What is Bonus Bagging?
I have been vaguely aware of matched betting systems for a while and have been meaning to check out a system, because I like the idea of making guaranteed profits and taking advantage of all those free bets that are flying around and leveraging those As you know if you’re a regular reader of BTT, I like to check things out before I promote them, so I started my search.
I am what marketing companies call a late adopter, because I like to wait and see when it comes to new things. This has its disadvantages in that I might miss out on potentially interesting things, but the advantage is that I get to watch all the guinea pigs and then analyse their results.
In case you’re unaware of what matched betting is, it is a type of arbitrage betting, put simply, you use your Betfair account to lay off a free bet that you make using a free bet offer from a traditional online bookmaker. You can of course do this yourself, you can sit down with a calculator trawling through hundreds of events and countless bookmakers, until you come across one that fits the criteria.
Or you could take the lazy route and pay someone else to do that for you, though if you think about it its clever not lazy, the hours I could have spent trawling many sites, I would prefer spending doing things more productive or enjoyable. Apart from that, human error is a very real prospect when trying to work out arbitrage bets.
There is really good matched betting guide in Latvian language.
I first came across Bonus Bagging after doing various searches on matched betting and matched betting reviews. Bonus Bagging always seemed to come out on top and the reviews came from many different sources. Basically I knew these systems could work, but I’d also read a few reviews about some matched betting scams. I was obviously keen to avoid the scams and try out a good one, after all, it’s guaranteed profits, but just how much, I intended to find out; so I took the £1, 7 day trial.
The system is simple, once you have signed up and you’re in your account, you click the request bet button, a message appears above the button telling you that a bet will be mailed to you in 3 minutes or less.
About 3 minutes later you get an email with some simple instructions, which you read carefully.
So for instance, my qualifying bet to my slight surprise, as the videos I’d watched had football examples, was a horse race.
As you can see if you click the image, it was the 4 pm race at Lingfield, the horse was called Bear Faced and the instruction was to register a new account and then back the horse at odds of 2 with £10, then to go onto Betfair and lay Bear Faced at odds of 2.02 with £10.15 giving a liability of £10.35. The bet carried a net loss of £.035 if it won (which it did) but then comes the free bet.
If you look at the bottom of the mail, you can see a link that instructs you to click if the odds have changed, without this feature it would be a terrible service, because you would have to work out any new calculations yourself, which of course, defeats the whole object.
If you look above the line in the top left, these are all the rules of the particular bookmaker that you have to follow, you’ll see that the amount of free bets you are due and how much you should deposit to qualify is all there, in fact I actually ended up with a £30 bonus so that was great. Also to note with this particular bookmaker (and quite a few others) they will not credit you with a free bet if you use PayPal. The cynical part of me lends me to think that it’s because you can’t recklessly deposit money quite as easily with PayPal, but I’m sure it’s something to do with commission charges *cough*.
The next thing to notice is the link for when your bet is settled and you have your free bet tokens in your account, once you hit that you’ll be taken to a screen where you can enter which bookmaker and how much you have in free bets, which helps if the bonus amount has changed, which of course in my case it had.
Once I clicked the claim free bet button did that, it confirms the bookmaker and the amount and then promises to email me the bet in 3 minutes or less, which it did.
When I got the email I was slightly shocked, the reason being that Mike advises that you will need cash to open the bookmaker accounts and a Betfair account, he suggests that you have a £75 minimum stake to get started, I had roughly £63 in there so I topped up to £75.
The problem was that the bet I had been sent, needed £112.28 to cover the lay on Betfair, now of course the profit is guaranteed, but I was slightly irked that my first bet was already over the £75 that I had been told to deposit.
Anyway after a bit of umming and ahing I deposited an extra £45 as I had £65 left from my earlier gross loss of £10.
Unfortunately for me, I decided to sleep on it as to whether I would deposit more money and the odds had dropped overnight, half a point from 5.5 to 5 on the bookmaker, this meant that when I recalculated, my liability had dropped to just over £100 but my profit had dropped from £22.70 to just over £20, time to use the recalculate odds link.
However the drama wasn’t over there, I had a slight panic over my free bet, the problem was after I put my covering bet on Betfair, I went to put my free bet on and found that I could only put £10 of my free money on the bet.
In panic I cashed out of my Betfair trade immediately, after which I calmed down and realised that the free bet was given in the form of 3 £10 free bet tokens, all I had to do to put the lot on the game was to put 3 separate bets on, problem solved and lesson number one learned;
Always put your free bets on first, because it’s not real money yet.
So panic over I put the free bets on and put the lay bet back on Betfair, my profits were slightly affected because of this so my overall profit if the Betfair trade won was £19.12, which it did.
After 3 bets in four days, which is no where near the maximum amount, (you can order up to three new bets a day) I have decided that Bonus Bagging is a great system, it is simple to follow, Mike is on hand to answer questions and I still believe it’s worth paying someone to do for you in a few minutes which would take you hours or even days.
At the time of writing this I am waiting for the Liverpool/Sunderland game, I have laid the draw on Betfair and covered it with my new bookmaker account, even though the odds had changed dramatically when I went to put the bet on.
After taking the bet I realised another handy button on the recalculate odds page, there is a click here if the odds have changed too much button, if you click it you are sent a new bet (doh!) oh well, that’s why you review things so that you make the mistakes so that your readers don’t have to!
So anyway the Liverpool/Sunderland game now carries a net loss for me of £10.89, if the bet wins on my new bookmaker account then I win £20.20 but do not get a free bet as this particular bookmaker only refunds losing bets.
You may be wondering why you would still lay off a bet that you are getting refunded if it loses, well that’s because if it does lose and you get your free bet, you will have to lay off that free bet on Betfair to guarantee a profit, which you wouldn’t be able to do if you were £25 down from the first losing bet.
So I’m in a position where I’ll win £40 or lose £10.89 but get a free bet [UPDATE: I won £40 didn’t get a free bet and requested a new bet am now waiting for the Gijon/Deportivo result].
Anyway, I’ve seen enough of this system to know that it’s a good system, it has been around since 2013 and from what I can see, almost 100% of people are happy with the system.
There are just a few things you need to remember before signing up for your Bonus Bagging 7 day £1 trial
- The system works by signing up for an online bookmaker account and placing a qualifying bet with your own money, so far I have used between £5 and £25.
- You will need a Betfair account, Mike suggests a minimum £75 but be aware that you may need more. Open a Betfair account here.
- You do not have to accept the first bet you get sent, you can request another one and you can request up to 3 bets per day
- If the odds change you can recalculate them, if they have changed too much for you, you can request a new bet.
Watch the first two videos and read the FAQs when you sign up for your Bonus Bagging trial, they are laid out simply and are worth the read.
Be aware that even though you are making guaranteed profits the money has to be moved around, I have been lucky enough not to have a big loss on Betfair yet, but it will happen. When it does I’ll have to transfer the winnings from whatever bookmaker I made money with the free bet with, into my bank and then back into Betfair; which will take 2-7 days depending, on bookmaker rules, time of week, etc.
This could be said to be the only “flaw” in the system, I put it in quotation marks because really it isn’t a flaw, it’s an inconvenience, the money is still there but if you are on limited funds then this will effect just how quickly you can make those profits.
At the moment it doesn’t really matter to me as I have the funds in my bank account to immediately top up whilst I’m waiting for the free bet winnings, but it has made me realise that the 3 bet requests a day may not be viable for everyone. [UPDATE: I just had a £60.29 loss on betfair and a £100 win on my other bookmaker, their terms are 48 hours to process then up to 5 working days to transfer, depending on my banks rules, it hasn’t affected my balance too much. So I will wait for the funds and carry on betting.]
So this leads us to the question; how much money do you need to start the Bonus Bagging matched betting system?
Well it depends on how quickly you want to make those profits, if you, like me, are happy to take one bet at a time, slowly building up your bank and increasing the amount of bets you take over time, then I would suggest having £100 in your Betfair account and a spare £50-£100 in your bank account.
In fact I would open a separate bank account just for this, that way you can easily keep an eye on your profits and more importantly keep the system away from your regular day to day finances. I can imagine there will be nothing more annoying than realising you’ve spent some of your living money by mistake and have to wait 4 days before it is replenished.
If however you want to jump into this system and make the £500 pound monthly that Mike claims you can make, then I would suggest having at least £500 in your Betfair account and the same in your newly formed separate bank account.
By doing this you are ensuring that you will be able to order 3 new bets a day and still have enough to cover all the Betfair lays and the new qualifying bets and of course the temporary Betfair losses, while you are waiting for your money to be credited to your account from whichever new bookmaker account you have won money from.
You can expect to make between £10 and £50 with each trade depending on if the favourite wins and which account you win the money with.
So that’s it, you’re ready to go, just click the link and start your 7 day £1 trial, report back here and let me know how you’re getting on and let’s compare notes! I’ve made just under £120 in a week, let’s see if you can do better!
As ever, good luck and happy trading
