Is Sports Betting Worth It? - How To Make A Living from Sports Betting

Is Sports Betting Worth It? - How To Make A Living from Sports Betting

In this video I’ll outline whether sports betting is worth the work and how to make a living from it if you decide to go down this route.

I've been betting sports profitably for 3 years and unprofitably for another 3 before that.

A bit more of a relaxed video today rather than the longer form Ai sports betting model builds that we usually post.

But I wanted to run through a couple of common questions that I have slightly different opinions on from a lot of people in the sports betting sense.

The first is.
Is Sports Betting Worth It?
Most professional sports bettors answer NO to this question.

The core reasoning behind this is that if you are smart enough to earn a living from sports betting, you can earn 10X that by going into trading, business or another industry.

The reasoning I actually do agree with.

I think if you are purely coming at it from a monetary standpoint then there’s better options.

Between building models and getting money down, or the liquidity issues, it can be a bit of a grind.

When you start-up you are just looking for ways to generate an edge.

But the real tough part is actually getting funds down on these edges when you start to scale.

Once you start winning, accounts will start to get limited and closed down completely.

Making it harder and harder to get money down on the edges you know are good.

This means you need to find new accounts, new liquidity, new contacts, which becomes an entire business or job in and of itself.

This is not something I personally enjoy.

However the edge creation and game of finding repeatable edges is very enjoyable.

Starting with lower liquidity sports and slowly moving up through higher liquidity (and hence tougher to beat) sports is a great game and the progression is very rewarding.

As well as the skills you learn, such as programming, modelling, stats, how lines move, how markets move are extremely useful both in business and life.

So is sports betting worth it?

I’d say if you are purely only looking to maximise earnings, then honestly probably not.

But if you are into problem solving, game theory and building an edge, then 100% it’s a great way to make some extra income whilst learning valuable skills at the same time.

I don’t think you need to aim to quit your job or go full time either, that’s a mistake I see quite a few people make.

Instead, I think approach this as trying to build an edge, as a game, regardless of the monetary upside.

We have other businesses as well as the sports betting side.

Which makes it a lot easier when you have a bad week or 2 on the mental and emotional side, it takes the pressure off.

Which brings me onto the next point.
How To Make A Living from Sports Betting?
A similar question to the above but more of the “what methods are there” option.

Generally there’s 3 approaches to profitable sports betting.

The first is to build your own numbers on games, usually by some kind of handicapping or modelling approach.

This is where you have a theory for an edge and build that into some kind of repeatable approach, back-test and if the edge is real, earn a profit through the difference between your number and the market odds.

The second is to be a “top down” bettor as Spanky discusses.

This is also called many things such as chasing steam, screen watching and so on.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach but I didn’t like watching an odds screen all day and having hundreds of bets across dozens of betting accounts.

It also gets your accounts limited more quickly in my experience.

The third option is to be a “mover” - this is the individual who gets the money down or gets the bets placed for originators (option 1).

The job of the movers is simply to get money down for the modellers.

As with the other 2 options you can either be very good or very bad with this but you don’t technically need to have any edge creation skills.

But understanding of the markets and how to keep sportsbooks open is a must.

Of those 3 core options you can choose whatever suits your personality and skillset best.

If you are looking into the mover option then having a good network, lots of sportsbooks and outs and liquidity is a must.

This option is tough to actually learn as the industry is very closed with the information around these processes.

For modelling you can look at my content on this YouTube as well as other content creators and see who you vibe with.

For the screen/top down approach there’s lots of good podcasts on this subject, Spanky’s Be Better Bettors is a good place to start.

With any of those methods you can make good money, like anything it depends how much value you add and how effective you are with each individual piece.

Thanks for watching and subscribe if you found this useful.