The Experiment Begins

This is an experiment in risk free betting. Essentially, it's whether money can be made from on-line betting sites offering incentives to join such as free bets by betting against the selection on a betting exchange such as Betfair so that there is a guaranteed profit.

If you want to follow the experiment and perform your own risk free bets, please learn by my mistakes, of which there are bound to be many.

I already have a Betfair account. If you don't have an account, I recommend you set one up via a cashback site such as Quidco, who are currently offering £10 cashback for new Betfair customers.

I started by loading my Betfair account with £175 on 9th August.

My first attempt to set up a free bet was with SportingBet. They are offering a £50 risk-free first bet. Essentially, what this means is you bet £50 on a football match during August and September, and it loses, they will refund the £50. This is effectively the same as giving you a free bet except that you only get it if you lose.

I chose to bet the full £50 on a draw in the Le Havre v Nice game at odds of 3.0 (2/1). The Betfair lay odds for a draw in this game were 3.10 - I've found that it's important to identify odds in a game in the betting exchange that are as close as possible to the betting odds in the bookmaker site. Using the Risk-Free Bet Calculator I treated the bet as a free bet stake not returned and laid £32.79 with a liability of £68.85.

Le Havre beat Nice 1 : 0. I lost my £50 in SportingBet and won £31.15 (£32.79 - 5% commission) in Betfair - effectively £18.85 DOWN, but my £50 will be refunded and can then be treated as a free bet stake returned where the return should be higher than the £18.85 loss at the half way point.

Watch out for the result of the SportingBet free bet in a later post.