Using Betfair, Betdaq and Smarkets together improves matched betting by letting you lay at the best available price across three exchanges (cutting qualifying losses), exploit lower commission on Smarkets and Betdaq for some offers, and keep working when one exchange has thin liquidity. The trade-off is more accounts, more funds tied up, and thinner liquidity on the smaller exchanges — so use the right exchange per offer.
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- Why use more than one exchange
- The three exchanges compared
- Lay-price hunting across exchanges
- Commission and how it changes the maths
- Liquidity: the real constraint
- From the desk: a qualifying-loss comparison
- A practical multi-exchange workflow
- Pitfalls to avoid
- Exchange diversification as gubbing insurance
- The verdict
This is a sub of our matched betting master class, and it addresses a gap in most people’s setup. They learn matched betting on Betfair, get comfortable, and never open a second exchange — leaving money on the table with every single offer and running with no backstop when Betfair’s liquidity or their bookmaker accounts let them down. Running Betfair, Betdaq and Smarkets together is not complicated, and it meaningfully improves both your profit and your resilience. Here is how to do it properly.
Why use more than one exchange
There are three concrete reasons to run more than one exchange. The first is better lay prices: the lay price you can get varies between exchanges, and a lower lay price means a smaller qualifying loss on every offer, so laying wherever the price is keenest directly increases your profit. The second is lower commission on some venues for the offers where commission bites — taking your exchange winnings on a cheaper exchange keeps more of the profit. The third is redundancy: if Betfair has thin liquidity on a particular market, or you simply want an alternative, having two more exchanges funded and ready means you are never stuck. Individually each gain is small; across a year of dozens of offers they compound into a noticeable difference, which is exactly the kind of marginal-gains thinking that separates serious matched bettors from casual ones.
The three exchanges compared
Betfair is the giant: by far the deepest liquidity across virtually every market, the widest range of markets, and the default for a reason. Its drawback is a higher standard base commission rate than its rivals, and the Premium Charge for a small minority of very profitable accounts — though matched bettors rarely trouble that. Smarkets positions itself on low, flat commission and a clean interface; its liquidity is good on busy mainstream markets and thinner on the obscure ones. Betdaq is the established number two exchange, generally lower commission than Betfair but much thinner on liquidity. The detail is in Betfair vs Betdaq and Betfair vs Smarkets, but the headline is simple: Betfair for depth, Smarkets and Betdaq for cheaper commission and keener prices when their liquidity allows.
Lay-price hunting across exchanges
The everyday benefit of three exchanges is lay-price hunting. For any given selection, the three exchanges will often show slightly different lay prices, and because your qualifying loss is driven by how far the lay price sits above the back price, laying where the lay price is lowest directly reduces that loss. On a qualifying bet, shaving even a few ticks off the lay price across dozens of offers a year adds up. The discipline is to glance at all three before you lay and take the best available price with sufficient liquidity for your stake — a habit that takes seconds once your accounts are funded and open side by side. This is also the foundation of cross-exchange arbitrage, where price discrepancies between exchanges become an edge in their own right.
Commission and how it changes the maths
Commission only matters on the leg where your exchange bet wins, but on those offers it changes which exchange is optimal. If a free-bet or reload offer leaves you taking a profit on the exchange side, doing so on a lower-commission exchange keeps more of that profit. The cleanest way to handle this is a matched-betting calculator that lets you input the commission rate per exchange, so you can see in a couple of seconds which venue nets you the most after commission for that specific offer. Do not assume the lowest-commission exchange always wins, though — a lower lay price on a higher-commission exchange can still come out ahead, which is why you compare the after-commission outcome rather than the commission rate in isolation. Track it all in a profit/loss spreadsheet so you can see over time which exchange is actually earning you the most.
Liquidity: the real constraint
The honest limitation of the smaller exchanges is liquidity, and it is the main reason Betfair remains the backbone. On mainstream events — big football matches, major racing, top tennis — Smarkets and Betdaq usually carry enough money to lay a normal matched-betting stake without trouble. On obscure markets — a minor football league, a niche racing meeting, an unusual market type — they can be too thin to lay your full stake at a fair price, and Betfair may be the only exchange deep enough. The practical rule is to check the available money before you commit: if the keenest lay price is on Smarkets but there is not enough money there to cover your stake, you either lay part there and part on Betfair, or simply lay the whole stake on Betfair and accept the slightly worse price. Never let a keen headline price on a thin exchange tempt you into a partial, mispriced lay.
The offer: a typical bookmaker sign-up requiring a £20 qualifying bet to unlock a free bet. The selection backed at the bookmaker was available at 3.0. The job was to lay £20 at the keenest available price to minimise the qualifying loss.
The three prices: at the moment I looked, the lay prices were Betfair 3.10 (5% commission), Betdaq 3.08 (2% commission), and Smarkets 3.06 (2% commission). All three had enough liquidity to cover a £20 lay on this mainstream football market.
The maths: laying at the lower Smarkets price of 3.06 needs a lay stake of about £19.86 versus roughly £20.13 at Betfair’s 3.10, and the lower commission reduces the cost further. Running all three through the calculator, the Smarkets lay produced a qualifying loss of about −£0.42, Betdaq about −£0.45, and Betfair about −£0.68.
The result: by laying on Smarkets rather than defaulting to Betfair I saved about £0.26 of qualifying loss on a single £20 offer. Trivial once — but multiply it across the dozens of qualifying and reload offers a serious matched bettor works through in a year, and it is a meaningful sum for a habit that costs nothing but a glance at three screens.
The lesson: the free bet that followed was worth far more than this margin, of course — but the point of multi-exchange matched betting is that you take both edges. You do not leave the qualifying-loss saving on the table just because the headline profit comes from the free bet. Small, repeatable savings are the whole game.
A practical multi-exchange workflow
Set it up once and it becomes routine. Open and fund all three accounts — Betfair, Betdaq and Smarkets — so you are never delayed mid-offer by a deposit. Keep all three open side by side (or use a tool that aggregates prices) so comparing lay prices is a glance, not a chore. For each offer, compare the after-commission outcome across the exchanges that have enough liquidity, and lay where it is best. Default to Betfair for thin markets where the smaller exchanges cannot cover your stake. And log every bet — which exchange, which price, which commission — in your tracker, so you build a real picture of where your matched-betting profit actually comes from. The whole process adds seconds per offer once the accounts are live, and the foundations are in matched betting explained and advanced strategies.
Pitfalls to avoid
More exchanges means more ways to make an expensive mistake, so guard against the obvious ones. Laying on the wrong exchange or at the wrong stake is the classic slip when juggling three screens — always run the calculator and double-check the exchange before you place the lay. Chasing a keen price into thin liquidity leaves you partially matched at a worse effective price than if you had simply used Betfair. Tying up too much capital across three exchanges can strand funds you need for the bookmaker side of offers, so balance your float sensibly. And sloppy record-keeping across multiple venues makes errors invisible until they have cost you — which is exactly why the spreadsheet matters. None of these are reasons to avoid multiple exchanges; they are reasons to be precise, because matched betting is only low-risk when executed correctly.
Exchange diversification as gubbing insurance
There is a resilience benefit to multiple exchanges that goes beyond the per-offer margins, and it becomes obvious the longer you do matched betting: diversification protects your operation against single points of failure. Matched bettors live with the reality that bookmakers restrict or “gub” profitable accounts over time, but the same logic applies to the exchange side in its own way. If you rely on a single exchange and it has a technical outage, a liquidity drought on the market you need, or a funds-access delay at the wrong moment, your entire matched-betting operation stalls until it is resolved. Spreading your float and your activity across Betfair, Betdaq and Smarkets means no single platform problem can shut you down.
This matters most during high-volume periods — a busy Saturday of football with multiple offers to clear, or a concentrated promotion period — when an outage or a liquidity gap on one exchange would otherwise force you to skip offers and leave guaranteed profit on the table. With three funded exchanges you simply route around the problem: the offer that you would have laid on Betfair goes to Smarkets instead, and you barely break stride. There is also a subtler benefit to spreading your exchange winnings across venues rather than concentrating an ever-growing profit history on one account, though for matched bettors this is a minor consideration compared with the bookmaker-side restrictions that are the real constraint. The honest framing is that multiple exchanges are partly an efficiency play — the keener prices and lower commission covered above — and partly an insurance policy, and the insurance value is invisible right up until the day one exchange lets you down and you are glad you were not depending on it. For a serious, long-term matched-betting operation, that redundancy is worth the modest hassle of maintaining three funded accounts all on its own.
Set against the modest hassle of opening and funding three accounts, the case is straightforward: keener lay prices and lower commission on every offer, plus an insurance policy against any single exchange letting you down at the worst moment. For anyone treating matched betting as a serious, ongoing source of profit rather than a one-off dabble, running all three exchanges is simply the professional default — and the trader who never looks past Betfair is quietly handing back margin on every offer they clear.
The verdict
Running Betfair, Betdaq and Smarkets together is the natural upgrade for any serious matched bettor. Betfair gives you the depth, Smarkets and Betdaq give you keener lay prices and lower commission, and all three together give you redundancy when one venue disappoints. Lay each offer where the after-commission outcome is best with enough liquidity to cover your stake, default to Betfair on thin markets, run a calculator every time, and log everything. The per-offer gains are small, but matched betting is a marginal-gains game, and over a year of offers taking the best of three exchanges is simply leaving less money on the table than the trader who never looked past Betfair.
FAQ
Why use Betdaq and Smarkets as well as Betfair for matched betting?
Because using all three lets you lay each offer at the best available price, cutting your qualifying loss, and lets you choose the lowest-commission venue for offers where commission matters. It also gives you a backstop: if Betfair has thin liquidity on a market or you need an alternative, you have two more exchanges ready. The marginal gains add up across a year of offers.
Which exchange has the lowest commission?
Smarkets and Betdaq have historically positioned themselves as lower-commission alternatives to Betfair’s standard base rate, and Smarkets in particular markets a flat low commission. The exact rates change, so always check the current figures — see our Betfair vs Smarkets commission comparison — but the smaller exchanges generally undercut Betfair’s headline base rate.
Does Betfair or Betdaq have better liquidity?
Betfair has substantially deeper liquidity across almost all markets, which is its main advantage. Betdaq is the established number two but is much thinner, and Smarkets sits in between on its busier markets. For matched betting on mainstream events the smaller exchanges are usually liquid enough, but on obscure markets Betfair is often the only one with the depth to lay your full stake.
How do I choose which exchange to lay an offer on?
Compare two things per offer: the lay price (lower is better, as it means a smaller qualifying loss) and the commission you would pay on any exchange winnings. Lay where the combination is best, provided the liquidity is sufficient for your stake. A calculator that lets you input commission per exchange makes this a few-second decision.
Is it worth the extra hassle of multiple exchange accounts?
For anyone doing matched betting seriously, yes. The lower lay prices and commission save real money on every offer, and the redundancy protects you when one exchange disappoints. The extra hassle is mostly upfront — opening and funding the accounts — after which choosing the best exchange per offer becomes a quick, routine habit that pays for itself.
Can I split a single lay across two exchanges?
Yes, and it is a useful technique when no single exchange has enough liquidity at a good price to cover your whole lay stake. You lay part of the stake on the keenest exchange until its available money runs out, then lay the remainder on the next-best. A calculator handles the split cleanly. The only caution is precision — splitting adds a step where stake or commission errors creep in, so double-check both legs before you commit.
Related reading
This is part of our matched betting master class. Compare the venues in Betfair vs Betdaq liquidity and Betfair vs Smarkets commission, and see the arbitrage angle in cross-exchange arbitrage. Build the foundations with matched betting explained and advanced matched betting strategies, track it all in a profit/loss spreadsheet, and use the matched betting hub for the wider picture.
Matched betting is low-risk only when executed correctly; mistakes across multiple exchanges — laying at the wrong exchange, wrong stake, or on thin liquidity — turn a risk-free offer into a real loss. More exchanges means more ways to slip up and more funds tied up. Most casual bettors lose money gambling; matched betting is not gambling but demands precision. Use a calculator every time, and never chase a fumbled offer. Past results don't guarantee future returns. 18+ only; help at BeGambleAware.org.
Open all three exchanges, lay each offer where the price and commission are best, and track every bet — the marginal gains compound over a year of offers.
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