Can You Make a Living Sports Betting?
Can You Make a Living Sports Betting?
What does it take to become a professional sports bettor? Can you make a living with sports betting? What kind of winning percentage do you need to become a professional sports bettor? What kind of bankroll size do you need to get started?
We spoke with a professional gambler out of Vegas who was kind enough to take the time to talk to us.
Sports Betting: What Does It Take?
So to start with let’s look at the obvious, you need to be a winner. So what kind of win percentage do you need to be a professional sports bettor? it’s not an easy question because there’s all kinds of different win percentages that people can make a living off.
It depends on volume and if you’re specializing in one sport or you’re betting on all kinds of different sports. But as a general rule of thumb you need to be a consistent winner for an extended period of time. Just because you had a week where you hit 61 percent or you had a month where you had 58 percent, it’s not an indicative of how the rest of your sports betting career is gonna go. So the very first thing I would say, if you haven’t done this already, you need to track your bets for at least a year, if not two years and you need detailed records of exactly what your win percentage is on each sport.
My personal goal every season is to hit 55 percent. That can seem really low especially, when with all those scam betting-services online saying they hit 70% winners and 85% winners. It doesn’t happen guys okay. You can ask any legit professional sports bettor. These guys are just selling you a fake dream and taking your money.
If you’re hitting 55 percent, I can assure you you can make a really good living but don’t deceive yourself because you’ve had a good week or a good month. You need to be sure that you can hit 55 percent target over a long period of time.
Risk Management
Let’s get into bankroll size. So the two kind of go hand-in-hand but in order to start as a professional sports bettor and I’m sorry to say this, you cannot do it for less than a €100,000. You need €100,000 to start being a professional sports bettor, okay! and there’s people out there that will tell you no no you could do it with twenty or you could do it with fifty if you want to do it properly you need a hundred thousand dollars. And I’ll tell you why! As a professional sports bettor your max bet is gonna be 1% of your bankroll. Amateur sports bettor can bet ten to fifteen percent of their bankroll on one game and have fun whenever they win. But long term, you can’t win doing that.
Your average sports bettor, who’s conscious about their bankroll, might be betting three to five percent per game, maybe 2% if they’re conservative. But as a professional, when this is your living and your bankroll is your livelihood, you gotta be betting 1%.
A few times a month I’ll have a game where every indicator on earth says this is a great game and I will up the stake by 1.5%, but never more. 1% of a €100,000 bankroll is €1000 and 1.5% is now €1500 per game so if you are hitting 55% you’re winning 55% but you’re losing 45% so you have to be able to make enough money with that profitability. It’s not a huge margin so you need to have a large enough bet size so you can make a sustained profit and a good living. Imagine if you’re betting 5% per game and you have a few losing weeks, your bankroll and your dream as a sports bettor would be over fast.
That’s why you need €100,000. How do you get a hundred thousand dollars? Most sports bettors would get it from betting on sports and save up, while tracking their bets until they feel confident enough to go full-time. It could take 2-4 years but if you’re serious about this business, consider it like an education. If you want to become a doctor, mechanic or whatever, you got to go to school and put the time in.
It’s no different with sports betting so make it your goal to keep detailed records so you know what you’re doing and to try turn your bankroll into a hundred thousand dollars in two years. Now in order to do that obviously you’re going to need some pretty serious bankroll management skills.
Bankroll Management Skills
Bankroll management skills is what separates the professionals from the amateurs.
The problem with your amateur sports bettor and why sports books are so profitable it’s not the juice they’re taking, it’s people chasing. You get someone who goes on a sustained losing streak and they lose 15% of their bankroll or 20% of their bankroll.
Its only a natural human instinct to try and get that back and that is the one thing you cannot do as a professional sports bettor. So if you’re prone to that kind of behaviour, you need to work that out before you become a professional sports better because if you’re gonna do this as a career, you can’t be jeopardising your livelihood.
Try to do this for a period of one to two years, keep detailed records so you know your win percentage.
This will also give you a strong indication of what types of bets you are excelling at and what sports you need to work on. As a true sportsbettor, you’re gonna figure out how to improve your betting game but, because you want to hit more than a 55€% win-rate.
- Test your skills first before quitting your day job
- Set a timeline and small targets. Like, ”I will track all bets for 1 year” or”Spend x hours on research”
- Star with 1% of your Bankroll and aim for for more than 55% winrate
- Don’t chase your losses
- Be patient
Naturally there are much more to the world of sportsbetting like strategy, nieches, valuebetting, and research. Especially research, which accounts for a lot of success in the sports-betting world but most people are too lazy. If you too lazy to check the lineups on twitter, then its not a business for you. Finally, its important to be clear on one thing. Sportsbetting is tough. Its a dreamjob for many but if it was that easy then everyone would do it and only a few succeeds.
Thats doest mean you should stop betting and completely give up. Eventhough you dont go full time, you can still generate a nice second income so keep betting and remember:
“Sportsbetting is not a sprint but a marathon”.