How To Get A Free Lunch

How To Get A Free Lunch

Milton Friedman has clearly never heard of Matched Betting Guy, because I’m gonna show you show to get a free lunch every weekday!

Throughout the week multiple bookies do various price boosts on a wide variety of sports. Most of these are for a limited time and are impossible to predict accuratly when and on what the boost will be. It’s also likely your accounts may begin to get limited if you’re always chucking large amounts online on these arbs as they spring up.

In contrast; William Hill does a boost on the same sport at the same time every weekday making it easy to plan for. Even better.. the boost is avaliable instore! Each day at 12 midday Mr Hill will boost a horse in a race later that day creating a nice arb. I’ve been monitoring these boosts for the past month and they’ve always been an arb and are worth on average £3-4 per bet. The boosts last for 15 minutes so if you have multiple William Hill shops in your town centre you can get round a couple of them placing the same bet for even better profit.

That’s a free lunch every weekday!

You are able to bet a maximum of £20 per shop on this and need to use a special coupon to place the bet. It can sound daunting if you’re not familiar with betting shops but having a specific coupon makes things much easier.

How to place you bet

At 12 midday, walk into your local William Hill shop and take a look at the screens. One of them will have the boost labelled as “Special 1” displaying the name of the race in the top left and name of the horse & odds in the middle. Make a note of the race, time & horse. In the 3 months I’ve been doing this now the boost has been positive value 95% of the time, very rarely it is negative value however there is that small risk. If you want to play it safe, check the odds against the exchange before placing your bet but make sure the staff dont see you on betfair/smarkets! Check that the offer is for the horse to win, NOT for the horse to win by X lengths.

You want to look for slip of paper titled “Today’s Horse Racing Specials”:

Find that slip and put a cross in the £20 box under the “Special 1” section in the top left:

Take the slip and your £20 cash (never pay by card!) to the counter and hand both over. Keep hold of the receipt.

Once you are done, head outside and away from the shop. Get out your smartphone and use the Smarkets app to find the race & horse. You want to place a lay bet of exactly £20 against the horse that’s been boosted instore.

If you’re going to hit another shop then get moving as you’ve only got 15 minutes to get all your bets on!

Why lay exactly £20?

There’s 2 reasons why we lay exactly £20 rather than working out the exact amount using a matched betting calculator like you would for all other bets:

Speed

You’ve only got 15 minutes to get these bets placed in store. Trying to work out an exact match is going to use up valuable time if you’re going between shops and can be very fiddly to do while on a phone out in town. Far easier to just lay exactly £20 without having to do any of the calculations.

Reward

By laying exactly £20 regardless of the odds you are effectivly placing a balanced bet. If the horse loses and your money goes into the exchange then you will get back pretty much dead-on your original £20 per-shop stake (£20 minus the exchange comission). No profit but equally nothing lost.
If your horse wins at the bookie then you will make a much bigger profit than if you had calculated an exact match. I much prefer to do this as it helps compensate for the extra time and hassle of going round to collect your winnings.

By doing this your profit can jump up to £8-£13 if the horse wins with £0 loss if it doesnt.

This assumes you have 0% Smarkets comission avaliable through Profit Accumulator or similar

It really is that easy! Spend 5 minutes of your daily lunchbreak walking into the bookie in town.. place a single bet and have it pay for the meal-deal lunch. Give me a shout in the comments below if you have any questions.

Sites I Recommend:

There are many guides available online which explain the maths behind Matched Betting and how the offers workI strongly recommend you sign up to one of the Matched Betting guide websites. Profit Accumulator has a free trial which requires no payment method to be registered so is great for giving Matched Betting a try for free. Just register with your email address and take a look through the guides for instructions on how to complete the first 2 signup offers.

36 thoughts on “How To Get A Free Lunch

  1. Is the horse and odds different to the online one at 12 because there really isn’t that much money in it maybe £2 with correct lay and 3-4 with the £21 lay.

      1. Today was not particularly good, but still £3.25 per shop with the underlay. I hit two shops in those 15 minutes so £6.50. In the past weekdays it’s won 2/5 times for £15 and £20 each across the 2 shops. £35 profit for 5 minutes walking around town at lunchtimes.

  2. Decided to try to bet on the horses for a first time. Went to the shop did as instructed except haven’t looked at the screen. And that what I got – “Offer 1 = flash odds: Humbert to win the 1.45 Lingfield WAS 5/2 NOT 3/1, Offer 16: Yensir 2.20 Lingfield to win by over 1 lenght. Have no idea what the second part means nor how to lay it. Looks like the rules for the “special 1” have been changed.

    1. The 2nd part is just an advert for another offer. did you lay off your bet? You only had to lay Humbert.

      1. I didn’t. Silly me, can’t believe I got so confused. Anyway, there is three shops around to visit in a 15 minutes, time to get £20 back and go after free lunch. Thanks for sharing.

  3. Do you know of any other bookmakers that have similar type deals in shop? Not necessarily price boosts. I mean, may as well kill 2 birds with 1 stone since going to town to do WH.

    1. Betfred do price boosts from 11-1. They’re not as predictable and most have no value in them however I sometimes spot a gem. They tend to put them all up on their twitter feed as well to save you waiting around in the shop

  4. I see the other boxes for £50, £100 etc.

    Would you recommend going for a higher stake?

    I appreciate that this may be a bit bold…

      1. Yes but you can hand multiple slips in at the same shop. Not sure how many would raise suspicion but i regularly put 3 on in the same shop.

  5. Understood, thanks. Popped into PP, compared to WH it was really busy, they were doing refunds upto £20 if your chosen horse came 2nd to SP favourite, didn’t have time to enquire which races, it said 3 races today. But that’s not a boost though and I doubt B&L odds would be tight enough.

  6. What about the other specials? Are they typically not boosts?
    I have ALOT of William Hill bookies within cycling distance, but I can’t reach them all within 15 minutes… maybe 3 tops

    1. The other specials are usually multi-part bets like x horse to win by x amount AND y to win by y amount etc. They are impossible to lay off and are likely of little value

    1. Yes, you can collect winnings from any WH shop although I prefere to go back to the one I placed the bet in so it looks less like you’re travelling around between shops.

  7. Guy,

    How are you getting on with Cheltenham?

    Yesterday, the Special 1 offer was made up of 4 boosts, each segment named a “happy hour.” HH1 was your selection if you bet in the first 15 mins between 12-1, HH2 for 12:15-12:30 etc.

    Do you know if you can bet for all 4 horses in store?

    I was too rushed to ask in any of the bookies, nor did I want to draw attention to myself, managed to place a bet in 5 stores… it was bit like getting paid for running.

  8. The William Hill Cheltenham Happy Hour offered some descent odds, easy to lock in a small profit there to build the bankroll. Not a vintage Cheltenham for matched betting, but still profit to be made!

  9. I nearly lost £80 doing this. Put money on the special, and it turned out to be Horse X to win by Y lengths – so not layable. All I could do was lay the horse not to win, and hope: possible results being: horse wins by Y lengths: approx £80 up; horse wins, but not by Y lengths: £80 down; horse loses: £0. Luckily for me, the bookie bet won, but I could have lost a lot.

    It’s nice to get an odds boost, but it is gambling, not arbing.

    1. Looking back, it would have been more sensible not to lay it at all, and reduce the potential risk while increasing potential profit.

    2. Hi Punter,

      I’ve not seen it be by Y lengths on any of the weekdays I do it. It’s possible to offer is different on weekends? I’ll amend this post to state that, thanks for the heads up.

  10. Today flash odds was 5.5 with a lay odds of a 5.9. If you lay £21 that gives you £13 lose if the horse wins. It happens. Have you ever run into odds like this by yourself?

    1. Today’s was the worst boost I’ve ever seen them do. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a mistake and they had meant to type 6.5.

      Regardless, if this does happen again you can limit your loss by backing the horse on the exchange after youve left the shop and had a chance to calculate things. This was the 3rd time I’ve seen the odds be lower than the exchange, so it seems to happen about 5% of the time. Still excellent value overall!

      1. I got caught by that too. Put down my money, rushed out of the shop to put on the lay bet, £21 without looking at the lay odds, thinking “in the worst case I’ll get my £21 back” … leading to a liability about 15 greater than the potential winnings.

        What I do now is this: I go into the shop at 12, wait for the offer 1 to flash up on the screens. If it’s layable I put a fiver on it. Once outside I check the lay odds and only lay if they are higher. Otherwise I just punt the fiver bet. They are good odds and the nag actually seems to win quite often.

        If the lay odds are OK I whack £47.50 on right away because I know I can get to two other shops within the 15 minutes so I have a total stake of £45. I do it immediately as I suspect lots of other people are also doing this offer and the odds may rise by the time I’ve been to the other shops. They don’t always rise and sometimes the odds also drop by the time of the race. But I am risk averse which is why I match bet in the first place.

        Once all your cash bets are placed you can then take a couple of minutes to use a calculator and add a secondary lay bet to equalize your profit.

        1. Thanks Punter, I’ve updated the post with a disclaimer as sometimes there isnt any value. I think its about 5% of the times I’ve been doing it that it would be of negative value.

  11. Do you have any records as to how much profit you are making each month? I could probably get to 1 William Hill maybe 2 tops in the 15 mins they offer the flash boosts, but I would have to drive there. Unless it produces £5 – £10 profit for those two shops, with petrol costs it probably isn’t worth doing them. I have a reasonably healthy Online Account, but don’t take the Mickey with Arbs/Boosts. Just do the normal offers such as 2clear and 4MM.

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