Living Of Sports Betting
- Many thought California would be a foregone conclusion to legislate law that made sports betting legal. Anyone living in the state appreciates the financial struggles of state agencies. They’re frequent news for Californians. So too is the push to legalize activities to help the state generate revenue.
- Mar 22, 2017 As the possibility of making a living from sports betting seems closer than ever before, it’s wise to set up a bankroll dedicated to solely betting. Managing your funds responsibly like you would if you were running a company. You should also have clearly outlined budgets on your future wagers.
Plus, be it sports betting Canada style or wagering on global events, we are proud of our 'sports first' mantra. From Rookies to Veterans Offering something for everyone from sports betting rookies to veteran handicappers, we also feature tools that help online bettors cash winning wagers.
When looking to venture out into sports gambling, you are likely to find hundreds of online sports betting sites out there. When looking for the best sports betting sites, therefore, the most important issues to consider are the perks that come with the websites. This will ensure you enjoy the greatest sports betting online experience. These perks include signing bonuses and easy usability among others. In this article, we are going to review three of the best online betting sites, which are Bovada, BetOnline, and MyBookie.
#1 Bovada
Bovada.lv also known as Bodog.com in Canada is among the best sports gambling websites that has been in existence since 1994. The site’s domain is registered in Latvia. The platform provides access to sport, casino, poker, and racebook wagering.
Bovada has continually offered promotions and offers to its customers. For instance, first-time deposits for sports get bonuses of 50 percent for deposits up to $250, 100 percent for deposits up to $1000 for casino bets, and 100 percent for deposits up to $1000 as poker bonus.
Making a deposit or a withdrawal is easy and only attracts a small fee. For first-time deposits, the processing fee of 4.9 percent is waivered. Payouts are done using rapid transfer, otherwise known as money gram.
Bovada allows sports betting online on their user-friendly mobile interface or in their state of the art poker and casino gaming rooms. The minimum wager online is $1 and $50 for mobile bets. The only limitation to using Bovada is that the odds are posted late and that they have very low wager limits.
#2 BetOnline
Licensed and regulated in Panama, BetOnline offers sports, live, poker, casino, and live dealer types of betting. It offers a wide range of payment options and several accepted currencies, thus making it one of the most convenient sites for customers across the world.
You get a welcome bonus of 50 percent on deposits up to $2500. However, bonus levels are tiered for different types of wagering. The online game library is categorized into 3D slots, table games, slots, and video poker. Most of the bets are placed online since their mobile platform only allows sports betting.
Maximum and minimum deposits and withdrawals are different for different payment options that are offered on BetOnline. Its major shortcoming is that it has high rollover requirements that customers might find difficult to understand.
Live Sports Betting Lines
#3 MyBookie
MyBookie is one of the newest top online sports betting sites in the market. It was established in 2014 in Costa Rica and is fast growing to compete with other older bet staking sites. The minimum online wager on MyBookie is $10 and the maximum is $1000. For mobile wagers, however, there are no limits.
Wagering options for MyBookie include straights, totals, open wagers, action points, teasers, reverses, if bets, futures, and money lines among others. You can bet on games such as NFL Football, college basketball, NBA basketball, NHL hockey, soccer, golf, and horse racing among others.
With one of the highest bet bonuses in the industry, MyBookie gives you a welcome bonus of up to 50 percent for up to $1000 if you are a first time depositor. For reloads, they offer a 20 percent cash bonus. This makes it one of the best sports betting sites.
Its mobile platform has a user-friendly interface that makes it very easy to use. Their customer service is also highly efficient and offers top-notch customer service. This puts them among the best online betting sites today. MyBookie, however, only caters to recreational gamblers as opposed to other top sites that allow professional gambling. The site has also been said to lean more on the US sports market as compared to international sports.
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.
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.
Sports Betting Sites
Ready for Part 2?
Living Off Sports Betting
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.