Each Way horse race betting is by far the best way you can make a ridiculous amount of money from matched betting, it also takes the least amount of time. So if you’re the type of person that thinks normal matched betting is too time-consuming due to all of the laying and Excel tracking, or if you only have a small amount of time during the day on your mobile phone, EW betting is for you. From only committing to an hour or so each day, you can be looking at profits in the thousands of pounds per month, and remember that this is all still tax-free!
With Cheltenham festival just around the corner, there’s no better time to start EW betting. It’s the most profitable time of the year for matched bettors where most (myself included) will expect to be pulling in thousands of tax free pounds during this period. Don’t miss out!
Head over to the Full Matched Betting Guide if you’d like to read all of the matched betting guides (including this one) in a single post.
Introduction to Variance Betting
Variance betting is a little different to “traditional” matched betting. What we’ve covered so far in this guide is laying each bet in order to “lock-in” a guaranteed profit. For these types of bets you only need enough money to cover your exchange liability, with variance betting this isn’t the case.
Let me explain.
A good way of illustrating variance betting is using slot games. All gambling sites have to publish the exact figure that each slot pays out, this figure is called the RTP (Return To Player). One slot machines RTP may be 95%, that means that for every £100 it takes, it must pay out £95. That extra £5 (5%) goes to the house, that’s what they call the house edge. Have you ever heard the phrase “The house always wins”? That’s because of this tiny 5%. That’s how gambling companies make their money, everything has a house edge like this. The only time that they don’t have a house edge is when a matched bettor is playing (which is why they try and ban us!)
Matched bettors only gamble when the odds are in their favour. For example, if the gambling site offers a bonus, such as, wager £10 to get £10 for free. That 95% RTP is no longer accurate. Instead, you’ll be looking at a more favorable return of around 110% resulting in a positive EV (Expected Value) for you and not the house.
The only problem with these games is that it’s not guaranteed that you’ll earn £10 (110% of your wager) playing on the 95% RTP slot. This is because slot machines pay out on different degrees of variance. For example, you may lose £50 and then win £60. Or you may win £60 straight away. This problem is exactly the same for the house when the odds are in their favour, but they know that eventually the house always wins (if they have their edge)…So you need to keep on playing.
To combat this problem when variance betting I recommend to only “risk” 1% of your variance betting total bank (the amount of money you’ve put aside for it). So to take this gambling site up on their £10 for £10 offer you’d need a “bank” of £2000. This way you will always be able to “play out the variance” and you’ll always end up in profit. Remember the house (or in this case you) always wins, eventually, as long as the odds are in your favour.
Each Way Horse Race Betting Explained
EW Betting is kind of like playing a positive RTP slot machine. On some of the biggest races the bookie actually loses money every time on the EW market and they even know this. They lose money because the odds calculated for each horse is based only off the win potential, not the place market (whether they come 1st, 2nd or 3rd) and with Each Way betting, you’re betting on the win and the place.
To demonstrate the positive expected value, take a look at the screenshots below.
If we look at all of the odds for this race and calculate the total probability, we can figure out how much the bookie is going to make on each race.
All of the odds are listed in the first column and the second column is the corresponding implied probability.
Adding up the total implied probability results in the total of 111.25%. This means that for this particular race, Bet365 is going to make a profit of 11.25% of whatever is staked (e.g. £11.25 if £100 is staked).
However, this is for the win only market, what we now need to figure out is the implied probability of the place market. To calculate this we must take the win odds, minus 1, divide by the EW payout (in this case 1/4), then add 1.
(Odds - 1) / (EW Payout) + 1
Using this formula we come to the total implied probability of 262.99% for the place market.
Because the bookie is paying out for 3 places the percentage that they need to break even is 300% and as we can see in the figures, they’ve not hit this. They’re actually losing 37.01% of everything that is staked in the place market. That’s £37.01 for each £100 staked!
This is where the value is for EW betting and how matched bettors can make a guaranteed profit! The bookies can’t help but lose money as they need to offer the same diminished odds for the win market as they do for the place market (otherwise it wouldn’t be an each way bet). Most other countries don’t actually offer EW betting anymore because of this very reason and it’s surely going to eventually be removed from the UK as well, so make the most of it whilst you still can!
Sniping
There is also another method that you can use in order to reap an even greater reward, they call this “EW Sniping.”
Bookies are neferiously slow when it comes to updating their odds, the exchange however, is extremely fast. This is because their are thousands of people manipulating the odds by setting their own lay prices on each horse every few minutes. The bookies (who set their odds themselves) would never be able to keep up.
This means that if a person is quick enough, when a horse’s odds drop from 50/1 (£500 for a £10 win bet) to 4 /1 (£40 for a £10 win bet) on the exchange, they’d be able to quickly go to a bookie and place a bet on that same horse for 50/1 (before the bookie updates it).
This provides tremendous value, I once had an EW bet win on a horse which paid out £812 for a £10 EW bet. The odds for this horse when it left its post was only 7/1…I should have only got around £80. I bagged an additional £737 from using this sniping method.
This is where OddsMonkey again comes to our rescue. EW Sniping would have been extremely hard to do before OddsMonkey came along. You’d need advanced (and expensive) analysing tools for each bookie and the exchanges, you’d then have to manually monitor each race. OddsMonkey has built a tool exactly for our purpose. They can track all of the bookies and exchanges and let you know of any positive EV (Expected Value) horses that you can bet on, they call this the Eachway matcher.
EW Betting Step by Step Walk Through
So now you’ve got the background of EW betting and why it is profitable, let’s walk you through how you can actually do it. For this demonstration, I’ll be using the Eachway matcher on OddsMonkey (I don’t recommend doing this without it).
The first thing you’ll need to think about is your total “bank” size. This will be the amount that you can confidently set aside for EW betting. It will also directly dictate how much you will earn as the greater your bank, the greater your stake size.
Once you know your initial bank size, you can use this figure to calculate your stake size. Your each way stake should be no more than 1% of your total bank. So, for a £500 bank, your total stake size should be £5 (£2.50 each way). For a £2000 bank, £20 (£10 each way). This 1% figure should be recalculated each week or month (depending on how much you’re betting).
Now that you’ve got your money ready, we need to go and set up the Eachway matcher filters on OddsMonkey . This is the tool that will find the horses for you to bet on so it’s important that we set up the filters correctly.
Head over to the OddsMonkey website and click on the Eachway matcher via Tools -> Matchers -> Eachway matcher.
Then click on the Filter option and set these exact options:
Sports: Horse Racing
Markets: Horse Racing - Winner
Bookmakers: (Whoever you’re currently betting with, see Which bookies to use section)
Exchanges: Smarkets, Betfair
Each Way Rating: 100 to 200
Normal Arb Rating: 80 to 200
SNR Rating: 0 to 200
Back Odds: 6 to 200
You’ll also have to go to the Oddsmatcher (Tools -> Oddsmatcher), click on the ‘Commission’ button and change Smarkets and Betfair commission to 0%.
Doing this means that you don’t have to worry about the different exchange commission amounts when looking at horse ratings in the Eachway matcher and it will save you a lot of time when deciding on if you should bet on a horse (when you’re trying to be quick!)
Awesome. Now you’re ready to start making some Each Way money! Click on the arrow next to the refresh button and set the matcher to auto refresh every 1 minute. Eventually you’ll get some horses come up, like this:
When one pops up, you’ll go to the Bookmaker and place your EW bet (however much your bank can support) on the corresponding horse. Make sure you check the ‘E/W’ box!
Be careful and make sure that the odds are the same on the bookie and the matcher, sometimes the odds can fluctuate a lot when a race is nearly starting, so you have to be quick (that’s why it’s called sniping!)
When you place a bet on a horse, note down the time and horse name somewhere (I use Notepad when I’m betting on my PC and Google Keep when I’m on my mobile phone).
4.45 Uno Valoroso
The reason that you write this down is because you don’t want to be betting on the same horse twice and you don’t want to bet on the same race more than 3 times.
At the end of the day (or early in the morning), go to each of the bookies that you placed bets on and update your matched betting spreadsheet with your new total balance. You can then note down your total profit in the ‘Profit Snapshot’ section and find out how much you lost/won on that particular day.
Remember that you can also lose money each day, just make sure that you trust the expected value and keep on going (and never risk more than 1% of your total bank), it’s very rare that you’ll end the month with a loss.
Tips and Tricks
- A lot of good snipes show up at around 11am, you can make a decent monthly profit just keeping an eye on the matcher for 15-30 minutes at 11am each day.
- There are more horses available towards the end of the week.
- Make sure that you EW bet with your browser in Incognito Mode. This makes it harder for the bookies to catch you and keeps your bookie tab separated if betting on your mobile phone.
- Bet365 and Ladbrokes are extremely generous bookies, utilize these first when big events are on (like Cheltenham).
Advanced Each Way Betting
After you’ve got the hang of each way betting, there are some more advanced methods that can bag you even more profit. These are methods such as betting on doubles, triples or even 4 fold horses on different races.
Doing this means that your bet count can increase into the hundreds per day but it will also increase your variance (and your profits) drastically. Accumulative bets can net you insane amounts of profit like it did for TheFIREStarter when he made over £11000 (tax-free) in a single day .
But, I recommend only moving onto these methods when your bank has grown and when you’ve got the basics nailed down. Because of this, I’ll be writing the advanced each way betting section at a later date.
If you are yet to try out matched betting, sign up via my affiliate link here , or go to the Full Guide to find out how to get started.
Cheltenham is only a couple of weeks away, this event alone could net you thousands of pounds (tax-free) so don’t delay any longer, try it today!