In European countries, bookmakers and making money on betting are a common phenomenon. For many, betting on the outcome of a game or sports competition is just a hobby that adds adrenaline to life. For others, this occupation has become a profession that provides a stable income. To start making money on bets, you need to study the theory, existing strategies, try them out in practice, test them, listen to the advice of experienced professionals, read sports forecasts from experts. Many make mistakes at first, but experience comes with time.

Outlook and risk

Experienced betting professionals earn several thousand dollars a month on bets. The income of beginner betters can reach $50 a day if you treat betting like a job and place bets with a cool head. Excitement for a professional player is an inappropriate quality. By making bets based on intuition, it will not be possible to turn betting from a hobby into a profitable profession. For a professional, learning, analytical mindset, willpower and self-discipline are important.

The main danger for a beginner is to lose all the money. Even experienced professionals are not immune from episodic failures, but they quickly and more than compensate for losses. 

Beginners often make such mistakes:

• they play randomly, without a strategy, making a number of unsuccessful, ill-conceived bets;
• succumb to the temptation to bet on an outsider in order to hit a big jackpot;
• use borrowed funds for betting;
• trust a fraudulent consultant (scammer);
• Unsuccessfully choose a bookmaker.

Important rule for players

For gamblers, there is a golden rule – to play for an amount that you can safely part with. Professional betting is more of an investment than a game of chance, but for beginners it is better to follow this rule. It is necessary to weigh your financial capabilities, determine the maximum allowable costs (the size of the initial game bank) and in no case exceed this amount, do not play in debt. And one more important rule – do not put all your eggs in one basket, do not bet all your money on one event, even if its probability approaches 100%.

Before moving on to practice, you need to study the theory, the system of bets and odds well, familiarize yourself with existing strategies, as well as constantly monitor sports news and analyze statistics. You can use a special program. If your own knowledge is not enough to choose a winning strategy, you can resort to the services of professional forecasters-cappers, sports analysts. Such a specialist can at the same time recommend a reliable bookmaker with favorable conditions.

You need to be careful: in the wake of the popularity of sports betting, a lot of scammers have appeared who, under the guise of selling win-win strategies, simply swindle money from inexperienced players. If you are offered to “leak” information about a match-fixing and earn fantastic money, this is a scam.

Where to bet?

Professional players prefer to deal with bookmakers: it is more reliable than playing on a sweepstakes, but you need to pay attention to the reputation and rating of the bookmaker. You should make sure that she has a license, take an interest in the reviews of other players, work experience. If an online office does not hide its contact details, and the site has a round-the-clock support service, this is a big plus. Pay attention also to the method of withdrawing funds, the regularity of payments.

In this article, we will look at 4 important points that are important to consider for both experienced players and beginners who want to succeed in betting. All these points have been repeatedly tested in practice by regular players, so they will no doubt help everyone who is interested in the topic of betting.

Probability theory not working?

Most gamblers believe that the theory of probability in sports betting does not work, because. the result of a sports match is influenced by too many accidents, including a lot depends on the human factor. A good example was given that it is the same as thinking that gravity does not act on an airplane, since it allows it to fly, despite a mass of several hundred tons. The fact that the result of a sports match depends on many chances only means that we cannot know in advance and exactly the probability of this result. However, this does not prevent the laws of mathematics and probability theory from working, which exist independently of specific events, axiomatically, and in fact, are the basis of betting activity.

There are no safe bets

No one knows the real probability of a sporting event, not even the bookmaker. In simplified terms, we can say that he evaluates this very probability by giving a coefficient for a given event. And this estimate is approximately equal to 1/coefficient. A coefficient of 1.10 roughly reflects the probability of 1/1.10 = 90.9%. What can be described in words as an event that should occur on average 9 times out of 10. However, we must not forget about the dispersion. In a short distance, an event with a specified probability can happen 20 times out of 20 (which often brings euphoria to inexperienced players who have caught such a successful series, which makes them believe that they are experts, and now they will simply tear the bookmakers apart). Or it may not happen two, three or even four times in a row, although the latter will happen quite rarely, but still it will, from time to time.

You can’t draw firm conclusions about profitability after just a few attempts

Due to variance, your actual result over a distance can be very different from what is shown over a short distance. The higher the coefficient – the higher the dispersion, the more you need to make bets to understand where they will lead you.

You must evaluate the profitability or loss of your bets precisely at a distance, if you are seriously and for a long time going to earn money by betting on sports, and do not expect to catch a successful streak (“positive variance spike”), take the money and never return to betting in bookmakers offices.

Comparison of bookmakers with casinos

Many people compare betting with a casino. There is excitement in both, but many people believe that it is impossible to win. However, there is one significant difference between a bookmaker and a casino, which radically changes things. If in casino games all the probabilities are known in advance, then no one, including bookmakers, is reliably known about the probabilities of real sporting events. Therefore, situations are quite real, moreover, there are regular situations when bookmakers give odds above 2 for events whose real probability is around 50%. What does profit at a distance mean for a player making such bets (or value bet, which I have spoken about more than once, it is “value betting” that gives distance profit). Indirect evidence that betting analysts are not at all sinless when assessing the probabilities of events and placing odds on them is the movement of the line, when, at times, the favorite in a match changes to the exact opposite over time.