How To Make Money Off Sports Gambling
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.
There’s a reason that the popularity of sports betting has exploded in recent years. In fact, did you know that during the last recession, the gambling industry relentlessly continued to grow? That’s because, in times of desperation, many people try their luck and think of ways that they can turn their hard earned money into…well, even more money. But can you make money from sports betting?
- 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.
- 'After attempting to make money from betting close to a dozen times, I gave up. I had no idea that there was more to profitable betting than just winning bets. With this book the Betting Scientist has done a great job at getting you set up properly so that you don't 'fall off the wagon'. I've read it 3 times and love the to-the-point writing style.
- Sports Betting Market – How Betting Sites Make Money In today’s world of sophisticated bookmakers and sharp gamblers, the sharps always seem to be ahead. As we went over in our article on “ fading the public ” as a betting strategy, the sportsbooks may want to alter the odds to cater to public betting opinions, (which they sometimes do.
Everyone is attracted by the thought of making easy money. When you’re slaving away in your 9-5, struggling to make ends meet, it’s only natural.
But the truth is this. Making money from sports betting is HARD. Very hard. But if you’re serious about becoming better at sports betting, this article will help.
How to make money from sports betting
Skills and Attributes
One thing that you must understand when you start sports betting is this. It’s got very little to do with how good you are at predicting individual events.
You’re going head to head with the bookmaker. You’re going to war with them, so you better be prepared.
The biggest bookmakers employ hundreds of smart people to enhance their profits. They obviously make their profits from you losing. See the problem here?
Mathematicians, programmers, sports experts.; They create tools that accurately predict the probability of a whole host of events.
Maths
A strong ability with numbers is probably the number one skill you need to bet successfully. Surprised that it isn’t sports knowledge?
As I said, betting is about probability. You have to be able to compete with the statistical models churned out by teams of betting experts. The key is to find value and spot where the bookmaker has priced something incorrectly.
Sports Knowledge
To be honest, sports knowledge isn’t a prerequisite to being successful at sports betting. In can, in fact, get in the way. Your opinions can go against what the numbers are telling you.
But it does help to have a knowledge of how sport works. A passion and interest in it is also helpful, because you’re going to be watching it an awful lot if you want to gain an advantage over the bookie!
Motivation
Successful sports betting is hard work. It’s not about watching a game with your friends and opening up your betting app and placing a bet.
Successful gamblers spend hours or days planning a bet. They study the numbers and news in the minutest of details.
This is why most people aren’t even remotely successful with betting. They see sports betting as easy money and aren’t willing to put in the hard work.
Discipline
Gambling is a very emotive process. The highs and lows when you win money are some of the most compelling motivators around. It’s one of the reasons that people become addicted to gambling. They don’t bet to make money anymore. They gamble to chase those emotions.
Having discipline over your emotions and your money is vital.
Preparation
So you may have been getting the feeling so far that this isn’t going to be easy. You’d be right. But it isn’t impossible. Before you start placing bets, there’s some prep you need to do.
Bankroll
To get off to a good start, you must put your bankroll aside. Place it in a separate bank account. Then write it off in your mind, because you may NEVER see that money again.
Staking Plan
The only way to take advantage of incorrect prices is by having a sensible staking plan. The goal is for long term profit, and to do that; your stakes must be consistent.
This means only betting between 2% & 5% of your bank. The percentage you choose to place on the bet varies depending on your confidence.
What & When
Sports betting is available 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. Yes, that’s right, you can even bet on Christmas day! Once you’re done with the present-opening, Bucks Fizz-drinking and cracker-pulling, obviously…
It’s for this reason that you need to get clear on what you’re betting on and when. You need to set strict rules for yourself so that you can ensure you stick to them when your reasoning goes out of the window and your emotions are telling you to bet.
You also need to get clear on exactly what your strengths are. Where can you find the edge? Which sport? Which markets?
Don’t become a jack of all trades. The only way to get an edge over the huge teams the bookmakers employ is to become a specialist in one sport, perhaps one competition, and just a few markets.
Strategies
You need to think carefully about what strategies you bet on, and how you’re going to apply them to the markets you have chosen to focus on.
These strategies will further enhance the rules you put in place, and you must stick to them, otherwise you risk losing your edge.
Mindset
To be successful, your mindset is crucial. It isn’t an easy fix, and it’s something you need to change over time.
Here are a few things that you need to train your mind to accept if you actually want to make money:
Don’t Chase Losses
This is perhaps the most difficult thing to master when sports betting. Why? Because money is linked deeply with your emotions.
Money is the thing that your brain links to a lot of the core emotions that drive every human on earth, like fear. Fear is obviously your body’s natural emotion to help you survive.
So when you grab that money and place it on a horse, your brain isn’t thinking “Oh, I’m throwing some spare cash on this horse for fun!”. It’s thinking “Danger! Money = Food = Life or Death.”
That’s why the emotions behind your gambling can be so intense. It’s why some people feel physically sick when they lose a bet.
It’s also for that reason that people decide to chase losses. That’s why sports betting is so difficult to do in an unemotional and detached way. You are fighting the natural instincts that have been built into humans over hundreds of thousands of years!
Slow & Steady Wins The Race
The natural instinct of many people is to try and hit the jackpot every time. That is why accumulators are one of the most popular bet choices in sports betting – particularly football accumulators.
It’s important to get into the mindset of being happy with small gains. Forget the get-rich-quick mindset; This is all about small, incremental profits over a long period.
There may even be long periods of time when you go without profit. This is when you need to have faith in your sports betting strategy.
You Won’t Win Every Bet
You need to come to terms with the fact that you won’t win every bet. Far from it in fact.
It’s all about the long term process and gaining a few % of profit. That’s why your numbers need to be planned to precision from the outset.
It takes a lot of nerve to go on long losing runs. But they will come, and before you start, you have to decide whether you can ride them out.
General advice
You should, by now have got the impression that sports betting successfully is difficult. Very difficult!
Bookmakers closing accounts
We need to tell you that, unfortunately, the game is rigged. Once you start to be successful with sports betting, the bookmakers will show you the door.
They have developed sophisticated algorithms that rate every player based on their win rate, how sensibly they stake. They have a rating for every single customer.
Read our post on account restrictions.
The second that you start to show that you aren’t going to be good for business, then the bookmakers will dramatically lower your stakes. We’re talking about maximum bets of £1.
Be Sensible
It takes a special kind of person to be successful with sports betting. You must show unwavering positivity throughout.
You are going head-to-head with multi-million pound businesses on your own, and when the inevitable losses follow you will doubt yourself. That doubt is incredibly difficult to let go of.
But it’s natural, and you have to know when to quit. Millions of people know that they should quit betting, but they fail to and end up developing a problem.
Or, you could just turn the table on the bookies and stack the odds in your favour for once…
Guaranteed Profit
How many times have you heard the sentence “you’ll never beat the bookies”? Probably lots. And for good reason. It’s very difficult to do so with sports betting as the odds are stacked in the bookie’s favour.
But there is a way to completely turn that on its head and stack the odds in your favour for once.
How?
It’s called matched betting and it’s a method that is now being used by millions who’ve realised that it’s incredibly hard to win with sports betting alone.
The great thing is, you don’t have to be good at betting. You don’t even have to have placed a bet before.
Whether you have experience with betting or not, you will have seen the free bets that bookmakers advertise on the TV.
This is their way of luring potential customers. The industry is so competitive, with hundreds of bookmakers. So they need a way to hook customers into signing up for their service.
Unfortunately, there are stipulations attached to these free bets, and customers usually lose money when they sign up. Before you are allowed to withdraw the free bet, you must wager it 5x. This makes profit extremely difficult.
This is where matched betting comes to the rescue! Matched betting allows you to bypass these terms and conditions and extract that free bet. You can take that money straight from your bookmaker to your bank account with ease.
Because of the huge number of bookmakers, there is literally thousands of pounds worth of free bets. This is so much more lucrative than sports betting, and it is for that reason that the bookmakers are scared.
You see, it’s completely legal, and there isn’t much they can do to stop it. Find out more in our ‘Is matched betting legal?‘ post. Millions of people from all walks of life are now taking this path and have quit sports betting.
Want to give it a go?
The great bit about that is that one service has laid it all out for you. No hours wasted frustratingly searching through Google looking for answers.
OddsMonkey has done all the research, built all the sophisticated tools and created step-by-step guides for you to follow. Make money from sports betting in no time.
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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.
How To Make Money Off Sports Gambling Winnings
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.
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?
How To Make Money Online
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.