
Ask HN: Who Earns a Living of Betting? - hoerzu
Specifically advantage betting in soccer,NBA etc.<p>How did you get started?
Do you do it full-time?
What&#x27;s your experience during corona?
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mywacaday
I know a few, 1- Young guy, full time online poker playing 6+ games at a time
and uses software to assist, based in Australia, bought his house outright a
few years ago. 2- Retired guy who bets on local club matches, has encyclopedic
knowledge of local clubs and is banned from placing bets by bookie chains.
Pays people to go place his bets. Also plays poker. 3- Used to manually
arbitrage Betfair but it took a lot of effort, was worth a few hundred euro
per month as a hobby. Betfair has an API so might be worth looking at to see
if you can find a gap.

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gas9S9zw3P9c
Not myself, but I know someone who was making a living from sports betting a
few years back. It's not that different from "gambling" in the stock market.
The same principles apply. You need some kind of egde, which often is 1. Data
or 2. Market Access, less often the statistical model. Better data beats
better models, and modeling is commoditized these days. Also, you need a
pretty decent bankroll so that you can handle the volatility.

It's an interesting space, but don't expect to be profitable without investing
1-2 years of your time into building good models, infrastructure and data
access. This already assumes you have that kind of freedom/capital and are
able to stick with it through tough times. Also, edges can be fleeting, so
it's a constant race against time and other players to find new opportunities.
A bit similar to online poker. It was possible to be highly profitable with
online poker 5-10 years ago, but over the last few years it has become very
hard to impossible to beat the odds, so a lot of poker people have moved on to
gambling on other things, sports betting included.

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kratom_sandwich
> It's not that different from "gambling" in the stock market.

Would you say that there's a difference in the number of skilled / unskilled
market participants in the stock market and in the betting markets? E.g.
majority of market participants in the stock market are skilled institutional
investors vs. majority of market participants in the betting market are casual
bettors?

~~~
gas9S9zw3P9c
I think stock market is a vague term. It depends on what "market" you're
trading in. If you're trading highly liquid stocks with large market caps
you'll be in against large hedge funds employing hundreds of people. If you're
trading less liquid stocks, small caps, complex derivatives, or other smaller
markets, you may have less competition and it'll be easier to find an edge.

I'd say the same is true for betting. Your competition will vary depending on
the market size and liquidity. Small unknown markets are typically not worth
going after for large teams of highly-paid individuals. For example, you
probably won't find as much competition betting on eSports events than betting
on horses [0] (in jurisdictions where it's legal). So yeah, I think you're
right that the professional competition in betting is probably a lot less than
in the stock market.

Finding a market with the right characteristics is IMO the most important
thing. If you're an individual, you ideally want to find small unknown and
relatively illiquid markets where you can make enough money for yourself, but
where it's not worth for large players to get into.

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-
gambl...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-
cracked-the-horse-racing-code)

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betanon
I worked with someone who did in the late 2000-2010 and and then for a company
that did (supporting circa 100 employees).

I can't say too much as I was on the dev side of things not the stats
modelling. But at a minimum you'd need a good statistical model, high quality
data and a way to get great odds on your bets. If you can make the money using
just Betfair (etc.) that is better because bookies are going to ban you if you
are making smart bets so it's chicken/egg. You also need a big bankroll, for
that inevitable stream of bad luck. And lots of little bets are of course
better than small number of big bets that could wipe you out. I'm mostly here
to say yes it's possible and can be very lucrative.

No corona experience.

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pbk1
No experience myself but you might be interested in this subreddit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/algobetting/](https://www.reddit.com/r/algobetting/)

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snyena
I had been betting professionally for 11 years. Started a product owner job at
a bookmaker this january. Already considering going pro again.

Things were harder during corona but not impossible.

