What It Takes To Make Money Betting On Sport

To discover the requirements to be a successful sports bettor may seem like alchemy, but actually, the skills, behaviours and experience can be simply distilled. ​

I was once in a meeting with esteemed US sports betting guru Kenny White and we were discussing the attributes required to be a successful sports bettor with delegates from a major European betting company. When asked what the key component was, we both answered simultaneously: selectivity. Put simply, the bookmaker must price up tens of thousands of events per year if they are to provide the long tail of betting competitions and markets which their customers have come to expect.

But, as their customer, you don't have to bet on a large number of these events, selectivity really is a key weapon in a punter’s armoury. In my time on the other side of the counter, I have seen a huge number of accounts who placed smart bets as a matter of course. However, the money they made from these wagers was squandered by an inability to resist placing additional bets which represented bad value. A good rule of thumb would be that if you’re unsure as to whether to place a bet and are going back and forth, leave the selection unbacked. The bet may win but over the course of a year, such bets are unlikely to be profitable.

Value is, surprisingly, a somewhat misunderstood term within betting. It is often mistakenly used to mean a selection which is simply a big price. In many cases, this selection should be an even bigger price and doesn’t represent value. A value bet is simply when the odds taken underestimate that team’s or player’s real chance of winning. Consistently place value bets and you will win in the long term, though variance means there will be losing sequences within that time. Consistently place bets which are bad value and you will lose over the long term, even if some runs during that period suggest otherwise.

Let’s say that you have priced up a Rugby Union Handicap. The match involves Wasps at home against Sale. You make the line 4 in favour of Wasps. Now, you might think Wasps will win the match. You might have a strong urge to bet on them on the handicap. However, it’s all about what the line should be. You should be betting numbers, not teams. There should be a line (and odds) at which you would be prepared to bet on Wasps and another line and odds for which Sale would merit an investment. Maybe, you feel you want a four-point difference between your line and a bookmaker’s line before you will have a bet at 10/11. Maybe three points will suffice. Or perhaps it’s three points in a close game, but you’d want more of a difference if one team is a very big favourite.

If you require a three-point difference between your line and the bookmaker’s before striking a bet, this means that you should be prepared to back Wasps -1 if the odds are 10/11. Or, you should be happy to back Sale if they are receiving a 7-point head-start. You shouldn’t accept Wasps -2, or Sale +6 if you’ve deemed that you need a three-point discrepancy to make a bet. If the line doesn’t conform to your criteria, move on to the next game, and bet only on games which fit the bill. Don’t simply bet one side because you fancy them to win. If you feel they have a better chance than the market thinks, then this should be reflected in the line you have come up with.

Similarly, if you price up a horse race, compile the odds so that they add up to 100%, i.e. the true chance of each horse winning, without the margin which bookmakers add to each selection. Having done so, if you make a horse a 7/2 chance and you can find 11/2 available, you should place a bet. Don’t simply back the 15/8 favourite in the race which you feel represents no value, just because it is the likeliest winner of the race. It’s all about betting on selections whose chance have been underestimated by the market. That’s what it takes to win in the long term.

But when reassessing the previous bets you’ve placed, how can you be sure that a wager was value? What criteria can you use to discern this? It’s the downfall of many bettors to consider that any winning bet must have been a good selection, and any losing wager must have been misguided. However, this isn’t the case on an individual basis. Consider a fair coin flip. If you placed a bet on the coin landing on heads at 4/5 and it was a winning bet, it would still be a bad bet, as the true probability was 50/50 and you bet it as if it had a 55.56% chance of happening. Obviously, in the long term, over a sample size of thousands of bets, you need to be winning, otherwise, you are doing something wrong, but one individual result doesn’t determine a good or bad bet. It’s very important in betting, to think about decisions, rather than outcomes.

One method for defining if a previous bet represented value is whether the price you took beat the ‘closing line.’ For US sports this might be the Pinnacle line at the start of the match; for Horse Racing it might be the starting price (SP,) or Betfair SP. For other sports, the last pre-match back and lay prices on the Betfair Exchange could be used. In-play bets are more difficult to quantify as to whether they were value, but either the Betfair Exchange price, or the odds at bet365 at the time the wager was struck, would be a good marker. If you place bets on the College Basketball Point Spread and find that, on average, the line moves 3 points in the direction that you played by tip-off, then you stand a good chance of defying the 10/11 odds that you may encounter. Beating the closing line is considered one of the key metrics for a winning customer at Pinnacle, long renowned as a sharp betting company. Many betting experts — such as NFL judge Scott Kellen — list whether the line they advised customers to take beat the closing line, right alongside whether the bet was a winning or losing one.

Match action can be useful in defining how good your bet was. Even if your selection was a loser, if you feel that match action suggests your read on the match, race, or other event was correct then the bet wasn’t necessarily a poor one. For example, you backed a golfer, win only at 33/1 since that player has a poor record of being placed in tournaments and the win odds represented better value. Your selection got off to a strong start, aided by benign weather conditions which you felt would favour players with an early tee time. He continually traded lower than 33/1 throughout the tournament. However, at no point did you think your charge was a price where it was value to hedge or cash out your bet. So, you let the bet run, only to see your selection narrowly miss out on the spoils. Match, or tournament action, suggests you had a good bet.

Lastly — and this criterion can take much longer to come to fruition — future events can be a useful barometer of how good a bet was. Consider an NFL bet where you backed Carolina, at Tampa Bay. You bet them at +6, and they lost by 7, despite dominating the match. Three weeks later these same two divisional foes met again, with little change in starting line-ups and similar form in the interim. Now at home, Carolina was a three-point favourite. The line had been adjusted by 9 points from the first game to the second, even though the swing in home advantage from one team to the other is only 5 or 6 points (home advantage being worth approximately 2.5 points in the NFL, though 3 is often suggested.) This line adjustment could suggest that odds compilers and bettors shared your view that Carolina represented value in the previous meeting between these two teams and that you had a good value wager.

Of course, scheduling of games doesn’t often afford such a quick rematch, but future results can give a good guide as to whether a previous wager was a shrewd one.

To facilitate getting value, it’s important to have accounts with all reputable bookmakers (I know some readers will see those words as an oxymoron!) I’d suggest that you should aim to open accounts with every traditional bookmaker on the oddschecker.com website. In addition, you should have access to at least two of the major betting exchanges (Betfair, Smarkets, Betdaq and Matchbook.) If you live in a country where you can place bets with Pinnacle or 5Dimes then you should also open accounts with these two firms. With this many bookmakers to choose from, shopping for lines, and getting value, becomes more straightforward.

Selectively was mentioned earlier as a key factor in winning money from sports betting. Alongside this, I would add specialisation. While selectivity means not betting on too many selections, specialisation is all about zeroing in on a small number of sports where you feel you have an edge, or on one particular area of a sport. For even the most avid sports fan it’s nearly impossible to keep track of everything across a myriad of different sports. Far better to look at one, two or possibly three sports where you feel your knowledge is greatest, or where there are inefficiencies within the pricing of markets.

At all the betting companies I’ve worked at, it was very rare to find a customer who excelled at everything. A customer might have their stake-factor reduced on Basketball, but as a sportsbook, you’d be happy to take their Horse Racing business all day long. Another account might be a significant winner on Golf but give it all back on Football.

To facilitate specialising, it always helps to have detailed betting records. You don’t need to be an expert coder; a simple Excel sheet will suffice. Simply, adding columns to the sheet with the sport, and type of market (1X2, Handicap, Total etc.) can show you where your strengths lie. You might enjoy betting on the Premier League but if after a significant sample size of data, your numbers tell you that you lose on it, but win on Test Cricket, it’s time to give the EPL a miss.

As another example, there are so many Horse Racing fixtures that keeping up to date with all the salient information across every Flat and Jumps meeting is nearly impossible. But, a bettor with an edge on the sport can maximise this further by deciding to only look at a smaller area, like Hunter Chases, Flat Handicaps at up to a mile etc. For instance, in the early days of the All Weather, many sharp bettors concentrated solely on these meetings, with a smaller pool of horses comprising the fields for most races, and knew each horse’s characteristics and preferences, as well as the unique characteristics of each track.

In selecting sports to specialise on you need to focus on those where your knowledge is strongest. Sportsbooks that still perform odds compilation in-house, hire specialists in each sport, expert quants to produce highly accurate models or train people in specific areas. If the odds compiler you’re up against only looks at one sport, you’re putting yourself at a serious disadvantage in trying to master half a dozen. It’s very important to immerse yourself in your chosen sports to augment your knowledge. Read newspaper articles, scour websites and trawl through social media to stay on top of all the requisite information.

It’s also worth considering which leagues are most likely to have pricing inefficiencies and which are likely to be very hard to win on. The English Premier League is a highly efficient market. The major Asian sportsbooks set the tone for the pricing of these matches and produce highly accurate Asian Handicaps and Total Goals lines from which most other prices can be derived. The high betting limits that most bookmakers set for such markets tells you that they are confident that there’s little chance of a price being seriously out of line. The EPL is one of the most highly analysed and scrutinised competitions in sport. It’s also one of the hardest for punters to win on.

What you’re seeking to find is a sport, or leagues and competitions within a sport, where you can find the sweet spot between markets where pricing inefficiencies still exist and where you can still place large enough wagers to maximise your edge over the market. It’s also crucial to find competitions where there are no integrity concerns, otherwise, selections that might seem to offer great value may in fact be no value at all. Rugby Union is a sport where pricing inefficiencies still exist. Yet, it is sufficiently popular that UK and Irish bookmakers must offer an array of markets, making it an ideal sport to bet on. Oval Sports Betting specialises in Rugby Union and allows you to cash in on the sport from a betting standpoint.

Now we come to an attribute without which the previous ones count for little: money management. So many punters come unstuck in this area. They find a small number of +EV (expected value) bets, using their encyclopedic knowledge of their chosen sport, only to fall down in this key area. Every bet, unless the result is already known, can lose. Many astute bettors who bet selections at odds against will back more losers than winners. However, good money management and getting value on every selection allows them to turn a profit.

If we consider a player’s bankroll for a second. This is money set aside for betting rather than for life’s necessities. I hesitate to call this money that a bettor can afford to lose, as who can really ‘afford’ to lose their entire bankroll? But it is money set aside solely for betting. Let’s say a punter invests 25% of their bankroll on each of their four carefully researched selections, at Even money. The customer in question makes each selection a true price of 4/5 (or 1.8.) The 25% of bankroll wagered on each bet is crazy.

Even if our bettor is correct in their assumption that each is a 4/5 chance, it is only a 24.63/1 chance that all four selections will lose, leaving our customer with no bankroll remaining (a 4.06% chance of happening.) Even if one selection wins and three lose, 50% of the bankroll will be lost. Should this player want to place three or more selections in the next round of matches at the same price they will need to reduce their original stakes.

A valuable tool when deciding the strength of a wager is the Kelly criterion [1] which is as follows:

f* is the amount that should be wagered

b is the net odds of the wager (b to 1)

p is the probability of the bet winning

q is the probability of the bet losing

If we use the previous example of our bettor who staked 25% of their bankroll on an Even money chance that they believed should have been priced at 4/5, here’s how the Kelly criterion suggests that bet should have been staked:

So, in this example, the Kelly criterion suggests 11.1% of bankroll should be wagered. However, by common consent, Kelly is a very aggressive staking plan and perhaps one-third or one-quarter of the Kelly suggested value is appropriate. What Kelly does help you to do is to decide the correct stakes for very different odds — i.e. an 8/1 shot that should be 9/2, compared to a 5/4 selection that you believe should be 4/5.

Personally, I’d suggest using something akin to one-quarter-Kelly — i.e. the stake should be one-quarter of the amount that the Kelly equation suggests. This reduces the chance of a poor run of results, caused by variance, leading you to lose all or most of your bankroll. In the example above, this would suggest staking either 2.5% or 3% of your bankroll on that bet.

Although different bets on the same market and on the same sport will have differing amounts of an edge, there is a good argument for grouping these at the same stake level. To show a practical application of this, let’s say you bet on the NBA Point Spread. You have recorded your results over a considerable period, and you can see that you have a strike rate of 56% and most of your bets are at 10/11. Using the Kelly criterion with the one-quarter derivation this would suggest that you should bet 1.9% of your bankroll on each selection:

Although you might make some bets stronger plays than others, I’d suggest betting 2% on most plays, but those with a more significant gap between what you make the line and the bookmaker’s price could be stretched to 2.5%, or possibly 3%.

Of course, bookmakers restricting your bets will mean that sometimes you can’t bet the exact amounts that the Kelly criterion would suggest, but at least it acts as a useful starting point.

Alongside bankroll management is the crucial discipline of not chasing your losses. With the current zeitgeist of responsible gambling, bookmakers now tell customers that they shouldn’t place a bet if their sole intention is to recover previous losses. Even the bookmakers are telling you that chasing is irresponsible! Why spend a considerable period looking for smart bets and then have the same stake, or even a larger amount, on a whim just to recover your money? As stated earlier, many losing bets aren’t necessarily bad bets so there’s no need to be self-critical and allow this to affect your betting decisions. If at the end of the year you added up the profit and loss on the bets where you chased your losses, I’d be confident they would show a loss overall.

As an example of bettors’ propensity to chase losses, look at the action that most books take on Sunday Night or Monday Night Football in the NFL. So many customers are looking to get out of jail after the earlier games during the weekend. In Horse Racing, the last race is sometimes referred to as the getting out stakes. In most cases, it’s the getting in deeper stakes. On almost every occasion there is another chance tomorrow, or in the next week to place a better bet. So never chase your losses.

Experience also counts for a lot when it comes to successful sports betting. Nearly thirty years into my sports betting career, I certainly know far more than when I set out. I believe that I get a feel for the texture of games, and scenarios fall into categories that are similar to those I’ve seen before, allowing me to make better decisions. Another thing that you tend to learn over the years is the value of betting singles rather than multiples. Put simply, the margin on multiple bets is huge. We’ve all seen bookmakers promoting Acca insurance (get your stake back as a free bet if one leg of your four/five/six-fold lets you down.) Ask yourself, why do bookmakers love these promotions? They push these because multiples bets are the type, they want you to make.

At every bookmaker I’ve worked at the biggest GGR is always created by multiples. Customers lose at a greater margin on multiples than on anything else. Think for a second about a Yankee. This wager consists of 11 bets: 6 Doubles, 4 Trebles and a four-leg Accumulator. If the first of these selections is a loser, seven of your bets have lost. How often do you fancy a selection so strongly that you’d like to back it 7 times over? It’s far better to stick with singles — your bookmaker won’t thank you for it.

So, there you have the key elements to become a successful sports bettor. You'll find all these elements in the Oval Sports Betting methodology and one of the best ways to become a successful sports bettor is to follow the information available on this website.

[1] Kelly, J.L. (1956.) “A New Interpretation of Information Rate.” Bell System Technical Journal. 35 (4): 917-926