How To Make Money Off Sports Gambling
- Sports Betting Sites Find the best sports betting sites to place your wagers at online. Sports Betting Picks Free daily sports betting and DFS picks from a team of expert sports handicappers. Sports Betting Strategy Sports betting strategy articles that will help you learn how to win more money.
- Sep 03, 2019 It’s an excellent starting point for anyone looking to make their first big leap into professional gambling without the risk of blowing their bankroll. Matched Betting familiarises newcomers with using the decimal odds format, and the Betfair exchange. It’s the first major step into professional sports betting.
- How To Make Money Off Sports Gambling No Deposit
- How To Make Money From Home
- How To Make Money Online
- How To Make Money Off Sports Gambling Money
- How To Make Money From Sports Betting In Nigeria
Nov 24, 2018 Stats are very important in sports gambling, because you can use them to spot trends that’ll give you an advantage over time. You can also use sports betting software to help you analyze advanced stats and make better bets. Of course, sports betting is like DFS in that you want to first learn the basics while concentrating on low stakes wagers. Oct 18, 2016 Making the leap from knowledgeable sports bettor to winning sports bettor is perhaps the hardest step of all. Having the required knowledge is one thing; putting that knowledge to good use is something else entirely. This is precisely why there are so few bettors who actually make consistent profits. Dec 04, 2020 Open a specific bank account. To really make money on sports betting, you have to be dedicated, so it’s a good idea to have a special account that’s only for placing bets. When you open this account, be sure you invest enough money to cover your bankroll for an entire season or year, not just a single game.
This is the first out of a three-part article series, which purpose is to investigate how one can make money from sports betting and the requirements of making a living from it.
Part 1: Having realistic expectations AND Different ways to make money from betting
Setting realistic expectations
If you already feel like skipping this part you are the type that would benefit the most from reading it.
First off, it is important to have realistic expectations.
As with anything in life, making money from sports betting requires time and effort.
And those looking for a get-rich-quick solution or minimal work are setting themselves up for disappointment.
Whether you have a job or are a student, things like this start as a side project.
Most of the people who work for Trademate are building their bankroll on the evenings and weekends, while working on Trademate during the daytime.
Whether you are studying, working a 9-5 job or making a living from playing poker, we think this approach makes a lot of sense.
It happens to be very compatible with value betting since that is when the majority of games are played anyway, and thus when the edges occur.
If you don’t need the money from betting to cover living expenses, it also reduces your risk as you have more legs to stand on financially.
It also enables you to reinvest any profits you make and keep building your bankroll. This, in turn, increases your turnover and potential profits.
You can keep doing it this way until you reach a point where it makes economic sense to do it full time.
Different ways to make money from sports betting
There are 2 main ways to make a living from sports betting:
The first is being able to pick winners. Which is what 99% of all tipsters and bettors out there are trying to do, and of which probably 98.9% are failing at.
To do this successfully, you would need to specialise in a market, preferably a niche market, where the bookmakers do not have the same level of information and knowledge as you, or where they can not interpret it as well.
If you want to try and create your own odds models, this article can help you get started.
The second way is to find value in the odds. Finding value can again be split into three groups: 1) Matched betting, 2) Arbitrage betting and 3) Value betting.
These can be ranked based on their potential risk and reward. The pros and cons of them are discussed in this article.
Also this guest post examines the pros and cons of arbitrage betting vs value betting.
At Trademate we are all about value betting as this gives the highest potential return of the 3 ways to make money.
The downside of value betting is that the risk is higher than for arbitrage and matched betting. This is because you only bet on one side of the game, the variance is higher. These articles and video explain variance.
Let’s use an example: If one takes a bet with 2.0 in odds, one can only expect to win 50% of the time. In the short run, anything can happen, e.g. losing 10 coin tosses in a row.
But over a large sample size, let’s say 10,000 tosses, the distribution of the number of heads and tails will be pretty much spot on 50/50 (the theory behind it is explained in this article and our big data analysis has shown that it has worked very well in practice for the Trademate users).
In practice, the potentially high variance nature of value betting, means that one needs to be prepared to place hundreds of bets, maybe thousands depending on the average closing edge and odds before one can expect the variance to even out.
One thing they all have in common is that they have hit bad swings, but made it through them.
We have had users who were breakeven at 1,500 bets, before they hit a good run and their profits soared up and past their EV line (expected value).
Before you start you should make sure that you understand the underlying principles of value betting, mainly exploiting market inefficiencies in our case.
It is not for everyone and if you decide that it is not for you, then that is ok. But then you will not be making a living from betting anytime soon.
Next, one needs to have the patience and discipline to stick with it, through both the upswings and downswings.
Reducing variance in value betting
There are steps you can take to reduce the variance in value betting, such as placing on lower odds, only placing one trade per game, placing trades close to kick-off, using a proportional staking strategy such as the Kelly Criterion and limiting it to 30% of the Kelly.
Also, one should apply a max stake size. We recommend operating with 1-2% of your overall bankroll. It is possible to set it higher and also to use a higher Kelly percentage if one wants to take more risk and increase the turnover.
Bookmakers limit winning players and how to increase your lifetime value
Whether it being matched betting, arbitrage betting or value betting, the soft books do not like winning players.
To stop players from winning, bookmakers will impose stake sizing limits on them.
Without getting a solid turnover, making money from either option becomes really difficult.
How long it takes varies from bookie to bookie. There are also internal differences at the bookies.
All of this does not mean that it is not possible to extract good value from them first though!
Also, there are steps one can take to make the accounts last longer before they get limited and thus increase the lifetime value of the soft bookmakers.
A topic we have covered in multiple articles, such as:
Article: How to stay under the radar and avoid bookmaker limitations
Article: How bookmakers track your every move and how to get around it.
Article: How bookmakers profile winning players
At Trademate we are currently supporting 100+ soft bookmakers. Playing through all of them should take some time.
Also, because we have so many different bookmakers and also trades to choose from, the number of people who pick the same trade is not particularly high and thus each individual account lasts longer.
We also switch out a couple of bookies every few months to keep things fresh and have added 10 new bookies this year. So our overall value offered is constantly increasing.
Sports trading
Finally, what about sports trading? Traditional trading involves buying and selling assets. Sports trading involves either placing a value bet, an arbitrage or hedging a bet.
Hedging a bet is basically to turn a value bet into an arbitrage bet. The difference between arbing and hedging is that when hedging, the bets are not necessarily placed at the same time.
For example in an arbitrage you place a bet on the home, draw and away within a short period of time, e.g. 1 minute. When hedging you would first place a value bet on e.g. the home team to win.
How To Make Money Off Sports Gambling No Deposit
Then you can turn it into a sure win or a sure loss by taking a bet on both the draw + away team, or an Asian Handicap bet at a later point in time.
Hedging enables you to reduce your risk, but it also reduces the potential profit. We have covered the topic of hedging a bet in this article.
Ready for Part 2?
In the second part of the article series, we will have put some numbers on the different input factors that affect potential earnings and run some simulations.
Most people who want to place bets on sports are fans to begin with. It isn’t unheard of for a gambler to place some sports bets, especially during big games like the Super Bowl or the NCAA basketball Final Four, but for the most part, sports bettors are sports fans looking to use their knowledge of a game or of a game’s players to earn a little extra cash. Being a fan of a particular sport, a team, a college or professional squad—these are all precursors to placing sports bet. Sports betting is also a way for a fan to get in on the action of the game, with something more than self-respect at stake.
All gambling is mathematics, even games of chance. If you understand the math behind the game, you understand the game and can give yourself an advantage. For many games, like penny slots or poorly placed roulette bets, are so bad that smart bettors earn their advantage by avoiding them altogether. In sports betting, the math is more complicated. Depending on your favorite sport, you may need to think about things like bye weeks, underdogs, quarterback ratings, and injuries with the same fervor other connoisseurs reserve for fancy winces.
So how difficult is sports betting math? The math behind placing a winning bet is fairly complicated, but the way to stay ahead of the bookmaker is rather straightforward. If you collect on 52.4% of your bets, you’ll break even. We’ll have more details on that number later, including why it takes more than 50% wins to break even, but first some general knowledge about sports gambling and the numbers behind it.
Sports Betting Basics
The easiest way to demonstrate the math behind a sports bet is to make up an example. Let’s say you and your buddy walk into a casino, each with $200 burning a hole in your pocket. There’s a big game on tonight, the Cowboys and the Redskins, so you wander into the sportsbook to check up on the latest news about the game. While you’re sitting there, you see the wagering board, with some funny numbers on it. It looks like this:
- 428 Cowboys +175
- 429 Redskins -4 -200 38
Some of this is easy enough to read. The Redskins -4 means the Redskins are favored to win and must do so by at least 5 points for a bet on the ‘Skins to pay out. The next number (-200) is the moneyline, in this case the Redskins are a 2/1 favorite. The last number (38) is the total, the over/under of the expected number of points scored in the game.
More on Placing Sports Bets
Look at that over/under number, in this case 38. If you or your buddy thinks this is going to be a particularly high or low scoring game, based on your knowledge of the team’s offenses and defenses, or information about a hurt player or bad playing conditions, you can place a wager on the total of points scored.
So how is a guy supposed to know how to literally lay down a sports bet? You need to know three things:
#1 – the type of bet you want to make
#2 – the number of the corresponding team you have chosen and
#3 – the amount you wish to wager
Knowing all that beforehand gives the ticket writer the details he needs to write the ticket without having to bend over backwards to process your bet.
Tipping and Sports Betting
We haven’t even gotten to the meat of the sports math yet, and we’re already talking about tipping the staff behind the window? Yep. Here’s why.
If you place two $100 bets, and you win, you’ll collect $440. You should consider leaving a tip around five percent of your winnings. Yes, that’s a $22 tip, but you just made a huge win, and surely you can spring for a twenty-spot for the guy who helped you win it. If you tip around the five percent mark regularly, when you win, you’re way more likely to get free drinks, which is about all you’re going to get comp-wise at the sportsbook.
So, back to the basic math of sports betting. You and your buddy, after much deliberation, decide to each place a $100 bet on your favorite team. What now?
To bet on the Redskins using the point spread, your bet is called “laying the points.” For your bet to pay off, the ‘Skins have to win by five or more to cover the spread. Remember, if the ‘Skins win by exactly four, the game is a push, and both sides recoup their bet. Another alternative is called “taking the points” with the Cowboys. That means the Cowboys have to lose by three or less for your bet to win, or if the Cowboys win outright. So you and your buddy go up to place your $100 bet, and you find out that the standard straight bet at any bookie pays 11/10. That means you have to bet $110 if you want to win $100. You and your buddy pay the bookie $110 and sit down with drinks to watch your bets come in.
These are deceptively simple bets. Deceptively because they make it look like the outcome of the football game is like the outcome of picking marbles out of a bag. Put one black marble and two white marbles in a bag, pull one out at random, and there’s your football game. After all, the odds are the same: 2/1 for white.
But we, as sports fans, know that the mathematics of a sporting event is much more complex. Sports bettors deeply involved in their hobby will subscribe to weather bulletins from major cities that take part in their sport, making huge wagering decisions based on a few mph of wind in one direction or another. Then there’s the unknown—does a player get hurt in the first quarter? Does weather become a factor? Is a particular player “in the zone?”
How Do Bookies Make a Profit?
Just as we finish ruminating on the concept of the difficult math at play in the background of major sporting events, we’re going to turn right back towards the simpler side of sports betting. Bookies make a profit because of vigorish. What’s vigorish?
Look at the above example again. You and your buddy each paid $10 to the bookie to place your bet. That’s what the standard 11/10 odds in sports betting are all about. You bet the Cowboys and your buddy bet the Redskins, a total of $220 bet. The sportsbook has to pay back $210 to the winner, leaving a nice $10 profit no matter what happens on the football field. That $10 built-in profit is called the vigorish, and it’s the final monkey wrench in the gears of sports betting.
Obviously, sportsbooks are going to take more than two bets on any game, but this example is for simplicity’s sake. Looking at the total number of bets on different games over the course of a week and adjusting the moneyline and other numbers is another way the bookie makes a profit. Adjusting the odds a tiny percentage point in either direction will affect the balance of beats and make the book more likely to turn a profit no matter what.
Essentially, a bookie is a person who holds on to money from bettors then pays them if they win and keeps their money if they don’t. That’s what the job is boiled down to its essence.
When a bookie sets odds for games, he will build what bookies call an “over round” into his set of odds. Another slang term used for this formula is “the juice.” For the sake of simplicity, let’s look at a boxing match where both contenders are equally talented, of equal stature, etc. Since they both have an equal chance of winning, a casual bet may be even money. You put $20 on one guy; your friend puts $20 on the other. Whichever fighter wins awards the bettor with the total of $40.
Bookies don’t offer even money like friends in a casual betting situation. In the above example, with two evenly matched boxers, a smart bookie will offer 5/6 odds for each. That way, a $10 winning bet would only return $8.30 plus your stake. What does this do for the bookmaker? He can float an equal amount of money on both fighters, winning no matter which fighter actually wins. If they take $1,000 worth of bets on one boxer and $1,000 on the other, the bookie would take in $1,000 but only have to pay out $830, for a guaranteed $170 profit regardless of the outcome.
Bookies look at the weight of their books all the time and adjust odds and other factors to make sure their books balance. Though it isn’t possible to completely balance a book, bookies that go too far out on one side run the risk of losing money, and losing money in gambling is the fastest way to find yourself in another industry. All of these factors are why bookies generally root for the underdog—too many favorites winning in a sport with a short season (such as the NFL) can cause a bookmaker to lose money, while a bunch of upsets (like you generally see in college football) is a guaranteed profit for the bookmaker.
The short answer here is that bookies making money has nothing at all to do with your betting. It is almost unheard of for a single customer to be allowed to place enough bets to sink a single book all on his own. High rollers in sports betting get special privileges in terms of their maximum bet size, but these privileges often change with the bettor’s luck—maximums get raised after the bettor sees big losses and decreased (sharply) when the bettor starts to get lucky.
In short, a sportsbook’s profits aren’t necessarily impacted directly by the way an individual bet is called. Unlike casino games or slot machines, where it’s you against the house, sports bettors fuel the bookmaker’s business and only rarely is an individual bettor betting against the bookie.
Sports Betting Odds
Remember at the beginning when we talked about the magic number necessary to guarantee a break-even week in sports betting? If you read enough about sports betting, you’ll hear this number repeated often: 52.4%. If a bettor can win 52.4% of his bets, he’ll break even. Where does that number come from?
When betting the spread, you get odds of -110. Sometimes, sportsbooks will offer a -105 line as a promotion or to welcome new business. But for the most part, if you’re betting the spread, you’re getting -110.
We draw that 52.4% break even number right out of the odds. -110 is equivalent to 11/10. That means if you bet 21 games, you’d have to win eleven of them and lose ten of them to break completely even. Even at -105, you’d still have to win an astounding 51.2% of the time just to break even.
If you don’t trust the basic math behind this break-even principle, look at another real-world example. Let’s say you get really into sports betting after your Cowboys cream the Redskins and you go home with a nice fat wallet. You then bet on the next 10 Cowboys games, winning six times and losing four times.
That 60% betting record (with the odds of -110 that is traditional for against the spread bets in football) will leave you with a profit of $160. Think about it—your $600 profit from your 6 winning bets minus the $440 you lost on losing bets leaves $160. It took you $1,100 to win $160, meaning you have to bet $6.87 to win $1 on average. So you see the small differences between a 52.4% winning rate and a 60% winning rate—inside those 7.3 percentage points lies hundreds of dollars in profit.
Now imagine instead that you lost one of those six winning bets, leaving you with a 50% betting record. You spent a total of $1,100, won $500, and lost $550. That means overall your 50% record drained your wallet by $50. That’s where the vigorish will get you. Not even winning half the time is good enough to break even in sports betting.
Professional Sports Bettors
Believe it or not, some people really do bet on sports for a living. Maybe they work part time at a sportsbook or in some other marginal job in the casino industry, but there is a group of gamblers who bet on sports for their life’s work. With all the math swirling around in our heads after the last bit of the article, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to do this for a living.
If you know that a 52.4% record will mean you break even, the simplest way to turn sports betting into a career is to bet enough so that a 53% winning record will bring in the kind of money you want to make.
Another example. After your successful Cowboys experiment, you decide to invest $10,000 in sports gambling over the first four months of the following football season. That $10,000 is set aside to win or lose in sportsbooks.
You plan on betting on 160 games during your investment period. You dream of a 55% winning record because your win-loss with a 55% winning record would give you an 88-72 record. That’s an expected profit of +8.8 units. How did we get to that number? To calculate your units, subtract the total of your losses (multiplied by 1.1 to include the vig) from your wins and you’ll get your unit profit.
Placing $460 bets on each of these games, a number pulled from some quick and dirty math about how much you could afford to bet in a single week’s NFL play without blowing your bankroll, would result in a $4,048 profit if you maintain that 55% winning record. Turning $10,000 into $14,048 in just four months is an investment return of 40.48%. I dare you to ask your bank for that kind of return on your savings account.
How To Make Money From Home
But that’s all assuming you can pick the winner 55% of the time. Do your research, look into the records of professional sports gamblers. 55%, while not impossible, would place you among the elite sports bettors in the country, if not the world.
Professional sports bettors have to worry about variance more than any other type of gambler. Working against the forces of variance means managing your bankroll over the course of the season to avoid the negative possibilities that could totally empty your wagering account. Professional sports bettors have the time and resources necessary to calculate these variances, and there are even a few pieces of software out there that can help you figure out your ideal bet in the face of negative variance. But the bottom line is that professional sports bettors would dream of having a 55% winning record, simply because it guarantees you’re beating the house.
Pro bettors make their money on bets that sportsbooks offer that give them even the slightest betting advantage. The key to becoming a profitable sports bettor is being able to find advantages, opportunities where the line a book is offering is vulnerable.
This is why many long-term sports bettors are math freaks. Good sports bettors understand statistics, particularly what are called inferential statistics, though any higher math will help when it comes time to place a bet.
Here is what a professional baseball bettor might do in his head. After looking over statistics from MLB (kept religiously by all sorts of bloggers, data archives, and magazines) between the years 2000-2010, he notices a particular statistic pop out. For example: when the home team starts a left-handed pitcher the day after a loss, that team wins 59% of the time. Good sports bettors can do this sort of math in their head or very quickly on paper. From that bit of information comes a new betting theory—look for game situations that mirror the above example and bet on them. That means he’ll only bet games where the home team starts a left-handed pitcher the day after a loss. Does he just jump in and start betting based on this back of the napkin math? No way. More statistical analysis is required—he may find that this was a fluke for that particular decade and isn’t a trustworthy statistics, or he may find an even more advantageous bet based on his original theory.
How To Make Money Online
Pro sports bettors also keep near-obsessive records of their bets. Obviously, no edge in sports betting lasts longer than a single game. Taking proper records will also help you test theories, like the above one about left-handed pitchers and losses. Without taking good records, no sports bettor’s bankroll will last very long.
What Is a Good Record for Sports Bettors
So, at the end of the day, what could you call a “good” record for a sports bettor? Most casual gamblers looking into sports betting see a pro advertising his 1100-900 record and shake their head a little. How could such an abysmal record be something to be proud of? That’s a 55% winning percentage, and it indicates to those in the know that this bettor is actually turning a profit placing bets on sports.
How To Make Money Off Sports Gambling Money
A good record for a sports bettor is any record equal to or larger than 52.4%, because that number or anything higher means you’re not losing money. A 53% winning record, while not impressive on paper, means you’re actually beating the sportsbook and putting money back in your pocket. Ask your friends that play the slots or play online poker how often they end up putting money back in their pocket.
A -110 wager, standard for spread bets in the NFL, gives the house a built-in advantage of 10%. It means that even if you do win, and you line up to collect your $100, some sucker behind you just spent $10 to hand the casino $100.
A good record for sports bettors is any record that ensures they at least break-even. If you bet 16 games this NFL season and you won 9 and lost 7, you probably made money. And taking money away from a casino is always something to be proud of.
Other Advanced Sports Betting Strategy Articles:
» Future Betting Strategy
» NFL Bye Week Betting Strategy
» Parlay Betting Strategy
Sports Betting Break Even Video:
How To Make Money From Sports Betting In Nigeria
In the video above I go over the break even % for sports betting, and we take a look at the difference between hitting 52% and 53%. I also quickly show the amounts of profits you can expect if you can hit 55% consistently.