How much money do you need to start matched betting?
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You are going to need some capital to start up your matched betting side hustle, but just how much do you need to be successful with it?
By far one of the most common questions I get asked by people when it comes to matched betting is how much money is needed to start. While there is no hard line for how much you need, the total I recommend is normally higher than they would like to hear.
Personally, I started with about $1000, and quite frankly, that is the bare minimum you would need to start making some decent money. In a perfect world I would have started with far more, but the reality of a uni student didn’t allow that. My friend who got me started on matched betting began with about $3000, and that is a far better amount.
Importantly, you can still start doing matched betting with less than these totals, but the returns simply just aren’t there, and you may honestly be better just getting a job and saving up a more decent amount of start-up capital.
Why you want more than one thousand dollars
Unfortunately, the withdrawal times for betting sites generally takes a bit of time, with most averaging about a day from my experience. This greatly limits your flexibility if a single bet can result in, for example, all your funds going from Betfair to Sportsbet.
I will demonstrate this with an example. Say you have a total of $500, with $100 of that on Sportsbet and the rest on Betfair. You place $50 on the favourite in Sportsbet, paying odds of 4, which means you are laying $150 on Betfair. If the favourite wins, you suddenly only have $250 on Betfair and $250 on Sportsbet.
If the favourite wins in the next race too at the same odds, suddenly you don’t have enough money on Betfair, and you will have to wait until you withdraw from Sportsbet to start again.
Of course, the chances of this happening is quite small, but it is a very real possibility that you have to be aware of when playing with smaller totals. However, this is only half the problem, with the real crunch coming when you try and convert your bonus bets.
Bonus bet conversion takes far more capital to work, with the outcomes being bet on having far higher odds. As a rule of thumb, the process works best when the odds are higher than 8:1. Another example is called for here.
Say you had a good race, with the favourite coming in at second, and you now have a $50 bonus bet burning a hole in your pocket, and you want to convert it. Keeping the $500 capital from above and the same original allocations, you would now have about $390 in your Betfair account and $50 in Sportsbet, along with the bonus.
You find a horse with odds of 8.00, and place the bonus on that, with the payout being $350. Following the process, you then minus $35 from this, meaning you place a $315 lay on Betfair. You basically have your entire Betfair account staked on this race, so if the horse wins, you have all your capital on Sportsbet, meaning once again, you have to wait to withdraw everything out until you can start making money again.
There really is a weird irony in this where you are hoping for the horse you have backed loses, and while it is bad for business, I always stop and have a little laugh at the odds I have sometimes defied with my bonus converting.
Learn more about bankroll requirements here.
I really want to start but I don’t have enough money, what can I do?
Ok, if you are really desperate to begin a life of matched betting even if you don’t have the recommended start up funds, there are two different strategies I would take to maximise returns.
The first one is using smaller bets, such as a $10 stake in each race rather than the optimal $50. The returns are going to be far smaller, but if you are willing to slowly grind away at the process, this could work for you.
Secondly, if you have around $500, you will have enough to place the $50 bets, but you just have to be willing to likely have some very short days, being essentially knocked out of play after maybe only 3 races. However, if you have patience and trust the process, this could definitely get you into the realm of a practical bankroll in a couple of months.
But to repeat the previous point, to avoid unnecessary frustration and to make an actual decent return on your time, you are still better off just growing your savings so you can actually begin with enough money and make it more worthwhile.
Required Bankroll for High Variance Strategies
The bankroll requirements that I described above are for if you are doing vanilla matched betting, by only taking advantage of horse racing bet returns.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing this, but if you are interested in taking advantage of other strategies, such as no lay betting, same game multi offers and other promotions that are high variance, then your bankroll requirements are significantly different.
When it comes to these high variance strategies, you just have to remember that they hold the possibility of actually losing money. Therefore, if you go into it with an insufficient bankroll, a single bad week could absolutely wipe you out.
If you are interested in pursuing same race multi offers, then I believe that you would need around $2000 in starting bankroll if you are going to stake $25 per race while still pursuing normal racing bonuses.
There are enough of these promotions to even variance out quite quickly, rather than potentially having a losing streak lasting multiple weeks with offers such as same game multis and head to head offers.
For this reason, I would say that you need at least $3000 to take on all of the promotions currently listed and being able to stake $25 for each multi offer.
If you are interested in doing no lay racing however, I recommend a far larger bankroll. I am talking about a bankroll above $8000, at least. The sheer amount of races means that a bad week could leave you out of pocket for thousands of dollars, and a small bankroll will simply not be able to handle it.
Furthermore, you will still want to be able to pursue all of the other promotions already talked about. And remember, with the no lay strategy, you don’t need to have a Betfair balance, so this really shows just how much money you are going to have with the bookies (please don’t keep your bankroll in the bookies, instead, just leave it in cash and deposit when you need to).
Personal Starting Bankroll for High Variance
Before I even thought about committing to no lay horse races and same game multis, I ensured that the two things that weren't lacking was experience and money.
While I have heard of some people believing that the general rule of thumb for starting bankroll with matched betting is $3000, I had about $10,000 that was entirely dedicated to this side hustle.
Yes, this likely was on the cautionary side, but I only really thought about doing it once I struggled with placing enough bets in time, and thus creating mistakes, and also once commissions were really starting to annoy me.
I am also placing around $250 or more on certain runners, so I certainly do want to have enough money to withstand these losses. The starting bankroll will certainly vary from person to person, and honestly no lay is more about mindset rather than bankroll.
Conclusion
While matched betting definitely isn’t one of those side hustles than can be started with just the loose change in your pocket, it really doesn’t require that much money to get started.
Once you have started up you can quickly take advantage of deposit bonuses to quickly grow your bankroll, and you should quickly be at a stage where you don’t need to worry about a cash crunch.
The starting amount may seem like a lot to some, but the potential profit is far greater!