Arbitrage Betting Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:03] it would be a bet that was completely risk-free where you would only profit and there was no potential for downside and this is something that i've done possible today and that is arbitrage betting you tend

[00:18] to see a similar form of betting pop up nowadays in the form of matched that's been given by a bookmaker a sports book and then you offset the risk somewhere else it's the perfect way to be able to place a bet but the problem

[00:32] you're likely to be banned by a sports that this is the type of activity that you are doing however i came across this problem many years ago and solved it in the most

[00:45] unusual of ways if you're interested in learning to use bet angel head on over to our website where you can download a free trial if you're interested in learning how to use it then head over to the bet angel

[00:58] academy where you can do exactly that and if you want to talk to like-minded and if you want to talk to like-minded people then head on over to our forum so i've had a very long and varied career in sports betting it started in

[01:10] the late 80s when i started analyzing football matches with the intention of being able to win on the football pools i figured out that if i was just a little bit better than other people that would probably be good enough and that's

[01:22] would probably be good enough and that's exactly the scenario that unfolded that if you can call it a progression uh to going to bookmakers and trying to find value bets and so on with bookmakers but i realized that there was

[01:36] a discrepancy in the way that bookmakers did a number of things and i figured out one bookmaker we're talking this is a few years ago you could go to one and they would have a different price from another and i began to realize that

[01:49] if i did that and if i took the early coupons on for example football matches i could actually create positions within the that basically meant that i couldn't lose and in fact i would get a small

[02:01] when one of those positions actually came in this was classic arbitrage betting and basically you can do this in a number of arbitrage bet to simplify matters for you is let's say

[02:16] we have a tennis match for example and you can back one player at 1.5 in price somewhere else for the second player say at odds of four you can actually place a bet into the market uh with different stakes to

[02:30] ensure that you profit regardless of who goes on to win that particular tennis and you can do the same in a whole variety of sports you could do it in tennis and cricket and horse racing there's many different ways in which you

[02:43] trying to find the best price that you can somewhere and then trying to hedge that position some other way and this was pretty much where i started my entire career it was with traditional bookmakers this is pre-internet days um

[02:57] i was either finding value doing loads of clever bets or arbing and i was that i could possibly find and then hedging that somewhere else

[03:10] betting and in fact the entire sports betting industry in the year 2000 when betting exchanges were born betting exchanges gave you the ability to back uh on something so you could basically win if it went on to win or you could

[03:23] back on something to lose you could lay on a betting exchange and for the world of arbitraging this changed everything because i could and look for the best prices somewhere and then just lay it off on the exchange

[03:35] i didn't have to go to another bookmaker i could actually put it on to the exchange but better than that you could create all sorts of opportunities because on an exchange you weren't obliged to be able to just take the

[03:48] offer a price up so i started to do clever things such as actually put a a bet into the order queue and wait for somebody else to get match because on against other people with opposing opinions you weren't up against a

[04:02] bookmaker and you could actually say well i'm not happy with odds of three to actually offer that bet to the exchange and wait for it to be matched so that vastly expanded the whole range of opportunities that you could do with

[04:17] but there was a problem however and that was that if you used a bookmaker to get the best possible price you could still have a problem it wasn't entirely have a problem it wasn't entirely risk-free

[04:32] within my arbitrage and i was always looking for ways to try and limit that but one day i just came up with a bright idea of why don't i go on the exchange and place two bets at different prices and if the two of them match it's

[04:44] looking for a bookmaker price and then laying off on the exchange all i can do on the exchange i don't need to do anything else and miraculously it worked um and all of a sudden i netted a profit i did another

[04:59] where i just basically went into the market backed something at a higher price laid it a lower price and hey presto there was my free bet exactly the presto there was my free bet exactly the same way that i did it over 20 years ago

[05:13] um you can imagine that my mind was blown away when this happens back then i of course nobody was doing it there was no information else was doing it um and you know i did worry actually whether

[05:28] maybe i'd found a loophole and that loophole was going to get closed or my account would be blatted or i'd get a phone call saying hey stop doing this could in theory do arbitrage on the exchange i

[05:40] the profit between the two and wow all of a sudden there was money in my completely blown when um all of a sudden i figured out that you could hedge that position to win

[05:53] for the result to come in it became result independent you could market um and then all of a sudden you'd have a profit regardless of who went on what an opportunity and it was such an opportunity that

[06:08] i'm going to do this full-time because from then on in it was like well just how far can i push this now the interesting thing about doing arbitrage betting and so on um is that it's basically

[06:23] betfair trading is a subset of that you have to take slightly more risk but with going to be limited blocked restricted by bookmakers and you're going to run out of accounts and so on but when you're doing betfair trading basically

[06:37] you're betting into a pool of 50 to 60 billion pounds worth of business a year so that the scale of it is almost unlimited but of course you do have to take a little bit of risk with that but fundamentally the two are very very

[06:51] similar and if you look at where i started i was using tens and 20 pounds when i first started doing arbitrage betting but now my objective is to try and put through as much money as possible so it's very easy for me in the

[07:04] summer to match millions a week simply because the markets are that big and they they have that opportunity within them is possible to do all of but the funny thing is that bookmakers are still quite slow if you wanted to

[07:17] try and do an arbitrage bet um nowadays it's still possible to do that because the odds on the exchange move much faster than they do with a bookmaker and what i actually did when i was recording this video or just before

[07:29] i recorded this video was i actually went on to bet 365 found something that was at a bigger price in a horse race and laid it off on betfair it's exactly the same thing that i did all those years ago 23 years ago

[07:43] nowadays now of course um bookmakers don't particularly like that and they can spot really sharp accounts very very quickly so i imagine while you can do that the problem that you will have is that

[07:58] uh you're gonna get your account limited or restricted in some way i would imagine that will happen fairly quickly if you try and take advantage of that but when we look at the fundamental process um that's essentially exactly

[08:11] when you're actively trading you're effectively just arbiting on the exchange you have to take a little bit of risk but the potential reward is infinitely higher so from that point onwards it was just

[08:23] you know the skies limit how far can i actively take this but fundamentally now and what i've just described is better fair trading but for me when i started i just considered it a variation on arbitrage betting i basically figured

[08:38] market and get them matched then that would generate the profit and so my focus from that point onwards was how far can i push it how big can i push it um how can i do it more effectively how many sports can i do it

[08:51] in and the sort of things steamrolled from there just got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and if you look at what i do now during the summer um i will bet stroke trade millions through the

[09:03] market a week but it all started from that very simple base and it just gradually grew and grew over time and of course other things i was doing things manually and i figured out if i could just use a bit of

[09:16] software that would help um and that was where bet angel came into the equation because bet engine would allow me to do this much faster more effectively than other people within the market and more importantly on a much much bigger

[09:29] simple tool and it's now grown into something much much bigger and of course you've got automated betting you've got but it's all geared around that really simple principle of how can you get two

[09:41] bets matched um in this particular market that fundamental principle hasn't changed basically from the first time that ever did it and it was based around doing arbitrage and i've always sort of seen trading as a variation of that

[09:55] strategy itself because that's where its roots were my whole career seems to have been spent just trying to figure out how to get two prices matched basically

[10:08] but yeah from those very simple beginnings we ended up to pretty much beginnings we ended up to pretty much where we are today