Welcome to my hastily arranged blog about betting. Really this part of the site will be two-fold. Firstly, it will help to generate a few leads from search engines but secondly will allow me to document the process of moving my tools from a mixture of Google Sheets, Excel, Python and PHP scripts into an online repository.
It’s no secret that edges erode over time and that with the rapid advances of Artificial Intelligence that erosion is accelerating at pace. More on that later, but personally I think that my days of betting on sports as a way to make money are dwindling. I’m definitely not clever enough to figure out my edges to within a decimal place and in any case most data that would have previously been used is also becoming harder and harder to scrape for the intermediate coder.
The game has always been stacked against the professional punter whether that’s via restrictions, vig/juice, voided bets, withdrawal requests or, sadly, withdrawal symptoms. It’s still possible to make money from sports betting but as your income grows and your time on earth dwindles, at some point you either need a massive scaling up operation or to consider whether the juice is worth the squeeze. This site is my scaling up.
The honest truth is that sports betting requires individual characteristics that are pretty hard to come by and if those traits can be harnessed in the financial world – or really any other industry – your time is far better spent pursuing a career in those fields.
So, who am I? Obviously I’m not going to disclose that because I still have some accounts active but I’ve been making a profit from wagering on sports for over ten years now.
A Profitable Sports Bettor
Note that I didn’t say professional. That’s important. To me the difference between myself and a professional is that for me, and hopefully you, is that sports betting represents between 5% and 20% of my annual income. It’s a hobby that has generated an income (for more years than it hasn’t) but truthfully a minimum wage job would have paid more.
Note also that I didn’t say gambler. Sure, there are, have been and will be losing runs. Hedging is for gardeners and all that. But the well-trodden paths of Closing Line Value and Expected Value clearly separate the bettors from the gamblers. I’ve even told acquaintances I am an options trader, which really isn’t too far from the truth.
Sports Betting Tools
As I say, I feel like my time has come. Kids are smarter and could knock up a machine learning doohickey in the time it took me to figure out how to buy a domain and set up wordpress.
That’s not to say my betting tools don’t have value – I genuinely believe they do. I feel that there is a huge representation both online and on YouTube for how to build a basic model or pick some winning tips. Quite honestly, you can outsource that pretty easily. What isn’t well documented (or at least well written) is how you can leverage that information and extract more of an edge in less time.
While I started my (non-professional) career with a bit of origination and modelling lines, things do catch up with you. Pinnacle and Betfair continue to improve on the accuracy of probabilities far quicker than any one individual but for non-originators that can be an opportunity, so it’s fair to say my strategies have pivoted somewhat in recent years and this is what has resulted in a mish-mash of spreadsheet based tools, but I’ve found myself regressing to market using the exchange to figure out the fair odds more often than not.
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