Sports Betting Career?
I was recently thinking about what it would take to make sports betting your job. First off, you would have to be really good at picking games against the spread (ATS). Let's just assume for now that you can predict the winner ATS right in football and/or basketball (NCAA or Professional) correctly 65% of the time.
To keep the math a bit simpler, let's say you bet the same amount (call it "x") on every game. Realistically, I think a professional sports better is going to be "more sure" about some games and bet more heavily on those games, but we would have to make more assumptions (how often that happens, how much bigger those bets are, and so on). So let's stick with the same bet on every game.
When you lose the game (35% of the time), you lose "x". When you win the game (65% of the time), you win an amount that is slightly less than the original bet. For most casinos, if you make a $110 bet, you win $100, which is 90.90909% of the original bet.
The formula for your expected bank account after any single bet:
(.65 * .90909 * x) - (.35 * x) = (.5909085 * x) - (.35 * x) = .2409085 * x
This means that for every bet you make, you can expect to win 24.1% of the bet.
Next, to figure out how much you need to bet throughout the year. (After all, the exercise is to see if this can be a career). To do this, you figure out what you want your earnings for the year to be, and divide that by .2409085 (the number from above). For example, let's say that you're comfortable earning $120,000 per year - enough to live comfortably, put some away for retirement, and so on. 120000 / .2409085 = 498114.4293, which means that you need to bet nearly $500,000 every year to earn that "salary".
There are limits that each casino puts on games. You can bet more on lines (point spreads) than you can on totals (over/under). And you can bet more on NFL than college football. And you can bet more on NBA than college basketball. Usually, you can bet more on college football than NBA. The biggest limits I found were at Caesars Palace - NFL ($25,000 lines/$5,000 totals), College Football ($10,000/$3,000), NBA ($5000/$1,000), College Basketball ($3000/$500). For this exercise (same bet on every game), let's say that $5,000 is what you're going to bet. That allows you to bet NFL lines, NFL totals, College Football lines, and NBA lines.
Betting $5,000 every game means you need to make 100 bets throughout the year to get to $500,000 for the year. You're going to have to have some pretty programming that spreads across sports (NFL, NCAA football, NBA). If you focus on one sport, you might be able to get 100 NBA bets or NCAA football during the year - there just aren't enough NFL games to get 100 where you feel comfortable that you'll beat the spread.
To keep the math a bit simpler, let's say you bet the same amount (call it "x") on every game. Realistically, I think a professional sports better is going to be "more sure" about some games and bet more heavily on those games, but we would have to make more assumptions (how often that happens, how much bigger those bets are, and so on). So let's stick with the same bet on every game.
When you lose the game (35% of the time), you lose "x". When you win the game (65% of the time), you win an amount that is slightly less than the original bet. For most casinos, if you make a $110 bet, you win $100, which is 90.90909% of the original bet.
The formula for your expected bank account after any single bet:
(.65 * .90909 * x) - (.35 * x) = (.5909085 * x) - (.35 * x) = .2409085 * x
This means that for every bet you make, you can expect to win 24.1% of the bet.
Next, to figure out how much you need to bet throughout the year. (After all, the exercise is to see if this can be a career). To do this, you figure out what you want your earnings for the year to be, and divide that by .2409085 (the number from above). For example, let's say that you're comfortable earning $120,000 per year - enough to live comfortably, put some away for retirement, and so on. 120000 / .2409085 = 498114.4293, which means that you need to bet nearly $500,000 every year to earn that "salary".
There are limits that each casino puts on games. You can bet more on lines (point spreads) than you can on totals (over/under). And you can bet more on NFL than college football. And you can bet more on NBA than college basketball. Usually, you can bet more on college football than NBA. The biggest limits I found were at Caesars Palace - NFL ($25,000 lines/$5,000 totals), College Football ($10,000/$3,000), NBA ($5000/$1,000), College Basketball ($3000/$500). For this exercise (same bet on every game), let's say that $5,000 is what you're going to bet. That allows you to bet NFL lines, NFL totals, College Football lines, and NBA lines.
Betting $5,000 every game means you need to make 100 bets throughout the year to get to $500,000 for the year. You're going to have to have some pretty programming that spreads across sports (NFL, NCAA football, NBA). If you focus on one sport, you might be able to get 100 NBA bets or NCAA football during the year - there just aren't enough NFL games to get 100 where you feel comfortable that you'll beat the spread.
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