What Are Accumulator Bets?

If you are a regular bettor, you definitely heard about accumulator bets or accas. This type of bets are widely known for being a huge gamble which can bring a massive return with a relatively small stake.

With matched betting accumulators, you have different ways to generate either instant or long-term profits. I’m going to explain some of methods on how can you profit from a consistent income with them.

Again, keep in mind this is through the perspective of my own experience and before you go ahead please, ensure you’ve read the disclaimer.

[Disclaimer: Gamble Aware 18+, AD]

Accumulator bets (ACCAs) are considered to be one of the best reload offers due to their wide spread across bookies and are often triggered constantly, or at least very regularly. However, are one of the two most intimidating methods for beginners – along with EW betting systems.

A short note before going into a more depth: Taking advantage of accumulators is not for total beginner or for those with a small bankroll. I would recommend that you have a minimum of a £750 bankroll before making your first steps. Also, probably the most important aspect, you need good organisational skills, a proper understanding of this method and discipline.

a) What Is an Accumulator Bet or ACCA?

An accumulator bet is a bet which contains at least 2 events, called also “legs”. For example, if we want to place a £25 bet on an football ACCA, we are going to pick at least 2 matches; let’s saying we are picking Man City, Chelsea, Man United to beat their opponents in the Premier League.

To win this accumulator bet, you must have correctly predicted the outcome of every match in your accumulator meaning that the odds are accumulated across multiple matches. Using the previous example, the odds for the above 3 teams are 1.28, 1.28, 1.5 the accumulated odds being 1.28 x 1.28 x 1.5 = 2.45. Football accumulators, or ‘accas’ are really popular across the betting industry because you have the potential to win a large amount of money from a relatively small bet stake.

b) What Is a Football Accumulator Refund Offer?

Now that we know what an accumulator bet is, let’s talk about how bookies are using this type of bet to hold their current customers or to bring new ones to their platforms. So, most of bookmakers offers are stating that you will get your bet stake refunded as a free bet , if you lose your acca bet by one leg – Football Accumulator Refund offer .

For example, if you bet £25 on 5 teams all to win this weekend and 4 of those teams won, with the other team drawing or losing, then the bookmaker will refund the £25 stake as a £25 free bet.

In most cases, the bookmakers provide Football Accumulator Refund offer under the name of “Acca Insurance’”. Each offer varies in maximum refund amount (either £10, £20 or £25), minimum number of teams in the accumulator (3, 4 or more) and minimum odds per team.

To find easily these offers, you will need a tool such as ACCA Finder or ACCA Matcher, from Odds Monkey or any other equivalent. If you are not already signup for one of these paid matched betting software, please use feel free to sign up.

c) What Do I Need to Start and How Much Can I Get Out of It?

From my experience, you can make a profit around £50/ week; each accumulator refund offer usually will bring an average of £2 profit, and you can expect to complete up to 5 – 6 refunds per hour. This makes you to invest like 4 -5 hours a week for this type of offer, which can be seen as a job with £12/hour pay. Of course, is subject to offers availability.

As for bankroll required, usually a £10 accumulator stake will bring the liability requirement up to £45. Many matched betters start with £5 or £10 accumulators before moving up to £25 accumulator offers. In terms of how much you need in your exchange to lay a £10 accumulator, it depends on which the lay methods you use.

I would recommend taking advantage of these offer, Thursday to Saturday or Monday to Tuesday because you will need a significant number of major league fixtures to be available to complete accumulator refund offers.

d) Are Accumulator Refunds Bringing Enough Value?

Again, is about the time you put in and how efficient you are. As a thumb rule, a football accumulator refund is valuable when you are picking events with teams that are strong favourites to win (usually under 1.6 odds) because you can receive a free bet 1 of 3 times you place a acca bet. In practice we will make a £2 to £3 profit per £25 accumulator due to two important factors.

• Choosing low odds teams – By choosing low odds teams, we ensure we have a reasonable chance of receiving a free bet. This means choosing football teams with odds under 1.6 because you have more chances of the winning (and so you win your accumulator stake multiplied by the combined odds) and less chance of your accumulator losing (and so you lose the accumulator stake).

• Choosing close back & lay odds – Probably, is a known fact that the bookmaker’s back odds are almost always lower than the exchange’s lay odds because the bookmaker will give you reduced odds (compared to exchange markets, where are the real odds from the sporting bet market). This is how bookies can make a profit.

Therefore, the closer the back & lay odds, the more profit you will make. For example, 1.42 lay odd can bring you a £5.40 expected profit, while 1.46 lay odds can return a £2.10 expected profit when the back odd (bookmaker’s shown odd) is 1.4. Normally, it is a better to place your accas closer to kick off as the odds will be at their closest.

e) How Can You Lay your Accumulators?

So far, I’ve explained what is an acca and how an accumulator refund offers can be profitable, in particular by choosing low odds with close back & lay odds. Now, let’s learn the laying methods for our accumulators. So by laying accumulators, we can reduce or even completely eliminate the risk of not receiving our free bet. Usually, a platform such as Odds Monkey comes into play.

As an alternative, you have to find the teams yourself by looking everywhere on the bookmaker website, then enter everything into a manual spreadsheet and work out your expected profit and the stake to lay. Fortunately, if you have access to tools such as ACCA Finder or ACCA Matcher, from Odds Monkey and even have explicit guides on how to use the correspondent calculators for each of laying methods.

Methods which we are going to discuss below:

There are four methods to lay an accumulator bet with the possible results based on our example (betting £25 on an acca offer):

1) Method 1: No Lay

Basically, you don’t lay your bets. This method is therefore high risk. This is because if 2 or more teams do not win, then you lose the accumulator bet and also do not receive a free bet refund.

I recommend this method to be used by experienced matched betters with £1,500+ profits to spare and a high risk tolerance, so they can handle the variance. You can read more about variance here.

2) Method 2: Lay All At Start

The principle used here is that you place a lay bet on each of the 5 teams in your accumulator. So, using this example, for a £25 accumulator with 5 teams, you are placing 5 x £25 lay bets – one for each team. This method is quite similar to No Lay method in terms of potential losses because even if you use it doesn’t reduce your risk by much.

3) Method 3: Lay Sequentially

You lay each match in your accumulator, one by one, incurring a small trigger bet loss. It is important to note that each team in your accumulator must start after the previous team has finished.

This means you need to head into exchange before each game kicks off to place the next lay bet, though you stop laying once 1 team has lost (as you now hope the remaining teams win to trigger the free bet). I would recommend this method for those with low risk tolerance and able to place lay bets on multiple days before each game kicks off.

4) Method 4: Lay Sequentially Lock In

This method is very similar in practice to Method 3. You are laying each match in accumulator right before it starts. However, with some clever maths in the Acca Matcher (that is automatically calculated for you), you are spreading the value of the free bet across every match.

Therefore, regardless of whether each team wins, you are returning a profit. This method is for those looking to make a guaranteed profit from every accumulator.

f) Which Method Should I Use?

As an overall, looking through the above laying methods, you will say Method 4 is the one. No doubt is a popular method with matched betters because can guarantee you a profit. However, I would suggest not to oversee Method 1 and here are some reasons why:

• Speed – With Lay Sequentially methods, you need to place a lay bet before each game starts, which is quite time consuming and obviously you need a reminder so you don’t forget to do it. On the other hand, with No Lay, you only need to set aside time once and then just wait for the results.

• Profit – With method 2, 3 and 4, you can only use one team that kicks off at a particular time, while you can use all of these with No Lay method. This means doing one accumulator may be more profitable, plus you can complete more accas given there are more teams to choose from.

• Gubbing – As you know, the bookmakers will observe your betting patterns. For sure, are going to notice that you are placing accas where every game kicks off at a different time, so you may be more likely to be gubbed compared to No Lay methods.

But remember, No Lay method involves a lot of risk given the swings in the results, so use this method if you have a healthy bankroll and you are happy with the variance.