Bonusbank Review | More Matched Betting Profit

Welcome to OzProfit’s bonusbank review.

Matched betting can be a confusing and difficult topic to navigate at first. Here at OzProfit, my mission is to make matched betting accessible to Australian’s across the country. By providing a comprehensive set of guides and simple tutorials, I hope to introduce people to the potential matched betting has.

Using free tutorials can be a great start to your matched betting journey. However, to make a significant long term profit you really need to use matched betting tools. These tools are designed to help you find the optimum bets (increasing profit) in the easiest possible way (reducing time spent).

Bonusbank is an Australian matched betting service offering a comprehensive set of matched betting tools backed up by detailed tutorials and an active community.

This review will cover all the different features available with bonusbank and whether the service really can help you supercharge your matched betting profits.

Disclaimer: I am an active subscriber to bonusbank and use their service on a daily basis to place my own matched bets. Links in this bonusbank review are affiliate links. You get the same price when subscribing and I receive a small percentage of their revenue. I try to be 100% honest in my reviews although please make up your own mind for purchasing decisions.

Bonusbank was started in 2017 by two friends Nico and David. They grew up together in Scotland but have since moved/travelled around the world, primarily on profits made from matched betting!

Nico is now based in Nicaragua making a full time living from matched betting profits, whilst David lives in Sydney after moving here in 2005.

They both discovered matched betting while it was still a relatively new thing in the UK, the same as I did. So, they have over 20 years of matched betting experience between them.

For years, Australia has lagged behind the UK on matched betting tools. This has historically made it tough to make long term profits, however this is exactly what Nico and David set out to change when they founded bonusbank in 2017.

I’m going to share with you all the key features of bonusbank (and their limitations) and how these can have a significant impact on your matched betting. Some of these features relate to quite advanced matched betting techniques that I don’t cover on this site. However, this review should give you a sense of what’s possible! Here’s a brief feature overview of the features discussed in this bonusbank review:

• Tutorials – 28 complete text-based guides plus plenty of video explanations.
• OddsMatcher – Easily compare odds between all major bookmakers and Betfair.
• HorseMatcher – Streamline your betting on Racing events.
• Today’s Plays – Recommended bets perfect for beginners that make a long term profit.
• MultiMatcher – Analyse betting on ‘Multi’s’ automatically identifying the best odds available.
• Forum and Live Chat – Connect with other active matched bettors and get advice from experienced mentors.

Bonusbank host 18 beginner tutorials alongside a further 10 advanced guides.

These tutorials do a good job of explaining the concepts of matched betting and cover all the necessary topics. Plus, each tutorial has it’s own comments thread where you can ask questions directly to Nico and David. In my opinion, I think they could do a better job of reinforcing the lessons, perhaps through quizzes or more detailed examples. Also, they do tend to be quite text-heavy which is difficult if you’re a visual learner.

Fortunately, they do have some fantastic (and freely available) videos on Youtube providing guides on various matched betting strategies. There’s also a knowledge base for subscribers that covers 80+ of the main beginner questions.

Where bonusbank excels is when explaining how to use their own tools, with some very thorough and valuable guides on how to make the most of every bonusbank feature. You won’t find it too difficult to pick up the different ways of profiting using bonusbank.

There are some fantastic free matched betting resources available (I’m biased, but I think our guides are quite good) with hundreds of guides available with a quick google search. For beginners, I think some of the free guides are better than what bonusbank offer, however these aren’t really what you’re paying for.

This is the primary software that will have a massive impact on your matched betting.

The ATM is a big odds analyser that works in your browser, pulling into thousands of live prices from across 18 different bookies plus Betfair. The software is the able to automatically present the closest matches for you to be on right now. Pretty magic.

I’m going to share a (secret, shh!) screenshot of the oddsmatcher for a $50 free bet I earned at Ladbrokes.

Now, I could have spent 20 minutes finding all these different matches themselves and still not been sure that I had the best match. Also, I could have taken the match on the Bayer Leverkusen v Bayern Munich match. If I had, I’d have been leaving $2.41 on the table for no good reason. That’s the benefit of using an oddsmatcher.

Bonusbank’s service is a good one because it covers all of the major bookmakers you need. The filters also work really well, allowing you to easily navigate down to just the matches you need. Plus, being able to save your settings is really helpful when you only have access to a couple of bookmakers.

My only criticism would be that it looks a little clunky, like a mid-2000’s excel spreadsheet. Since this doesn’t impact functionality at all, I can live without a fancy interface.

Now, here’s the best feature bonusbank have for their oddsmatcher.

In the oddsmatcher example above, I was getting a match around 72% on my free bet. This is good, but not great. Ideally, we want to aim for something that’s 75% or above. One way we could do this is to sit and watch the oddsmatcher all day.

The better way is to use ATM Alerts, an extension for the Google Chrome browser. This extension allows you to set up some criteria then it will notify you whenever there’s a match that meets those criteria. Here’s what it looks like:

As you can see, there are plenty of different settings. It’s very easy to set a minimum return on your SNR bet and/or minimum odds that the alerts extension will need to beat. Once a match meets your criteria, you’ll get a popup on your computer that looks a little like this:

This feature is incredibly powerful for making the most of your new account offers or getting the most of your ongoing free bets.

There are, however, some drawbacks with the ATM Alerts tool. Firstly, it’s only available on a desktop/laptop running google chrome. Whilst I know this is a common setup, it does mean that you can’t use this tool on mobile and would have to rely on the oddsmatcher alone. Secondly, you can only set up one alert at any time which may be a limitation if you’re matched betting both qualifiers / free bets with multiple bookies at the same time.

Finally, I’m always worried that the tool won’t send the alerts so I find myself checking on a regular basis anyway – I should probably stop because it’s never failed me yet.

Matched betting on Horse Racing is a bit different to betting on any other sports. Where you would normally find good liquidity hours before an event, it’s often you’ll only find money in the market 10-15 minutes before a race. Then the price starts shifting very quickly in the few minutes leading up to the start. That means the oddsmatcher is just too slow to provide useful insight into betting on Horse Racing.

Enter HorsePower.

HorsePower is similar to ATM Alerts in that it’s a Chrome Browser extension that you download from bonusbank. However, this time it loads up a fresh page and allows you to select the race time / bookmakers you want to see odds for. The tool then automatically opens up each bookmaker and Betfair in their own tabs. Let’s see how that looks:

You can see that I’ve loaded up the comparison for Race 5 at Gloucester Park, with odds from Ladbrokes, Neds and PointsBet. I can easily filter results by my %return on SR or SNR bets plus any minimum or maximum odds.

HorsePower updates every few seconds, matching the changes made on each bookmaker site you have open. With this running, it becomes far easier to identify which horses are providing great opportunities for finding bonus offers.

Warning: As mentioned, odds in Horse Racing can move very quickly. This can work both in your favour and against you. This means you should have a good knowledge of how matched bets work, with the ability to quickly change your stakes, before you start matched betting on Horse Racing. However, this can be very profitable so I always recommend beginners start slow and take on more offers over a few weeks.

It definitely took me a bit of ‘getting used to’ when I started using HorsePower but it quickly shows itself to be a very powerful tool. It allows me to focus my time on the right horses with the right bookies during the hectic few minutes before a race. This tool alone easily earns me enough to pay off the bonusbank subscription fee a few times over.

As with everything, life isn’t always perfect. Like the ATM Alerts, it’s limited to being used on a computer with Google Chrome installed so mobile users don’t get the benefit. There are a couple of bugs in the interface that occasionally get in the way, though these don’t impact any primary functionality.

Finally, the update rate isn’t quite able to keep up with the speed that odds are moving. It’s not unusual to see a great opportunity in HorsePower and navigate to the bookie to find the price has already changed. I’ll defend the bonusbank team here and realise that it would be very demanding on your browser for them to be calling new odds every 0.5 – 1 seconds. Instead, HorsePower should be seen as a guide to which bookies/horses are at attractive odds for you to focus on.

Having been through some of the more advanced features that bonusbank offer, Today’s Plays is easily one of the most profitable. It’s also very simple and accessible for beginners.

Every day, the bonusbank team post a set of recommended bets that are designed to trigger bookmaker offers. Generally, these focus on NRL, AFL and NBA games although they do cover over sports where there are profitable offers.

The idea with these offers is to ‘Dutch’ bookmakers against each other and therefore avoid exchange commission fees. Then, we’re looking to trigger lucrative bonuses through bookmaker offers. Here’s an example of a daily play:

As you can see, if any of those bonuses get triggered it’s quite a significant payday. However, if none of them are triggered we take a relatively small loss. This is exactly the core concept of Expected Value and why you need to follow these offers regularly.

Bonusbank keep a public tracker for their Daily Plays that is updated on a daily basis. As you can see from the (static) graph below, from April 2017, these have been highly profitable over a number of years.

That’s $37,000 profit in just over 3 years. Not including all the other available promotions!

Finding an advantage with ‘Multi’s’ is an advanced matched betting technique where you take advantage of bookie offers when placing a double, treble, four-fold or five-fold bet. Using promotions, it’s possible to place bets that are a positive expected value and will earn us profit over time.

All you need to do is put in your stake, the bookmaker and the bonus you could earn. Here’s a (condensed) example:

Bonusbank offer this feature for different strategies, including No Lay, Lay Sequentially and Lay at Start. There are full tutorials on how to use each of these strategies and the pros/cons of each.

These calculators are perfectly suited for what they need to do and they save heaps of time trying to find the best events to use. They work with all the major bookmakers and I have nothing negative to say about them.

The technique used in ‘Today’s Plays’ , dutching involves betting on all possible outcomes using only bookmakers. Thus, avoiding the exchange commission fees on any winnings.

This isn’t a nirvana for matched betting, you still have to deal with bookmaker margins and constantly shifting prices. However, it can be a really smart way to reduce your qualifying losses. If you’re working through wagering requirements at multiple bookies at the same time, dutching can be a very profitable strategy.

Here’s what the dutching software looks like:

As you can see, I’m looking to dutch against some wagering requirements at Ladbrokes and I can do reasonably well matching against Ubet (with a $100 total stake). This is another way to take all the hard work out of finding low qualifying losses.

Dutching works best when an event only has 2 possible outcomes (win/lose) but can also be profitable with a 3 way dutch (win/draw/lose) and there’s even a mode to calculate that.

My favourite feature is the calculator found by clicking the orange calculator symbol. This suggests different stakes you should follow, in particular using ’rounded’ stake that look more like a normal punter. I highly recommend using this for any dutching you do.

I’m a big fan of this software and it really simplifies the process of finding dutch bets. I’d like to see the ability to manage rounded stakes on the search screen itself, as well as being able to select multiple bookmakers to filter. However, these are really minor current limitations.

Building the sense of community within bonusbank subscribers, the forum acts as a fantastic resource to get help from other matched betting experts. One of the fantastic benefits is that you can sign up for a free account and get access to the ‘Free Members Forum‘ where paid subscribers including Nico and David can help you answer any questions you have.

It’s a very simple forum with just 6 different sub-categories and basic forum functionality. It’s also realistically not incredibly active, maybe seeing 30 posts a week on average. However, I see this as a result of the tutorials/guides available meaning that people don’t need to ask beginner questions. Nico is also very active and always on hand to answer any questions in the forum.

The forum is also an absolute treasure trove of advanced, profitable matched betting techniques. I had been matched betting for over half a decade before joining this forum and still learned some new valuable techniques.

If the forum isn’t particularly active, that’s in stark contrast with the Live Chat functionality. Here, all bonusbank subscribers can join a central chat room and discuss any interesting topics.

I’ve shown what the chat room looks like on a random Wednesday morning when there isn’t much sporting activity. On a regular Saturday or evening, there’s always far more activity and advice being shared.

I’ve anonymised all the chats and advice to be fair to the users who happen to have found their way into my screenshot!

I really find that the chat creates a brilliant sense of community and makes the process of matched betting far less lonely. It’s very welcoming and easy to ask beginner questions here in such a relaxed setting.

To make the most of it, you really want multiple screens and have the chat on display at all times. If you can’t do that, it’s still valuable to check every few minutes to see what’s being discussed.

All the tools and features I’ve discussed sadly don’t come free, although I fully believe that they pay back the subscription fee very handsomely as long as you’re actively making money from matched betting.

Free Tier – Bonusbank very kindly offer a free member account where you can access a lite version of their oddsmatcher, 9 introductory matched betting tutorials and access to their free members forum. Even if you don’t want to pay for bonusbank, it’s well worth opening a free account.

Monthly Cost – $47. This grants you full access to every bonusbank feature and everything you need to supercharge your matched betting. You can sign up for a paid subscription here. Get 25% off your first month with the code OZPROFIT.

Bonusbank also offer the ability to buy a 6-month or 12-month membership at $225 and $400 respectively. These have the opportunity to save you huge amounts of money although I would recommend that beginners always start on the monthly plan. If you enjoy matched betting and want to commit yourself to making long term profits, then getting a 6/12 month membership is a fantastic deal.

This is almost impossible to answer, because it really depends on how much time and effort you want to put in to matched betting.

Based on my experience, these are an average set of figures that should be achievable by everyone for a weekly profit not including any new member bonuses that are hugely profitable:

• Today’s Plays – $150
• HorsePower – $150
• Multi’s – $50

Weekly Total – $350

Monthly Total – +$1400

That really makes the $47 monthly subscription fee seem particularly small. I also know there are bonusbank subscribers making far more than that every month through very clever strategies.

It’s been a bit of a marathon run-through of bonusbank, with plenty of features to discuss. I hope you’ve found this review insightful and it leaves you with an enhanced knowledge of why matched betting tools are important.

Bonusbank isn’t as polished as some of the matched betting tools available over in the UK, where matched betting is much more popular. There are elements that are a little clunky in places, which require a bit of effort to learn.

However, I think there are two things that are the most important to consider:

• Bonusbank is very welcoming to beginners and offer a huge amount of resources to help you get started.
• All the tools you need are available and functional. There aren’t any clear missed opportunities or gaps.

If you’re a complete beginner, I do recommend subscribing to bonusbank for access to the community and to help you make the most of the very profitable new account offers.

If you’ve been matched betting a while, then you need to be taking advantage of all the ongoing offers. Using the tools available in bonusbank can save you hours of time every week. I value my own time quite highly which is why I value the bonusbank service very highly.

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David

David's been matched betting since 2013 between the UK and Australia, earning over $30,000. He's passionate about helping others find financial freedom and he's already made all the mistakes so you don't have to. Read his story | Follow on Twitter.

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