In early 2021, I deposited $250 into a sports betting account and a couple months later I was informed there were changes to my account and that I was banned. By that point, I had turned $250 into over $8000 in profit and of course I withdrew everything single cent. And that was just for Sportsbet, I also did the same for Ladbrokes, Tab, Pointsbet and many others.
Now this is not a scam for some get rich quick scheme. How I managed to make money consistently among the bookmakers is not by getting lucky but rather using something we all learn in high school – mathematics.
Yes, the mathematics is the entire foundation behind the lucrative strategy of arbitrage betting which is what I used to make money from sports betting, and I will explain this in this video.
Now there is this bad reputation around sports betting, most people think you become gambling addicts and degenerates and lose all your money to the big nasty bookies. This perception isn’t entirely wrong and in probably over 90% of the time, this is the case but hopefully by the end of this video, you will understand how to actually make money off of them and beat them when I explain the maths behind arbitrage betting.
Let’s go through a very basic example of how bookies make money:
You can bet on a coin toss: Sportsbet pays $1.90 and $1.90 for head or tails.
If one customer bets on heads, and another bets on tails, one person will make $0.90 and the other will lose a dollar. This guarantees the Sportsbet company makes $0.10c.
So this way, just like gambling in the casino, the punter is expected to lose money and the bookie is expected to make money.
This is because the odds are not in your favour and are actually under-priced. The true odds should be
odds = 1/ % chance of winning
Now arbitrage betting comes in when the odds are in your favour. The main concept of arbitrage is you can bet on one or more outcomes together and not make a loss regardless of the outcome– RISK FREE.
Going back to the coin toss example – this can be:
If you bet on heads, the payoff is $2.50 and it’s the same for tails.
If you bet on $1 on heads and $1 on tails, you get $1.50 and lose $1 so you profit 50c.
Same applies for if the outcome is tails.
This way you’ve guaranteed yourself a risk free profit and you have no view on the outcome.
And of course your guaranteed profit is even bigger if you bet lets say $100 on each, in which case you would have guaranteed yourself $50 profit.
Now of course, we all know the probability of a coin toss is 50% and unless the bookie made a mistake, they would never give you a price better than $2.
But what about events where the probability is a lot less certain. Say for example a sports event, the match between France and Switzerland, different bookies have different views of the outcome.
Now we can use a hypothetical example with a tennis game between Djokovic and Medvedev:
Bookie 1: Medvedev at $1.9, Djokovic at $1.9
Bookie 2: Medvedev at $2.5, Djokovic at $1.4
You can bet on $10 on Djokovic on bookie 1 and $8 on Medvedev on bookie 2 and get a risk free profit.
This might seem too good to be true, and yes, this is a very simplified example but there are many real arbitrage opportunities out there, but there are always promotional offers or mispricings that you can take advantage of. There are many different sports betting sites and there is a lot of money to be made each week, risk free if you do it right. Remember this is only the surface of arbitrage betting and I highly recommend doing your own research before you get started. It can be very easy to make mistakes, eg odds changing quickly, bet limit, accidentally betting on the wrong thing. (go over a couple of my personal examples)
Ultimately though, the only problem you’re going to have, is that they will inevitably ban you after a while which is what happened to me, but by then, you would’ve made a load of money off of them already to not care too much.