Becoming a professional sports bettor

In this modern day world of the Internet and hundreds of different online cardrooms and betting firms, the ability to gamble for a living or as a serious second income has never been so great. Most fail of course but they fail not through a lack of intelligence or knowledge but a lack of strategic planning.

People fail for numerous reasons and one of those is to try and shoot too high. This happens a lot in poker and if more players contented themselves by keeping to low stakes and not trying to be hotshots all the time then they would have a long and prosperous career as a poker player.

The next question is, do you need to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of sport or odds? I suppose it helps but then again it can also be a hindrance too. I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of poker but yet I don’t play that high whenever I do play. Sometimes having a lot of knowledge about something can be a terrible handicap because it leads you to go down paths that you really shouldn’t be going down.

I make money from sports betting and on sports that I have no in depth knowledge of. I understand an awful lot about most sports but there is a world of difference between understanding about a sport and understanding it on a professional level. I know an awful lot about cricket and football but yet when you compare that to the in depth technical knowledge of professional players then my knowledge is somewhat limited in these areas.

So how do I make money from betting on sports? Well there are numerous ways to get the job done and the puzzle is how to defeat the professional odds compilers who are studying these sports for a living whilst not really having the time to do so yourself.

This puzzle fascinated me for ages and I eventually found a solution. The Internet and the media and the recent huge interest in sports betting have led to professionals and ex-professionals being paid to give their opinions.

These are precisely the kind of people who you should be listening to. Some sports journalist may really know his field but in my view, he cannot know it better than a professional working on the inside. So my own method of operation is to cross reference respected professional opinion in certain ways.

I prefer to do this in some sports over others and what I am trying to establish is if certain odds with certain betting firms are out of sync with where they should be. Of course this does not always mean that the betting firm in question has made a mistake. Most of the time they are working to their own individual strategies!

It is easier for me to be able to figure out when certain prices are wrong without necessarily knowing what the correct theoretical price should be. This may sound odd but not once you understand it. The recent bout between Nikolai Valuev and David Haye is a classic case in point. The cross referencing of professional opinion had Valuev as at least an even money shot.

Most of the professional fighters were making him favourite although not a huge favourite so getting 2.15 on him was something of a good price. Despite the fact that he lost, I was still happy that I took the bet at that price. I would have taken anything 2.00 or above based on my assessment of his overall chances using my usual method of cross referencing pro opinion.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson