No Lay Matched Betting – The Ultimate Method To Exploit Bookies’ “Lay Impossible Offers”

No Lay Matched Betting

No Lay Matched Betting Method Is very useful not only for sharp punters but also for casual bettors as a risk hedging approach.

If you are a matched bettor, You must have encountered many bookies’ free bets offers which you can’t lay. How do you deal with them? just ignore?

There are a lot of juicy opportunities you can explore big profit with minimum risk by using the No Lay Matched Betting Method. I’ll share how to do it.

At the same time, you can actually lay many offers which you may think impossible to lay such as the “Create Your Own Bet” offer. How? We also share various creative solutions in this guide. 

Matched Betting – The Offer That Can Be Laid

If you are familiar with matched betting, just skip this section.

How Matched Betting Works

Coral offers “If You Place £10 Tennis Pre-Match Bet, You Will Get £10 In-Play Bet“;

Very briefly, how we do matched betting to achieve Sure Profit with Risk-Free from this offer are;

• In pre-match, 2 transactions of Back (bet on win) Player A at Coral & Lay (bet on NOT win) the same Player A at Betting Exchange like Smarkets so that you cover all outcomes.
• Regardless of the outcome, your losing & winning will cancel out each other. In real practice, usually, 2 bets are not perfectly offset due to the odds difference & exchange commission. Therefore you make a small loss called Qualifying Loss.
• Now, you get a free bet. So, you repeat the exact same process In-Play but using the free bet for the back bet at Coral. Then, this time free bet value (minus little loss) will become your net profit.
• The success factor is how to minimize this qualifying loss by selecting the player whose odds gap (between Coral & Smarkets) is the narrowest. For further details, please see Place Qualifying Bet Section in Free Matched Bet Starting Guide (2).

No Lay Matched Betting I describe is effectively doing usual betting for the Qualifying Bet stage and doing matched betting to extract cash from the free bet.

Betting Exchange

As you see in the above process, betting exchange is essential for matched betting. Therefore, it’s critical to adopt the right approach toward the betting exchanges from the beginning, which will affect your long-term profit. The 4 most established bet exchanges are;

We discussed more detail about betting exchange in this guide. Besides,  we constantly update all top 4 betting exchanges’ latest sign-up offers & how to extract cash risk-free from each offer in this list.

Betfair Alternatives

Just in case you can’t legally or physically access any of the above betting exchanges in your country, this guide will help you open an account with Betfair Alternatives.

BTW, many people imagine matched betting is for only UK & Ireland, Wrong, by using this approach everybody in the world including US citizens can make decent profits from this risk-free betting technique, just FYI.

No Lay Matched Betting – What Sort Of Offers Are We Talking About?

In this context, we are referring to the method that can address the bookmaker’s offer which we see as impossible or extremely difficult to lay in the betting exchanges.

Let’s see the specific offers we’re concerned about. I list 4 types of offers.

1) No Exchange Market

Coral runs different Tennis promotions that can’t be Laid, which as “Bet £10+ on Virtual Tennis You’ll receive a £10 free bet to use on Wimbledon finals weekend”; Simply, No Betting Exchanges including Betfair provide Virtual Sports Market, thus you can’t lay.

2)  “Your Own Bet” Offer

The recent buzz is the “Your Own Bet” offer. This is the special market each bookie allows you to mix and match markets to create your own unique bet and then request a price.

A few examples are William Hill’s “#YourBet”, Betway’s “BetYourWay”, Coral’s “Build Your Bet” etc. The offer is often in the form of a free bet like “Place a £5 (or higher) on — If You Lose We Will Refund” like Betfair Sport “OddsOnThat” as below;

Although not impossible depending on the market, usually you may not be able to lay any such markets since most of them are quite unique based on the individual punter’s request.

So, unless you are lucky enough to find the proper lay market (I would say even if you can find it, the liquidity of such a minor lay market could be extremely limited or very poor odds), it’s impossible to lay.

Some of the other offers you can’t lay are;

3) No Liquidity in the Exchange Market

Ladbrokes  – “Money Back as a free bet up to £/€10 on losing Set 1 Correct Score betting in the Muguruza v Rybarikova match”;

See the below Betfair Lay Odds that are even 3 minutes before the match starts. Firstly, very little lay offer, secondary almost all the odds are too poor, which means not worth laying because the qualifying loss will be too big;

4) ACCA Offer That Requires the Matches Simultaneously Occurring

StanJames (taken over by Unibet) – “Place Both Teams To Score Acca on four or more Premier League games on Sunday and Get a £5 free bet”;

The basic prerequisite for making matched betting on ACCA Offers is Laying The Matches Sequentially. This means if the matches happen concurrently, we can not make it Risk-Free. For this rationale, please see How To Lay & Make Matched Betting Multiples / ACCA for Newbies.

What Are The Immediate Solutions?

For 2) Your Own Bet – Creative Solutions

3 Minimum Selection Case

We all human beings are creative creatures and always come up with some solution. T&C of Create Your Own Bet varies between offers but it’s often the case that you need at least 3 selections like the below Netbet Offer;

” Bets to be placed via mobile only. No Opt-In is required customers need to place a Pre-match £5 Bet Maker on one of the selected games above. The minimum total combined odds for the bet maker is 3/1. The minimum number of Pre-Match selections for the bet maker is 3.”

So, how to lay off this offer? Find the various examples of at least 3 selections; 

Assuming there is an offer for Real Madrid vs PSG game.

Ensure your bet is in line with each offer’s requirement. The above combination bets’ odds are often not good and lay odds can be poor, therefore even though you can lay the qualifying loss could be big.

So, shop around the lay odds (that’s why you need to have not only 1 betting exchange but also multiple bet exchanges – see the latest offer of the best betting exchanges) to minimize the qualifying loss.

2 Minimum Selection Case

BTW, if the required minimum selection is only 2 like below;

, it’s much easier.

Find many examples of 2 selections;

Assuming there is an offer for Manchester UTD vs Newcastle UTD game.

So, as you’re aware that any Winner & BTTS combination can be layed

Again, you can create many combinations of Win (or Lose or Draw) with Correct score which can be layed by the single Correct score.

Simple as that.

For 3) No Liquidity & 4) Acca Simultaneous Matches

For 3), since the lay market itself exists, if you’re lucky you may find a good lay offer. Then you can simply take the Under-laying method as a Risk-Free Bet Approach. The detailed process is explained in How To Lock-In Profits from Risk-Free Bet.

For 4), we prepare a variety of Acca insurance spreadsheet that includes a mode called Lay All At The Start. You can download Free Spreadsheet in Lay Accumulator Spreadsheet Tutorial. As the name implies, we lay all the matches all at once before the games start. However, it requires very short odds in every match, we discuss more details in this guide.

So, probably the easiest solution is to use the Smarkets Custom Lay Multiples method. 

No Lay Matched Betting Method

As briefly explained before, what we suggest is very simple, Do No Lay yet Advantage Play by minimizing risk for the qualifying bet, and extract cash from the free bet via matched betting.

Rationale: Risk vs Return – Effective Odds

All through 1) – 4) cases, we receive the Free Bet as long as we place the qualifying bet. We can confidently extract 80% of the free bet. In other words, what we do is risk 20% of the free bet amount for any potential return in the qualifying bet.

Say, 3) of Ladbrokes Offer, the free bet is £10, thus we need to prepare a £2 loss in the free bet. When it comes to the qualifying bet, the range of odds of the correct 1st set score was around 4.5 – 18.0.

The actual result was Muguruza 6 – 1 Rybarikova of which the odds were around 9.0. This gives you the expected return of £80 from a £10 qualified bet. In summary, we are risking £2 for a potential £80 return. This means the effective odds is £80/£2 + 1 = 41 compared with 9 of Muguruza’s odds of winning the 1st set by 6 – 1.

Obviously, you feel comfortable pursuing this risk/reward level. Even if you take the lowest odds of 4.5, the effective odds were 18.5 in comparison with 4.5. Definitely, it’s a value bet, and as long as we keep taking this offer, mathematically it’s impossible to lose in long term.

We can apply the same concept to 2) Betfair Sports & 4) StanJames offer.

Rationale: EV – Expected Value

For 1) Coral Virtual Tennis offer,  although you can take the same approach, I will show you another tactic. Since it’s not necessary to place the entire £10 into 1 bet, we can take the casino game approach to minimize the loss. For further details in this regard, please take a look at Casino Bonus Strategy – How To Beat Online Casino With Expected Value Betting.

I explained the EV tactics on the 3 most popular games, namely, Roulette, Blackjack & Slots in the above document though, the fundamental concept is the same. And it can also apply to sports betting as below.

The virtual tennis odds look pretty standardized. The favourite’s service game gives the odds range of 1.1 – 1.3 to favourite and 4.5 – 7 to the underdog as seen from the below example;

Let’s quickly calculate the Coral overround % based on the above odds. 1.15 of the favourite’s probability of winning is 87% (1/1.15), while 5.0 of the underdog’s probability of winning is 20% (1/5). So, Overround = (87% + 20%) – 100% = 7% This is a bookmaker’s profit margin that is equivalent to the house edge of the casino.

So, we can calculate  

EV =  Bonus (£) – WR (Wager Requirements) Amounts (£) x House Edge (%) = Freebet (£10 x 80% Extraction) – (£10 WR x 7%) = £7.3  

This offer gives you a Positive EV. That’s why it’s worth pursuing. The more you bet, the closer to the overround because the better you can get rid of variance. You may want to bet £1 x 10 or £0.5 x 20 or £2 x 5, depending on your preference.

What I did was £1 x 10 and ended up with £2.21 profit with 10 consecutive winnings. I bet on the only favourite. I observed 16 games including no real money practice, I never saw the underdog winning. Just FYI.

No Lay Accumulator Insurance

So far, we discussed the cases of difficult laying. But, we are adding the tactic of Intentionally Not Lay.

No Lay Acca Insurance – How we do / Pros & Cons / EV

The bookmaker’s offer we’re talking about is Acca Insurance of whose typical claim is “We will Refund if 1 leg let you down“ like below Paddy Power;

We usually do the Lay Sequential approach to make it risk-free. However. in these tactics, we simply don’t lay at all.

Pros & Cons

Advantages of No Lay Acca;

While disadvantages of No Lay Acca;

EV (Expected Value)

The formula of EV is;

EV = All teams win £ (Acca stake x combined odds) x Probability % + 1 team loses £ (Free bet cash value) x Probability % + 2< team loses £ (lose acca stake) x Probability %

The key factor is Probability %, especially All Win. The lower the odds, the higher the probability, so as a fundamental approach, it’s wise to select the Acca Insurance of which minimum odds per leg is the lowest like 1.3<, go to the Latest List of Best Acca Insurance Offers to choose.

Player’s Real Performance

Let me quote the information posted in the forum of Oddsmonkey showing stats of individual players (I combined the poster’s original post & the subsequent answers to other members’ questions); 

I hope this may give you a better insight into how it works.

No Lay Matched Betting Wrap Up

Let me alert you that what I discussed in this article works in the simple Risk-Free Offer. If the offer requires an additional Trigger in Qualifying Bet such as “If Messi Scores 1st Goal, We Will Refund You” etc, you need to take Matched Betting Trigger Bet Approach, please see How To Lock-In Profit on Trigger Bet with Extra Lay Spreadsheet.

If that trigger condition can’t be laid like the offer of “If Messi Scores 2nd goal rather than 1st goal, We will refund you”, there must be extremely limited value. Because there is no guarantee to get a free bet. Thus, such an offer is not in our scope in this discussion.

Never Overlook The Value Opportunities

I understand from my readers that many matched bettors tend not to be bothered by the bookies’ offers that can’t be laid. I really would like those people to change their mindset due to the reasons we discussed here.

As long as we find Value in the form of effective odds or expected value, we should take the offers as many as we can. Because we are able to make the profit in the long-term without fail. That is the Advantage Play. You don’t need to trust me but trust mathematics.

Lastly, we have summarized the 5 most common welcome offers among UK & European bookies & brief instructions on how to use matched betting to extract cash from each offer in this guide, you may be able to find the overlooked opportunities, just FYI.

If you have any inquiries or need any help from us, please contact us anytime (don’t worry, we will not charge you any fee, everything is free here).

BTW, in case you’re a sharp casino & game bonus hunter, strongly suggest taking a look at the List of 52 Best Bitcoin Casino Bonuses and for those who appreciate the highest privacy, go to the List of Best Anonymous Bitcoin Casinos & Bonuses, just FYI.

Good Luck!!

Joshua Walker (bio)

Editor – Global Extra Money (GEM)