Common Newbie Mistakes...

Matched betting requires quite a bit of focus when it is so alien to you so although we all try and fit placing our bets around work and family, there are occasions when you try get your bets done in-between making the dinner or on the school run!   

It may sound obvious, but the more distractions you have around you at the crucial time you back and lay your bet, the more risk you take making a fatal error.

Dogs, kids, and husbands/wives are the most common home-based distractions and although you can’t lock them up in a dark room, there are a few things you can do:

- Find a room that’s away from the hubbub of the main house

- Close the door and get the lighting nice and calming

- Fit your bets around the kids school/bedtime as much as possible

- Don’t matched bet while at your other job (people do!)

Distractions also come from procrastinating online so really try and allocate a few hours of the day solely to matched betting just to minimise them as much as you possibly can. 

All offers are not created equal in that a ‘Bet X, Get Y’ can be more straight forward than say, an accumulator offer. The biggest favour you can do yourself is to set aside the time to reading and understanding the guides for those more complicated offers before attempting them. Trying to lay your acca trigger bets when on the school run when you only ‘kinda know how’ is just going to end in tears.

Organisation, organisation, organisation

Treat MB like it’s important and like anything important, organisation is key to being successful and efficient.  We provide you with the plans, the guides, the spreadsheets and the community help but the practical side of things come down to you. 

Organise your workspace, your timeframes, your accounting/stationary as if this is a job! 

We’ve seen members posting photos of their ‘MB office’, their multi-screen set-ups, their incredible spreadsheets and even their wall charts! It ALL helps to create a distraction free, peaceful, focused approach to something that does change many people’s lives. Dedicating the time to minimising distractions will save you mistakes, and profits in the future, we guarantee it!

FOMO

Another big ‘distraction’ is something every matched bettor can admit to being guilty of and that’s the ‘fear of missing out’ and to a lesser extent, other people’s profit postings.  When you’ve had a slow profit week and you come across an offer posted on our Facebook community you may decide to jump into it when you aren’t really sure how in the hope you don’t miss out and get left behind!

Although the TP team and other members will all help out, it takes the member themselves to approach the offer sensibly. Read it, familiarise yourself with it and then come on the groups and ask your questions instead of just going for it. We’d rather you ask questions before making a mistake and getting into a panic. 

Don’t jump too far along your learning curve and do more advanced offers than you are comfortable with. Sure, there is a fine balance between learning something new and staying familiar with what you already know, but ease into those new offers slowly and again, only after asking for help on the groups. 

Matched betting has a pretty clear path from those relatively easy welcome offers through to accas and onto things like Extra Place offers and we hope that the ‘Welcome Offer’ guides make that path a logical one in keeping with one’s natural learning speeds.  

It just needs you to walk that path and not to undertake something you feel is a little beyond your grasp just because someone else is doing so.

Ignore T+Cs at your peril guys n gals.

It is the second most common mistake newbies make and it’s one that rests firmly on your shoulders. Bookies are getting pretty sneaky these days with very similar looking offers having maybe one, very different, but important term setting them apart.

- Don’t assume you know the offer until you’ve read the terms

- Gradually familiarise yourself with the mechanics of offers

- Always search out the ‘Minimum Stake’, ‘Minimum Odds Required’, ‘Eligible Markets’ and the timescale information of an offer as a bare minimum. 

Usually, the bookies email or promo banner will give you the basic terms with the above information included, but not always! You may find a link with ‘Full T+Cs Apply’ attached. It would be good practice to read through the extended terms and make sure you have a fair idea of what is required and when. 

‘Opting-in’ by clicking a button or entering a code comes up daily as a mistake on our TP live chats and although we highlight these requirements in our guides, it is so easy to be delayed or distracted and forget the code or opt-in button and then it becomes a time consuming effort to chase the offer on live chat.

Simply save yourself that energy by jotting down the tick list for the offer;

√ - Opt-in?

√ - Minimum Stake?

√ - Minimum Odds?

√ - Eligible Markets?

√ - When do the trigger bets need to settle/Free bets get credited?

Screenshots

When you need to get onto live chat chasing an un-credited bet, it’s worth taking a screenshot of any conversations you have, or better still, get a chat transcript from the chat box or ask directly.

Most browsers have an ‘Extension’ or ‘Add-on’ store where you can search for a screenshot tool, they are free and easy to use saving you a lot of time and bother later.

This helps for terms & conditions too - it's good practice to store them, just incase! You can always delete them after you've had the freebies!

Thirdly, but by no means lastly, Unmatched or Partially matched bets complete our top 3 Newbie Mistakes!

This is such an easy one to avoid once you know what you’re looking for and we’re on a mission here at Team Profit to make this common mistake a thing of the past.  

We’ve written a lengthy guide on this already and we HIGHLY suggest reading it thorough and bookmarking it somewhere, but I’ll just go over a summary of what these terms mean. 

Both unmatched and partially matched bets occur when there simply isn’t enough money ‘in the pot’ at the exchange odds you have in front of you.
Think of it like this, if you need to lay £9 on that horse and there is only £3 in the pot for you to ‘take’ that bet, it will only partially match.

That ‘pot’ is referred to as ‘liquidity’.

Where is this pot you speak of? 

I may be about to blow some of your minds here, but take a look under the odds on any exchange and you will see little £ figures.  That is ‘the pot’.

Sometimes you’ll see the liquidity sitting on £1 and this is generally an indication that the pot is empty and you should not lay just yet.  You can either wait for that £ figure to rise, or find another match.

ALWAYS ensure that the £s in the pot, are equal or higher than the lay stake you need to place and you will avoid the issue of your lay not matching. 

Robots are takin’ over

Now, there is always an exception to the rule and the exchanges employ (not literally), a ‘bot’ which is basically a tool that will automatically top up the pot of liquidity as and when someone tries to place their lay, even if the £ figure was sitting at £1.

If you were to place your lay bet of £9 on a £1 pot of liquidity and there was a bot there, it’d match almost instantly.

The issue here is that we, as matched bettors, have no idea if there is a bot sitting there waiting to auto-top up the pot or not and there will not be a bot behind every market so as a general rule, just avoid the risk and do not lay. 

Before you place every single lay bet check that the liquidity amount is higher than your required lay stake.

We hope this guide will really help to erase some mistakes from your matched betting routines and help you all to reach your goals that little bit sooner.