Combined liability and matched betting

One of the biggest challenges you may face as a new matched bettor is not being able to do numerous offers at once because your funds are tied up. This can happen if your bankroll is on the smaller side. Or if your money is deposited across other accounts. If you move money around, withdrawal times will keep you waiting even longer before you can move on to the next offer. But don’t worry. There is a way to get around this and it’s called combined liability.

Combined liability and matched betting

Before we get into combined liability, let’s take a quick look at what liability is. In the world of matched betting, liability refers to the amount of money needed to place a lay bet at the betting exchange. The lay stake and liability amount are two separate costs but both are needed in order for your lay bet to be placed. These funds are then held until the event ends and the bet settles.

So how does combined liability work and how can it prevent your funds from being tied up?

What is combined liability?

You can drastically reduce the amount of money needed at the betting exchange by combining liability. In matched betting you do this by placing numerous lays bets on multiple outcomes within the same match, race, or event.

The idea is that the lay bets cancel each other out and reduce the overall liability. It works because the betting exchange knows that only one outcome can happen within a market. Let’s look at a quick example.

How does combined liability work in matched betting?

Imagine you back and lay several horses to win within the same race. The exchange then doesn’t need to hold the liability for every horse. The reason for this is that only one horse can win.

What it then does is only hold the liability of the worst-case scenario, which is the horse that has the highest liability. Therefore, if a horse with lower liability ends up winning, then the exchange already has enough funds to cover it.

And if the horse with the highest liability ends up winning, then it’s covered for that as well. Why? Because only one horse can win. So the exchange doesn’t need to hold ALL the liabilities of EVERY horse.

Combined liability isn’t just applicable to horse racing.

How to get combined liability at the exchange

The good news is that you don’t really need to do anything out of the ordinary in order to combine liability at the exchange. The betting exchange does it for you automatically. All you need to do is back and lay your bets as you normally would and let the exchange work out the maths.

You’ll see your exchange balance go up and down as you lay the horses. This shows that it’s working it all out for you and only keeping what it needs as a worst-case scenario for that race. It is then releasing the rest of the money back to your balance.

So once these funds have been ‘released’ from liability back to your exchange balance, you’re free to do other offers.

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