Can one take sports betting as a profession?

[iamsheikhadil]

Can sports betting be considered a profession because it's more like a trade as we need to analyse each team and their skills and stuffs? If not, why not? I guess it's easy to make money on sports betting than normal casinos.

[sheenazbay]

You are right that traders who enter the financial markets really do a thorough research before taking any position. They analyze past price movements to determine future prices and learn as much as possible about their trading assets. Likewise with sports betting, before gamblers bet they will analyze the team that will compete. but in my opinion the difference lies in time. As a trader, we can access financial markets in various time frames. we can hold financial assets for years, daily or even weekly. In the case of options, we may have several months before the contract expires, allowing us to choose the optimal time to sell our financial assets. on the other hand, sportbet is time bound. In sportbet, determined after the match is over.

[zhestka]

I dont think its easy to make money on sportbets!

[Philip74]

I think you are right, it is easier to make money on sports betting than on casinos. With casinos you are relying on your luck but with sports betting you are relying on yourself and if you have managed to determine all the factors (form, history, injuries, suspensions etc) that could influence a game and make a correct prediction. 

[Mahdirakib87]

Lol nop. Sportsbook is one kind of gambling. And no one should take gambling as profession. You need to guess the exact team before. You need a lot of knowledge about the game and team but always the prediction doesn't work. And opponent wins. It's same like betting on other game. After few reds you need ti raise your bet and get the right side with green. No difference. 

[jualid]

Maybe, because i saw some people become a professional bettors on sports betting and they have a good bankroll management. I think it's possible to have a profession or a job like that but you know, it's not easy.

[davinmark]

I dont think that sports betting can be a profession for us. as we know in gambling was so unpredictable. sometimes the Pro team can lose with the underdog team. we can analyst of course but as a profession is hard i think.

[Finalizer]

Well, not all the teams are correct according to the odds so keep that in mind. Not all low odds win against high odds, and sports betting are unpredictable. That include the players, the opposing players, the environments, and the mentality of each games. So there are a lot of factors that can affect each games. I think sports betting is more safer than casino but its still gambling so win/lose is always in the equations.

[Mayday]

I also agree with that 'not any type of gambling should be taken as a profession'. There are exceptions but some people, surely.

 

Sport betting in the end of the day is about chances, just like any type of gambling. Thus, unless you have a know edge, you aint going too far. A good model can be a edge, inside info, good odd value and so on. 

 

Gambling should be a particular hobbie, not a job. Still, there are a lot of people who cant control themselves.

[wyj1306]

Sports betting is considerably better than in casinos, because relying on external and human factors brings us much more results. Satisfying and reliable, we just need to analyze and monitor sports often.

[Dp10011]

I don't think so easy! But there are people out there who say they live only on sports betting. It is a good market, as a profession I see nothing guaranteed after a month, for example. But I think it's better than trying to cash in on casino.

[skywallkee]

Of course it can! And just to prove it (as a former professional eSports bettor), I tried the Stake's sports book and achieved this: 5 losing matches and 17 winning matches (~23% loss). This might be put to 9% if we consider the first bet made on the platform was lost due to me trying the platform and just betting something as a test and 2 of them me trying the feature of multi-bet again with just trying the feature.  With 9% loss (91% win rate), I made a 5x profit on XRP (long story short, my approach is on different coins, won't really explain it how it works) and 5.6x profit on BTC. Good odds, right? Wrong. Due to the lack of important events in this period and even Stake not displaying all the events I'd like it to, the number of bets is way smaller than it should be and the loss is way bigger than it should be.

On the site I used to bet (with accent of used to, as I said, I'm a former bettor), I managed to achieve this rating, 83424 bets with 82981 correct (~99.46% win rate). This just to prove my affirmation that small cases don't really show up real data.

But the data might bring you two questions: "Why did I shop?" and "How to achieve that level?".

For the first question: simply got bored of it and found it too time consuming and might be better (and it is) to focus on something else.

And for the second one: it takes practice, a trained analytical mind and a lot of probabilities, statistics and a little machine learning (which were also made by a program I wrote for this purpose, as doing each calculation by hand might take a while and surely won't be as accurate as it got me). Basically, using all the data I have about two teams (recent activity in-game, practice time, overall statistics of each member, statistics on each map for both teams, analysis of last matches and streaks resulting in moral and willing to win/throw, etc.) you can determine if a bet is a safe bet and not a safe bet.

As an example, you might think this game was put just to win, but rather was made with 98% confidence of winning:

Why so confident on a match that has such big odds? Well, what I did know and Stake didn't was the following: Big is an old team with members that usually play hard the first matches in the bracket until they get a safe spot in the next phase, after that they just play casually, not giving all they got. And this was the match in the second part, where they already had granted an place in the next phase. Ok, but why these odds if everyone knew about that? Well, because, Big was much bigger than Hard Legion Esports (which was actually a REALLY new team, made by some Russians on 17th October 2019), meaning nobody believed a fresh team would actually be able to beat an old playing with experience team like Big. So most bettors went with Big. Well, just with this information, I might've gone with Big too, as it is still a safe bet for Big. But why it turned out to be better for HLE? Well, due to the following fact: Big had 3 hours daily of preparation for this tournament in the last week, whilst HLE had over 8 daily hours, preparing on their map AND each enemies favorite map. Finding out this information, I knew that HLE had a strategy against each team in the tournament and also Big wasn't playing at their full capacity, leading to a really easy 2-0 map win (16-13 on HLE's map and 16-4 on Big's map) for HLE.

A lot of text, right? Sorry, this is just for the ones that really wanted some details about how you SHOULD think if you want to bet for win when it comes to sports bets. (the details I gave you aren't even half of what I usually prepare before making a bet, but are some of the main points that lead to the decision)

Now I've told you about the thinking behind it and you might think that it isn't that hard. Well, it is when more variables come, reason why my program came into my mind, being able to find some sort of formula via trial and error, doing input of all the data described above, resulting in a score. the higher the score, the safer the bet.

The formula is like this (not going to show true data for obvious reasons, but if someone's smart enough they can figure it out on their own): (12.3 * practicedHours/days + 6.2 * average(SCORES(teamFavoriteMap)) + 15 * (2 if major tournament and team not qualified, 0.5 if minor tournament and team not qualified, -2 if minor tournament and team qualified and -0.5 if major tournament and team qualified) + ..... ) / (....)

So pretty much this formula will give out a score and it is compared to the maximum it can give (for me it is tweaked to be 263 the maximum score a team can get if they play perfectly and train 24/7 and so on) and the winning % is compared to the odds on the website. if I have 80% certainty that I will win and the website has a 1.5x multiplier, then surely it is a good bet to place. But if I get 70% certainty with 1.1x multiplier, then that wouldn't be a bet I would touch.

This is how I, 5 years ago managed to win most of the games I bet on. Now I found it funnier and more enjoyable to just bet small amounts on teams that I like instead of doing it for money.

If someone would like to get rich, then surely Sports Betting is way safer than Casino Betting. But the reason it is called Betting is also due to luck. So besides all the help from experience/programs/statistics you'd still need a little luck to help all of that, reason why it can be a good way to sustain you for a few years, but not the safest way to do so. Variables always change and we're humans and can easily forget/make mistakes and everything can fall apart. Reason why even if it is indeed possible and not that hard, I wouldn't recommend it trying.

[Ayesha0770]

Maybe yes and maybe not it's all depends and base on the player and how you observe the game its not all base on players skill some are good but turned out they loss it depends on the team you placed your bet. It is easy to make money in sport if you know how to observe the game

[Etude]

Sure why not if you have enough capital to keep going at it, a person in my opinion can treat sports betting the very same as in real life stocks and options trading as in the stock markets.