A pocketful of money - could it really come from Matched Betting?
Greg Bruce on the pitfalls of a get-rich-quick scheme which proves to be anything but.
A couple of years ago, in writing a story that was part-attempt to make money and part-cry for help, I experimented with some schemes for getting rich online, none of which worked, one of which was called "matched betting". As part of that story, I opened a betting account with a bookmaker in the UK, deposited £5, then discovered, as a non-resident, I wasn't eligible for the free bets required to make the scheme work. I quit, embarrassed by my ignorance, and have never sought to get that money back.
A year later, a man called Richard, who had started a website called Matched Betting Australia, sent me the following email: "I came across your article in which you wrote about the pitfalls of matched betting about a year ago and found it interesting! I just thought I would reach out to you and share our website with you to show you that one can make some real good additional money with matched betting in both Australia and New Zealand."
There is a deep tension in me between scepticism and credulousness. I have fantasised about having my life changed by a Tony Robbins-style motivational weekend roughly as often as I have disparaged Tony Robbins-style motivational weekends. What this comes down to is money. I want it about as much as I hate that I want it.
As I understand it, the essential condition for generating abundant cash in one's life is the ability and willingness to treat other people as exploitable resources. If I knew anything about Richard - and I didn't - it was that he saw me as exploitable. My question to myself was: "How exploitable is he?" In other words: "Who in this interaction is going to be Tony Robbins and who is going to be the guy trying to convince himself that it was all worth it?"
Around this time, I had developed an interest in clothes I couldn't afford - specifically selvedge denim jeans, Ray Ban Wayfarers and a camel overcoat - so one day not long after Richard's email, I signed up to his website and used its online calculator to help me place my first bets for and against the Chicago Cubs.
I had to take it on faith that Richard and others on his site's forums knew what they were talking about, because I didn't. My lack of understanding was both deep and broad and was made clear by my wife's rudimentary dinnertime questions about what I was doing with our money. That made me angry because I hate being intellectually exposed, particularly in front of my children.
Money is both physical and not, the spending of it both real and not. It exists only as long as at least two parties agree it does. It is a conjuring act, a belief system.
At my peak, over roughly 24 hours in September last year, I placed $3951.36 worth of bets, using my credit card, because I don't have the cash for that sort of profligacy. The bets were as follows: $1000 on a team (which team? Who even played?) to win the NRL grand final; $983.76 on the same team to not win the 2018 NRL grand final; $1000 on a team to win the AFL grand final (Who? What even is AFL?); $967.60 on the same team to not win the AFL grand final.
If this sounds confusing, and it does, that's because it is. Stay with me.
The basic idea of matched betting is this: sports gambling sites give you free money as an incentive to open an account with them. The catch is that you can't withdraw the money until you've gambled it because, if at all possible, they would like it back. What you want is a way to ensure you keep it, or at least most of it and it turns out there is a way. That way goes by the name "matched betting".
You place the free money (let's say $100) on the All Blacks to beat South Africa, then you place $100 of your own money on the All Blacks to not beat South Africa. In a perfect world, one of the bets makes $100, the other loses $100. If you were betting your own money, this would leave you even, but because $100 of the money was not yours, you're $100 up.
This is a vastly simplified summary of the workings, which are complicated by factors including discrepancies and fluctuations in odds, liquidity in the market, terms and conditions imposed by gambling sites, betting commissions, the speed of your internet connection and your propensity to push to its limits both your credit card and your spouse's confidence in you.
At first glance, it seems weird that this whole financial house of cards exists at all. Gambling sites are typically large-scale financial operations, turning over massive amounts of cash, using opaque algorithms and calculations to ensure they come out ahead. Why would they allow a bunch of rubes and noobs who've done little more than google, "How does matched betting work?" to take their cash? Are they really that dumb?
When I turned 20, my older brother took me to the casino at SkyCity. I had a good run on the $5 blackjack tables and walked out at the end of the night with $30 - $46 in today's money.
I had neither friends nor social life, so a couple of Friday nights later I drove my Datsun 180B back to SkyCity and sat down at a $5 table. I got up to about $50 before going on a losing run. When I got down to about $20 I called it a night and drove home to the one-bedroom Panmure flat I shared with my dad and no doubt watched sad music videos on Max TV until I fell asleep.
What that night taught me was that I was not as smart as I had thought and definitely not smarter than SkyCity: the experience hadn't been particularly entertaining; I had spent more time driving than playing; my winnings barely covered fuel, parking and dinner at KFC; the whole thing left me feeling a bit low.
I went back to spending my Friday nights flicking between the music videos of Jewel and Bic Runga and whatever scheduled television programming I'd highlighted in the Herald that morning.
That was 22 years ago.
Cold, hard cash is what I wanted. The matched betting websites promise big digits, but the money I made was neither cold nor hard: it was vague and ethereal. Nevertheless I am reasonably sure it was real. My matched betting spreadsheet, designed by my wife and eventually recording 172 transactions, shows I made $1700 over 10 weeks. It took so much work and required so many thousands of dollars worth of transactions, in and out, our credit card balance bouncing wildly up and down, often multiple times on a single day, all those transactions mixed in with other incomings and outgoings. It was impossible to pinpoint any moment when I could say, "Look how rich we're getting!"
Up to 90 per cent of my matched betting life was spent doing things other than making money. I spent hours on telephone helplines, online forums and live chats, trying to comprehend the rules and regulations and terms and conditions of various gambling sites. I took a morning off work to go to a JP who pretended not to be judging me for the tranche of gambling site application documents I asked him to sign. For one form, I had to get a doctor as a witness; for another, a chartered accountant.
Every week, I spent hours on betting sites, trying to find the best combination of odds, deals and commissions. I learned acronyms and I used those acronyms increasingly confidently on the online forums.
There are two ways to make money in matched betting: the sign-up offers, which encourage you to open betting accounts in the first place and the ongoing offers, which are typically reduced-risk - but not risk-free - deals, encouraging you to never close your betting accounts.
It was my understanding from the matched betting blogs and forums that if you devote a reasonable amount of time to the ongoing offers you can create an ongoing cash stream. I had assumed I would never understand how to do this, but if you spend enough time immersed in anything it starts to make sense. And so it was that I sat down at my computer one Saturday, visited Matched Betting Australia's offers page, and spent a couple of hours making maybe 12 bucks from ongoing offers on a big horse racing carnival.
Twelve bucks is not nothing - that's the cost of the two-and-a-half weekly coffees that prevent millennials accessing Auckland's property market - but those precious Saturday hours should have been spent cleaning the gutters or paying attention to my kids' constant whining because my wife was trying to read the paper. I may have been a rube but I was no longer a noob and at that moment I understood that once the sign-up offers were all done, so too would be my short career in matched betting.
From the first bet, I found the whole thing difficult both to understand and to explain, particularly to my wife, who remained a sceptic throughout. Now it's all behind me, it feels like the befuddling dream of the heavily-medicated. It's hard to believe it happened at all.
I had always believed Big Money was accessible only to those prepared to take Big Risks, but matched betting offered a rebuke to that theory. It was a magical time. I was conjuring cash and thereby redefining both it and my relationship to it. I felt like some sort of god, like I would never be closer to understanding The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
What I have come to realise, though, is an essential mathematico-financial truth: an unexpected windfall is never as much as you need it to be, $1700 is a gateway windfall. It's a lot of money until you have it. Once the free money fountain of matched betting had dried up and we'd poured most of its contents into the geothermal sinkhole of a family holiday in Rotorua, I began to look for a replacement source of income. I stumbled around for a while, but it was a path well-stumbled and I knew it would be fruitless and that belief, as Tony Robbins will tell you, is limiting.
My best hope now is that a few days or a year from now, another Richard will find this story, recognise my value as an exploitable resource and send me a proposition, because my wife is struggling with three small children at home and she really would like a romantic getaway on a tropical island, with me.
Second-hand clothing can be a reservoir for many potentially dangerous microbes.