Laying Accas in Matched Betting Just Got Easier!

Platinum and Diamond Members can now view a full video guide of this method here.

Smarkets added an exciting new feature to their repertoire – the ability to lay our own tailor-made accumulators (or ‘multiples’ as they insist on calling it) –all at once as one single bet.

In this post we’re going to introduce you to their 'lay accumulator' feature, show you how it works, explain what it can and can’t do, and most importantly, discuss how it can benefit us making money with Matched Betting.

If you’re still quite new to Matched Betting and not sure what an accumulator is yet, we’d recommend that you refer to our training guide ‘Understanding Accumulators’ first, before continuing with this article.

You'll also want to make sure you've taken advantage of Smarkets' 0% commission offer too as this can be massively beneficial for us when Matched Betting accumulator offers.

(Can’t see the training guide? Then please upgrade to our Platinum Membership today and you’ll get instant, unrestricted access).

A Quicker Way To Lay Accumulators (Or Multiples) On Smarkets

For those of us who only have time for Matched Betting a few hours each week, tackling accumulator offers was always a bit difficult, as frequently the only way of getting a decent Qualifying Loss or return from a Free Bet was to lay the accumulator sequentially.

Thanks to Smarkets, this has now all changed!

With the launch of their new ‘Multiples’ feature we now have the ability to build our own accumulators and lay them off all in one go as one single lay bet.

How The New Feature Works

To make our accumulator (or multiple) at Smarkets we first need to select the back (or ‘buy’) odds for each leg (or selection) in our accumulator.

(The back odds are the odds in the green boxes at Smarkets).

Then we need to double check that each leg of our accumulator has appeared in our betslip OK and that each leg has the ‘Multiples toggle’ switched on (this should be automatic).

Once we know all our legs (or selections) have been entered correctly into our betslip, we then need to switch the tab in the ‘Multiples’ section at the bottom of the betslip from ‘Buy’ to ‘Sell’.

When you do this you will see the amount in the ‘Price’ box increase. The amount stated in the Price box represents the lay odds for our single accumulator bet. These are the lay odds we would use in our standard Matched Betting Calculator to work out the lay stake we need to use at Smarkets.

Unlike the lay odds for each leg, the lay odds for the single accumulator lay bet cannot be edited.

Before placing any bets, we need to also check what the maximum lay stake is we are allowed to use on the acca at Smarkets. We can do this by typing in the lay stake we want to use in the stake box in the Multiples section of the betslip and seeing if a red warning box pops or not.

If the red box doesn't pop up we are good to go - if it does then we can only use the maximum lay stake allowed and would need to adjust our back bet amount at the bookie accordingly.

In the screenshot here the maximum lay stake allowed would be £67.22.

When we're happy we can go ahead, once we've successfully placed our accumulator at the bookmaker, all we then do is just click Sell and Confirm at Smarkets to lay the acca off.

Once you get the hang of this simple process, you will be able to lay your accumulators off at Smarkets within seconds.

What We Can And Can’t Do With The New Accumulator Feature

• We can only have a maximum of 10 legs (or selections) in an accumulator (or multiple)
• Each leg (or selection) must be on a completely separate event, game or race. No same-game multi’s basically.
• We cannot include selections from ante-post horse racing markets
• We cannot include selections from long-running or outright markets (e.g. Team to win the Premier League season).

One Teeny Tiny Draw-back Of The New Feature

Smarkets are no longer going to provide their pre-made accumulators for us anymore. Although slightly frustrating for those of us that are so used to using these pre-made accas (especially for the Sky Bet Soccer Saturday Price Boosts), it’s understandable really as we can literally now build any accumulator we want with just a few clicks.

To Single Lay Or Sequential Lay?

Now we have this new and oh-so-simple and quick way to lay accumulators for Matched Betting surely we no longer need to worry about fiddling around doing the, rather time-consuming, sequential lay approach anymore?

Sadly no – for some offers laying sequentially will still be the best approach to use.

How do we know which approach is best to use when though?

That’s easy...

Bet & Get Accumulator Offers

Several bookmakers currently have Bet & Get sign up offers involving accumulator bets and some also have Bet & Get reload offers involving accumulators as well.

With these types of offer, most of the time you will be better off using the new single lay approach to make a return.

This is because the single lay approach will be so much faster for you to do than using the sequential lay approach.

Your Qualifying Losses might be slightly higher– but for the massive amount of time you save this is a very small price to pay!

If we use a Mr Green offer as an example – you’ll see immediately what we mean.

Mr Green Bet & Get Accumulator Offer Example

For this offer we need to do a £10 Qualifying Bet on a three-fold accumulator with combined odds of 4.0 or more.

At the time of writing, using the sequential lay approach the Acca Catcher found a suitable Qualifying Bet to do that met these requirements and had a Qualifying Loss of just 62p.

Using the sequential lay approach, in the most ‘time-consuming’ scenario we would have to do all of the following to ensure we complete our Qualifying Bet successfully:

1. Place the accumulator back bet;
2. Place a lay bet on the first game of the accumulator;
3. Remember to check the result of the first game;
4. Place a lay bet on the second game of the accumulator;
5. Remember to check the result of the second game;
6. Place a lay bet on the third game of the accumulator.

Basically this equates to potentially having to keep an eye on 2 games and place 3 lay bets all over a 2 day period.

On top of all that our total Qualifying Loss could change as well if the odds on Arsenal and/or Juventus changed before the start of their games.

(This is all just for a three-fold acca as well – imagine what’s required on five-fold and higher-fold accas with the sequential lay approach!).

Let’s compare this with the new single lay approach where all we have to do is the following:

1. Place the accumulator back bet;
2. Place a single lay bet against the accumulator.

Always just 2 simple steps instead of 6 (or more) steps needed with sequential laying.

With this approach instead of the Acca Catcher we use our good ol’ Oddsmatching Tool instead to just quickly find us some close matching Qualifying Bets between Mr Green and Smarkets:

As there were 3 good bets available all on Italy Serie A it made sense to build our acca on these games in this instance.

At Mr Green we just selected Inter, Roma and Napoli to win, and ended up with accumulated back odds of 4.25.

At Smarkets we selected the same teams, and ended up with accumulated lay odds of 4.7 there.

We then popped this all into our standard Matched Betting calculator (in normal mode as this was for a Qualifying Bet)

Placed our single accumulator back bet at Mr Green, then our single accumulator lay bet at Smarkets and we’re done! Completely done!

No checking of any the games. No laying any more bets!

All for a just a 95p loss still (just 33p more than laying sequentially).

For the small extra ‘expense’ of using the single lay approach for us it has to be the winner ever time when it comes to doing Bet and Get Accumulator Offers like this now.

What about other types of acca offer though?

Accumulator Refund if One Leg Loses (or Acca Insurance Offers)

“Get a £25 refund as a free bet if your five-fold sports accumulator bet has just one losing leg. Each leg of the accumulator must have odds of 1.2 or greater”.

Accumulator refund or acca insurance offers like the example above are an advanced type of Matched Betting reload offer that can be good return for us over the long-term when we only choose accumulator bets to do that have a positive expected value (+EV). (Unlike Bet & Get offers these offers are therefore not risk-free).

Whether the expected value on a particular accumulator is positive or not can be heavily influenced by the overall Qualifying Loss of the bet.

As the new single lay approach offered by Smarkets has a tendency to increase the Qualifying Loss on our accumulator matched bets, this means, in most cases, it will not the best approach to use for these types of acca refund or acca insurance offers.

Anything that reduces our total positive expected value for such offers is basically not a good thing!

For these types of accumulator offers we therefore highly recommend to stick with the 'traditional' sequential lay approach and the Acca Catcher.

Interested In Learning More About Accumulators In Matched Betting?

Here's a list of useful resources available to our Platinum Members:

• Sports Accumulator Betting Guide
• Basic training on Accumulators
• The Acca Catcher Tool
  
• Discussion on the Forum of the Pros and Cons of Acca Methods
• Advanced reload offers - Accumulator Refunds

Need A Helping Hand With Matched Betting?

Our Facebook Group, which has over 50,000 members, is a great place to ask for help and ask questions, especially if you are new to Matched Betting. Our community forum is also a great place to ask for help and advice.

Alternatively you can also contact us directly for support too.

Interested in Getting Started Matched Betting?

You can start learning for free with our free trial

Alternatively, upgrade to our Platinum Membership here