One of my Simple Bets students DM’ed me on Instagram yesterday.

Here’s what he said:

There’s a bit of matched betting jargon in there, so here’s what he means:

Using the SGM (same game multi) strategy we use in Simple Bets, he managed to make a profit of between $1,003 and $1,314 after making 64 bets on the World Cup.

That’s around $16 per bet.

Pretty good!

Out of curiosity I went and did my numbers too.

I made $662 AUD.

Not sure how our numbers are so different, but it’s not the first time I’ve been getting outgunned by my students. It’s happening pretty often lately actually!

Let’s break down how my numbers worked out.

To matched bet on the World Cup, I leveraged two promotions offered by TAB.

Here’s the first one:

Place a pre-match Head to Head bet on either team in a Football World Cup game, and if the game ends in a draw, we’ll refund your bet (up to $50) as a Bonus Bet*!

This is a very straightforward promo to play.

Simply bet on a team to both win and lose.

In matched betting speak, we call this backing and laying, or placing a qualifying bet.

On each bet you will take a small qualifying loss, usually around $2 or $3.

However, if the game ends in a draw, you will win a $50 bonus bet.

We can then use basic matched betting to convert this $50 bonus bet into a guaranteed cash profit.

Here’s how it played out for my World Cup:

I bet on 37 games, with total qualifying losses of $130.85 ($3.50 per game)

There were five games that ended in a draw and won me a $50 bonus bet = $250 in bonus bets.

I always convert bonus bets at a minimum of 70% retention, so those bonus bets ended up netting me $175.

Total profit from head to heads = $175 – $130.85 = $44.15.

Pretty shitty.

HOWEVER, in matched betting, as long as you come out in profit, it means your maths was sound.

So even though the profits here were insignificant, at least the strategy was correct.

I also do this strategy during Premier League and A League, as TAB usually offers this promo on this leagues as well, and it’s normally quite lucrative.

Perhaps World Cups games are less likely to end in draws for whatever reason! Who knows.

Let’s look at that second promo.

Place a 3+ leg Same Game Multi on a Football World Cup game, and get a refund (up to $50) as a Bonus Bet if you lose by one leg.

Same Game Multi promos are my favourite promos because they’re so easy to do once you understand them.

I can literally place all my bets for the day in less than 2 minutes, without even using a matched betting calculator.

Depending on the sport and the bookie, your expected winnings per bet is often over $15 (in matched betting we call this EV, or Expected Value).

However, even when you don’t have the best legs to choose from, you still get an EV of around $6 or $7 per bet which is still pretty good.

That means for every 100 bets, you will make around $600 or $700 at least, but potentially closer to $1,500.

In Simple Bets, I break down the 300+ Same Game Multis I placed when getting to my first $10k in profit, and the EV worked out to $10.70, which is very good in matched betting.

Let’s take a look at how I did in this World Cup.

I bet on 63 games, netting a total LOSS of $117.

However, from those games, I netted 21 bonus bets.

$1,050 bonus bets converted at 70% gives a cash profit of $735.

Total profit from same game multis = $735 – $117 = $618.

Add that to my $44.15 from head to heads gives a total World Cup profit of $662.15.

To be honest, that was a bit underwhelming for me.

SGM and Head to Head are both usually great promos for soccer, so I was expecting a bit more from such a big tournament.

It was nice to see some other matched bettors hitting the $1k mark though!

Hope you all had a great World Cup 🙂