I have always been fascinated by beating the casino at their own game and in 2009 with the financial crisis in full swing that fascination became an obsession. But after lots of trial and error, experimenting and false starts I finally was able to turn that obsession into a career and make money gambling. I was a professional gambler. Over many years it was my full-time job, making over a million pounds along the way. I started with matched betting and then moved to arbitrage, while dipping my toes into every other form of professional gambling.
In this post, I take you through seven different ways to make money gambling and talk about their pros and cons.
But before we start, if this is all new to you I really recommend starting with Matched Betting as it is the easiest and least risky. Here is my detailed how-to guide on Matched Betting.
Contents
In short: Keep as much money as possible from free bets.
Matched betting is the easiest way to become a professional gambler. It is where I started and over the years has made me a lot of money. And if done correctly it is risk-free.
Most online gambling sites offer promotions such as free bets to try and get you to sign up with them rather than their competitors. You can’t withdraw the free bet, but you can keep any winnings from it. If you are clever you can hedge your bets and whatever the outcome withdraw most of the free bet.
When you do this over all the different online bookmakers you can make a lot of money.
I have a detailed free introductory guide to matched betting.
After that, you will want to sign up to one of the matched betting services like Oddsmonkey. It is free to sign up and will work you through your first few matched betting offers. From there it is £17.99 a month and will provide a constantly updating list of what free bets are currently available. You simply work your way through the list.
Oddsmonkey has a few competitors which you can compare in my guide to the best matched betting subscription services.
Matched betting is probably the easiest way to become a professional gambler but does have an earnings cap. Once you have made £15,000-£20,000 you will need to move on to another way to make money gambling.
Then once you have exhausted matched betting you can move on to making money from casino bonuses. Even more profitable but quite a bit harder.
In short: know more about the sport than the bookies so you know when they get the odds wrong.
Value bettors are often world-leading experts in one particular team or sport. They know everything about it, more even than the oddsmakers at the bookies. They take all that information and make their own odds. If their odds are drastically different to what the bookmakers come up with, they will bet the difference.
The value bettor is probably the purest type of professional gambler. They are not using loopholes or bonuses, instead they make money gambling by beating the bookies at their own game.
I have a detailed free introduction guide to value betting.
Warning, it is not an easy way to make money gambling! Once you have started creating odds I suggest paper betting (with fake money) to test out your edge before you start spending real money.
Once you are ready to use real money, you need somewhere to bet. Traditional bookmakers don’t like value bettors because value bettors make money. So most professional gamblers will instead use a marketplace based sports betting exchange such as Betfair.
In a betting exchange, you are betting against other punters and Betfair just takes a commission of the winnings. So no matter how much money you make they won’t close your account.
In short: Find differences between the odds at separate bookmakers and bet on all outcomes to lock in a profit.
Sports betting arbitrage is where I have made the most money as a professional gambler. It was even the subject of my university dissertation.
Very simply, imagine there is a tennis match going on. If one bookmaker believes player A is going to win and the other bookmaker believes that player B is going to win, then they will price their odds very differently. If the difference is big enough you can bet at both bookmakers on opposite players so whoever wins the match you will make money.
Finding such arbitrage opportunities is actually the easy part. There is software you can rent such as OddsMonkey (£17.99 a month for beginners) or RebelBetting (€129 a month for professionals) which alerts you whenever there is an opportunity available and tells you exactly what the bet on.
The hard part is stopping your accounts from getting closed. Although arbitrage betting is completely legal, as soon as the bookmakers realise you are a professional gambler they will limit or close your account. Here is a guide a wrote How To Make Money Arbing And Avoid Getting Your Account Closed.
In short: using the same strategies that hedge funds and investment banks use to trade the stock market trade the betting markets.
Everyone has heard of traditional bookmakers, but have you heard of betting exchanges such as Betfair? They are markets modelled on the stock market where punters can buy and sell bets. That means you can trade in and out of a single bet multiple times and lock in a profit before the event even happens.
Traders will create strategies to buy and sell these bets.
I wrote a pretty detailed post on my experiences sports trading here. I had some initial success and was making money, but struggled to scale up. I am still trying my hand at sports trading now using the automated trading software called BF Bot Manager.
The BF stands for Betfair which is the worlds biggest betting exchange and the most popular one for sports trading.
Most sports trading strategies are based on the stock market, so if you are looking to make money gambling using trading, then the best place to start is with stock market trading strategies. There are lots of books on Amazon about the stock market or algorithmic trading.
There is also one book on Amazon about betfair trading.
And other skill-based gamblers.
In short: Be better than your competition.
Whenever I used to tell someone I was a professional gambler they assumed I meant poker player. It is definitely the most well known and well-understood way to make money gambling, but that means it is also one of the hardest – because everyone is trying it.
The hardest part about being a professional poker player is not just being better than your competition, that’s actually the easy part. The hardest part is being better by enough to cover the ‘rake’. The commission that the casino takes from each hand. To successfully make money gambling with poker there needs to be a very large gap between your skill level and that of your opponent.
In other words, the better your opponent, the less money you make. So here is the secret:
The people making the real money in poker are not the famous names winning the big tournaments, but the anonymous professional gamblers sharking on not very good players.
The biggest and best forum for all things poker is the Two Plus Two Poker Forum. If you want to start learning strategies and eventually make money gambling, that is a great place to start.
If you really get into it you will probably end up with accounts at all the online poker sites, so you can make the most of the welcome bonuses. But if you are looking for a good place to start I recommend Betfair Poker. A Betfair account is pretty useful to have and you can use it for some of the other ways to make money gambling.
Warning – Make sure to start slow. Play really low-value tables and only work your way up once you are making money.
And other loophole based gambling
In short: Keep track of what cards are left in the deck in a game of blackjack, so you can bet large when the odds turn in your favour.
You may well have heard of card counting from the film 21. The Hollywood adaption of the true story of a team of students from MIT who made millions card counting playing blackjack in Vegas.
But what you probably don’t know is that one of the biggest funders of that film was MGM Grand, who own a lot of very large casinos. Card counting is really difficult and casinos have got very good at making it difficult to make a lot of money from it so they actually welcome in amateur card counters. They know most people won’t be good enough and will lose money, and they can ban anyone who is winning.
I went to Vegas to try my hand at card counting. And surprise surprise didn’t get very far. But it is possible and there are plenty of successful professional gamblers who do it. Just be prepared that it is very difficult and not particularly glamorous.
First off you cannot card count at online virtual casinos. This is because they shuffle the deck after each hand. So if you are going to do it you need to go into physical casinos.
I really liked the independent film Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians. It is a documentary following a blackjack team of Christians in America, and is probably the only film about card counting that I believe gives you a true idea of what it is actually like.
They spend all their time on the road travelling to obscure casinos where they haven’t yet been banned. When they get there they play as long as possible until getting caught, then take their winnings and move on to the next casino. There is no glamour and they don’t even make that much money.
Including collusion, match-fixing and inside knowledge.
In short: find a way to cheat, and don’t get caught.
All of the other ways to make money gambling are completely legal and won’t get you in any trouble. But there is one other type of professional gambler. The cheater. And be warned, people do go to prison for cheating.
This can include a whole range of cheating:
I am not going to teach you how to cheat at gambling, but if you are interested in the history of it there are some interesting stories. Here is a documentary on YouTube to wet your appetite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Z5_Hk8IpM
I recommend starting with matched betting. It is by far the easiest and although it is limited in the amount you can make, it is a good gateway into professional gambling.
I have a lot of posts and guides about professional gambling. Here they are:
In this Oddsmonkey review, I will take a look at how useful Oddsmonkey is to a matched better. Ask if it's worth the money, and compare it to its competition. Oddsmonkey has always been a big name in the matched betting community. It is almost 10 years old I have been...
Arbitrage betting (known as arbing) is a risk-free way to gamble profitably. It is actually very easy to make money arbing, but much harder to stay under the radar and prevent your accounts from getting closed. In this article, I will introduce you to the concept of...
In this Profit Accumulator review, I will take a look at how useful Profit Accumulator is to a matched better. Ask if it's worth the money, and compare it to its competition. Profit Accumulator popped up about four years ago and revolutionised the industry by being...
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