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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
