One of the most common questions which seems to pop-up amongst beginner Matched Betting groups is for people seeking advice on how to ‘lose it into the exchange’. Inevitably someone will have won a large bet with a bookie and are now trying to avoid having to do a load of rollover or, even worse, trying to avoid strict KYC checks.

Time and time again I spot people asking for tips of selecting losing bets and occasionally see others responding with their own advice on which matches they are sure will lose.

Let me share with you my own tale of woe.

In the Beginning..

My story starts on a particularly cold January evening with all horse racing finished for the day and no domestic football games on. At times like these I like to crack on with new account signup offers and, having just opened a new bank account for my wife, had alot to be getting on with.

Most signup offers are pretty lean these days compared to a couple of years ago. Back then it was easy to get a ‘Bet £50 for £150’ worth of free bets with all the major bookies. Now however things are a bit tougher in the mainstream with only the mighty Bet365 retaining their signup value. So I began looking further afield for some hidden gems of signups still offering good value for the time required.

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Through my internet travels I spotted this advert for SportNation, offering a very generous £100 worth of bonus for a £200 deposit. I’d signed myself up to SportNation a couple of years ago so knew they were a legit site.

As always, I took a quick skim over the terms to check the wagering required in order to release the £100 of bonus funds.

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Blah blah blah £200 blah blah blah bonus funds available is £100 blah blah blah 7x your deposit amount and bonus funds blah blah blah.

Seems simple enough. Deposit £200, get £100, wagering of 7 x £300 required. No worries!

So I cracked on with my deposit of £200, received £100 and went off to find a match to chuck the whole £300.

Now for offers like this I tend to go slightly higher odds and underlay a bit so that it is more unlikely that the bet will win and if it does I will get a bit extra from the underlay to help compensate for the wagering requirements.

I went for Cardiff v Bournmouth, Betting on Cardiff at odds of 3.25. Pretty unlikely they would win but not a massive issue if they did. The bet would return £975 into the bookie with £1800 wagering left to go which I could cover in 2 bets. Simples.

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So it seems Cardiff had a very good night, polishing off Bournmouth and throwing my cash back into Sportnation.

Sportnation: +£975
Exchange: -£845

Awesome, £130 in profit so far with £1800 of wagering to go. I’ll just chuck the whole amount on a low odds match and roll it over again if it wins to complete the wagering. Simples.

Here Come The Floods..

I logged into my SportNation account the next day and thought I’d better just double check the bonus section to see how long I had left to complete this wagering.

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Rollover left: £2050? That can’t be right, I placed a £300 bet originally so there should be only £1800 of wagering left to go.. right?

This certainly confused me, and I was reluctant to go onto live chat and brand myself as a bonus chasers So instead I thought I’d better take another look at those bonus terms.

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Oh crap.

So I have £2050 worth of wagering to do and only £50 counts at a time? That means I need to do 41 worth of individual £50 bets on a bookie which is known to not have particularly good odds. Okay, no biggie.. I’ve got 30 days to do this so I’ll just grind on through at low odds so it doesn’t take out too much of my exchange.

I better check over all the terms just so there’s no more nasty surprises..

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General SportNation terms and conditions apply? So there’s more terms involved here? Best go hunt those down as well.

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Did you spot it? Hold on, let me make things a bit easier for you.

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Oh double crap

So I’ve now got £975 stuck in an account requiring 41 x £50 bets to release and even then we’re not even allowed the account anyway?!

This just got serious.

The way I saw it, I had 3 possible options out of this:

– Write off the whole amount
– Crack on with 41 separate bets and hope they pay out at the end
– Try and lose it into the exchange

10 points for guessing which option I went for.

I figured I’d find a football match with enough liquidity for me to lump the whole £975 on an option with odds above 3 to try and lose it into the exchange at a liability I could afford without wiping out my whole exchange balance.

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Perfect, I chucked the whole balance on the draw at odds of 3.5 and waited nervously for the match to start.

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74 minutes down and the score was a comfortable 2-0. Villareal had dominated the game so far and things were looking good.

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Unbelievable . An own goal followed 6 minutes later by the match equaliser. Villareal had crumpled and the match finished a shock 2-2 draw.

Sportnation: +£3412.50
Exchange: -£3365.21

I now had well over £3k stuck in SportNation plus the whole load of wagering left to do.

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That’s 40 x £50 bets, potentially tying up even more exchange balance and with no guarantee the bookie would even pay out at the end. Worse case scenario they could void the whole thing and just return my original £200 leaving me several thousand pounds down. Disaster!

What else was there to do but crack on with wagering and pray they did eventually pay out.

The following days were a mad blur of football, horse and in-play bets as I struggled to get on anything with a decent odds match while rushing to complete wagering as quickly as possible to hopefully reclaim all my matched betting bank.

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Eventually all 40 bets were complete leaving just a nail-biting wait to see if my withdrawal would ever see the light of day. SportNation have a 48 hour wait on payment processing yet that didn’t stop me logging in every couple of hours to see if it had been denied and my wife’s account closed.

The Sun Shines..

After what seemed like a lifetime of waiting I woke up one morning to the sight of several thousand pounds landing in the bank from Sportnation. I’ve never been so relieved to see a bookie payout and it was by far my largest withdrawal from an online bookie.

Not only had I lost alot of money in the qualifying losses from the 40 x £50 bets required for wagering.. completing this offer had taken me almost a week’s worth of evenings where I could concentrate on little else. Not to mention the stress of not knowing if the whole thing was in vain as it was all going to be confiscated anyway.

Let this be a lesson..

I’ve shared this rather long-winded post with you to hopefully share 2 important lessons:

1. ALWAYS read and understand the terms of an offer fully before starting it. Had I seen that the wagering needed to be done in 42 separate bets I’d have never bothered with it. Had I seen they didn’t allow multiple accounts per household I’d have never touched it with a bargepole.

2. DON’T try to ‘lose it into the exchange’!