to complete in order for us to profit from them. The first step is the qualifying bet. Let’s use the first offer on the list as an example.

Coral Free Bet Bonus – Bet £5 and get £20 free

So in order to get our free £20 bet we need to place a £5 qualifying bet.

Our qualifying bet isn’t going to make us any money, it will usually cost us a few pence so we need to keep out qualifying losses to a minimum in order to make the most money we can out of the offer. In order to do that we need to find an event where the back odds at the bookie closely match the lay odds at the exchange. Even if we lost the whole £5 it would still be a good deal for us as we will be able to make around £16 from the free £20 bet. As matched bettors though we are looking to minimise losses and maximise profits. Over the course of many bets these small savings add up to a lot of money.

Step 1 – Register an account at the bookmaker

Click here to sign up to Coral

Click the green Bet Now button to proceed to the sign up page.

Fill out your details and register for a free account. Remember when signing up to opt in to marketing emails, it’s a good idea to set up a new email address to keep all these separate. It’s a good idea to opt in as bookies will often send us more free bet offers via email.

If you already have a Coral account then you won’t be eligible for this offer so move onto the next sign up offer if that is the case. Or get a member of your family to sign up instead.

Step 2 – Deposit £5

We need to put £5 into our account in order to complete our qualifying bet. Always do your first deposit with a debit card. Other deposit methods like Skrill and Paypal will mean you won’t qualify for the free bet.

Step 3 – Set up your Coral account to show decimal odds

By default bookmakers will show you odds in a fractional format. We need to see the decimal odds in order to calculate our bet. ALl bookmakers have the option to change between decimal and fractional somewhere on the site. With Coral it is right at the top of the screen.

Step 4 – Find a bet

There are a few sites out there that will help you find good matches for matched betting. We will talk about these in the future. For now though we are going to keep it simple and bet on a horse race.

The minimum odds we need to qualify are 1.5

By comparing the odds on Coral and Betfair I have found a horse that is running where the back odds match the lay odds. This means our qualifying loss will be really small.

The back odds on Coral are 6.00

The lay odds on Betfair are also 6.00 – On betfair we are always looking at the pink box to see the current lay price

So now we have found our bet it is time to place it with Coral. Click the green 6.00 on Coral to bring up the betting slip on the right hand side of the page.

Press the green place bet button. Congratulations you have just placed your back bet. Now we need to lay that bet off at the exchange so that we don’t lose our £5.

Step 5 – The Lay Bet

Using the lay calculator here on trickybet.net we can calculate how much we need to lay and what our qualifying loss will be.

Enter the details of our bet into the calculator:

The calculator tells us we need to lay £5.04 at betfair. After both the back bet and the lay bet settle we will be down 20p or 21p depending on the result BUT we have our £20 free bet to come.

Go to Betfair and click the pink 6.00, this will bring up the bet slip on the right hand side. Enter 5.04 and click place bets.

The liability tells us our potential losses so we need to have £25.20 in our Betfair account to place this bet. We won’t actually lose that much though as if this bet loses it means our back bet has won and we will win £25 at Coral.

That’s it! You have just completed your first qualifying bet. Now all we need to do is wait until the race finishes. Whatever the result Coral will credit us with a £20 Free Bet!

In the next blog post I will show you how you can use this free bet to make yourself a guaranteed profit of around £16.