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pinkisntwell
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Posts posted by pinkisntwell
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Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living. Fedar, When we refer to "yield" or "ROI" in a sports betting context, we refer to the fraction (net profit) / (total stakes, i.e. money that we'd have lost if all our bets lost). You can see that if someone starts with a 100 bankroll and a 5% edge he can bet those 100 euros many times (it's not unrealistic to expect to bet 10 or 20 times that) and the 5% will be multiplied by the total stakes. Note that if he starts with a 100 euro bankroll he doesn't have to bet the full 100 euros in his first bet. He can bet 5 or 10 euros, making it extremely unlikely to go bankrupt, assuming he has a 5% edge (that edge being our original assumption). On the other hand, if you deposit your money into a bank account you need to have the whole sum up front. You are comparing very different things. Now, on to your "bookies guard against mug bettors" argument. This is a tired old argument, which you should be very careful with as it can cost you lots and lots of money. Let me explain myself: If there is "mug money" on sports betting, it's very definitely on the underdogs, not the favorites. In your example the mug money would be on Swansea. This can be proved by the consistent favorite-longshot bias that is evident on bookmakers' prices, that is, if you blindly bet all favorites with your average high-street bookmaker and then do the same with all the underdogs, you will find out that you will lose much more when you bet on the underdogs. This leads us to believe that "mug money" is concentrated on the underdogs, as "mug punters" would be unlikely to bet 10 pounds to win 4. In short, the bookmakers' overround is distributed unevenly, since it is concentrated mostly on the underdogs. There is no such bias in the exchanges, mind you, as people can back or lay so the overround has to stay close to 0 (and you can't distribute something that doesn't exist).
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Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living. Fedar, I agree 100% with everything you wrote. Here is my answer to your question though:
Another point is that very frequently in the discussion winning yields of around 5% have been mentioned. Am I mistaken' date=' or you will readily get similar winning yields if you just deposit your money at a bank? And if this is the case, then why bother talking about this kinds of returns?[/quote'] Assume you have a bank that pays 5% interest. This means that each year they will give you 5 euros for each 100 euros you have in your account, but those 100 euros have to be there for the full year. In sports betting you can use the same 100 euros to bet over and over again. It is not unrealistic to expect to make at least 2,000 euros in bets per year for every 100 euros you have in your bankroll, which means that the bank interest would have to be 2,000 / 100 * 5% = 100% to give the same returns. -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
Because that isn't the hypothesis I'm trying to disprove. I'm trying to disprove that "the number of gamblers that can win more than 20' date='000 euros in a 12 month period is equal to zero." And I did.[/quote'] Well done, but I had proposed no such hypothesis. The numbers you quote are related merely to my bet offer which is by now obvious that you're not willing to take. -
Re: Experiences with following tipsters?
It's not like I put my fortune on them, just small amounts to see if I can get the odds or not.3% over 150 bets is hardly a long term profitable track record is it! When putting my money at risk based on someone elses opinion I'd need more concrete evidence than that! -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
I will not accept this as a winning bet. I have a simple explanation for this, which I can present in two ways. First, for the non-statistically trained readers: If I place a bet on Germany to beat Greece tonight, and Germany loses, I cannot call the bookmaker and demand to be paid because Germany has beaten Greece in the past. Your claim amounts to that, nothing more, nothing less. Now, the second explanation, for the (not-so-much) statistically-trained readers: You used that data for gambling addiction research, for which they are suitable. Why don't you try to use it also to publish a paper supporting the hypothesis that professional betting is viable (i.e. sports betting markets are not efficient), as you're trying to do here? Don't rush, it would never be accepted by the editors. See, there is no problem in finding bettors whose past record is profitable. I don't need a master thesis for that, or even (possibly biased) data from a bookmaker. I can simply head over to an independent site like http://www.sports-tipsters.co.uk/ or even right here at http://www.punterslounge.com/tipster-competition/. But since you have statistical training you don't even need to do that; you can simply perform the following calculation: Assume a hypothetical bettor plays at a betting exchange. He only bets when the market has very high liquidity and only takes odds of evens, that is 2.00 in decimal. This means that the market expects the bet to win half the time. But our bettor needs to pay 5% commission, so the odds he's paid at when he wins are really only 1.95. Let's assume that our bettor places 500 such bets. To have a yield higher than 5% on those 500 bets he will need to hit at least 270. If the market is efficient (i.e. his expected loss is only due to commission) then he's got a 4.05% chance of hitting 270 or more (equal to 1 - binomcdf(k = 270, n = 500, p = 0.5)). So out of 40k such bettors I would expect to have 1,620 with a higher than 5% yield. Doing a similar calculation you can find that I also expect 72 to have a yield of more than 10% and 1 to have an extraordinary yield of more than 15%! And all that with an efficient market (i.e. an expected loss for each betting sequence). I believe I have sufficiently justified my grounds for not accepting your after-timer's bet. That said, my betting offer still stands, exactly as I had initially presented it. It can start any time you wish.It's been more than three years since I last posted here. Sooo many things have happened in my life since then, and one of those is that my foray into sports gambling led me to do a Master's in Applied Statistics, and the title of my thesis is "Statistical Methodology for Profitable Sports Gambling." So I'm willing to take your challenge. Your original conditions to consider this hypothetical gambler a pro are: 1) He has to post selections and stakes 2) "Satisfy us that he would be able to get the bet on" 3) Make at least 20 thousand euros within the next 12 months I noticed that you used the expression "burden of proof", which I interpret that you have at least some training in the scientific method. Based on that I want to provide scientific evidence, where scientific means a) backed up with data, b) published in scientific journals, and c) reproducible results. I am able to provide you not with one but with TWO people satisfying your criteria. (Quoting from my upcoming thesis) "As part of its corporate social responsibility program Bwin and the Harvard Medical School launched a joint research project in 2004 focusing on specific features of Internet gaming. Bwin provided a dataset with information representing eight months of aggregated betting behaviour data for 40,499 sequential sports betting subscribers who opened an account during the period from February 1, 2005 through February 27, 2005. LaBrie et. al (2007) initially used the dataset to conduct research on gambling addiction but the dataset can also be used to characterize the actual profit or losses incurred by online gamblers." You can download the dataset at: http://www.thetransparencyproject.org/Availabledataset ("Actual Internet Sports Gambling Activity: February 2005 through September 2005") Long story short: the top 2 gamblers achieved a profit of 38,310 and 26,300 euros. Both of them placed more than 600 bets, so their profit isn't the result of just one big bet coming through. -
Re: Experiences with following tipsters?
I used tipsters showing yield over 3% for at least 150 bets (verified by independent sites).Are you following the right tipsters? What are you putting in place to ensure you have reputable tipsters at your disposal? -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
Your suggestion is very good. I might try it in the future, although the Finnish league is not considered as obscure as you believe. It's played during the summer, so it doesn't have to be tracked together with the big leagues.I would advise trying to find competitions which the bookmakers don't spend much time or resources pricing up' date=' but where you can find information which would give you more knowledge on the event than the bookmakers, and therefore an edge. Bookies only have limited staff, and most of them are pricing up Man City vs Man Utd. I have had success with the more obscure international games, youth internationals and the Welsh Premier League. There are a few other areas I've looked into but haven't done enough research to really gain any expertise on them yet. Here is an idea for you though [url']http://www.urhotv.fi/ This is a website which shows live Finnish games. You have to pay a small fee to subscribe, but in the long run it should be more than worth it. Do you think the bookies watch those games? Not a chance. There is your edge. I have only had trouble with not getting enough money on with Paddy Power and Betvictor (am banned from the latter). But then again my stakes are not that of a pro punters; as I've already said I am only aiming for some supplementary income from betting. Bet365 will let me win £250 per bet on those sort of games, I'm not sure what limits other bookies set but I've never been thwarted except by PP and BV. -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
Dont know how to get the overround but heres England match as example. Sweden 3' date='20 draw at 3,15 and 2,20 England. Nothing that tempted me on the outright market but took a small punt on under 1,5 at 3 which seemed nice value. There was a conversation in Euro thread about the odds on most ball possession in that match and it was only bwin offering odds on that market where England were set slight favs at 1,8 which looked wrong for some. Checked local special bets and found Sweden on +5% handicap @ 1,85 in the same market which looked a big mistake and a must bet for me. Took that with medium stakes just to think it was a bad bet for the whole game. It somehow came through at the end to make a decent profit for the day. My point is that there are some really bad mistakes by all of the locals from time to time and its easy to be used by those seeking value and theres not much of those here just to make the job easier.[/quote'] They surely make mistakes, as does everyone, but the overround you're looking at (with 3.2-3.15-2.2 or 1.85-1.85) is so big (as is always the case with local bookies) that they have to be way wrong for any value to exist. The example of the ball possession market is obviously such a mistake on their part, but I would expect the betting limits on that market to be miniscule. -
Re: Experiences with following tipsters?
And you have the idea of following tipsters yourself' date=' if you are happy that you can profit from them in practice?[/quote'] Yes, but this seems very unlikely to produce profit. -
Re: Experiences with following tipsters?
I was curious whether the records that tipsters display can be obtained during real-life betting. My results so far point very firmly towards a negative answer; their good results are probably mostly due to luck or to posting unobtainable odds.pinkisntwell, On another thread you have argued that no one makes a worthwhile living from sports betting -
http://forum.punterslounge.com/threads/130186-The-reality-of-sports-betting-trading-for-a-living I think you've made a reasonable case. On this thread you asked about peoples experiences following tipsters, with the idea that you would like to follow some yourself. Given your well-argued views on the other thread about how hard it is to profit from sports betting, can I just ask you what you are trying to achieve by following tipsters? I'm not taking sides with or against you, just genuinely interested in what you are trying to achieve by following tipsters. -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
As for some of the other points re value' date=' getting bets on early etc - a lot of the betting is done by people who do not know about or are interested in value. Therefore you don't neseccarly have to find value (or whatever) that other gamblers haven't found because chances are other gamblers won't have noticed the value or even have the slightest interest in such value. Betting markets seem to overreact as in the example above about Liverpool. Just because it was Liverpool people, without looking into it or considering what a decent bet would be, backed them for top 4 finish. Finally I was reading an artical in the RFO (I think it was). They carried out a survey of 600 punters - 90 odd % of them would bet based on emotion at Euro 2012 which goes someway to highlight the fact you don't neseccarly have to an edge over fellow punters to allow you to get the odds you want / need.[/quote'] You are repeating the well-known myth that markets are inefficient because some small-time bettors bet on emotion. If what you say is correct it would be advantageous to lay popular teams, which clearly isn't (as a matter of fact, there was a bias a few years ago which rendered popular teams slightly advantageous to bet). -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
Sometimes they are on more obscure markets' date=' so the price does not get noticed as being wrong by a sufficient amount of people for it to change much.[/quote'] What kind of markets are those and how much money can you get on? -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
I am far from being a pro bettor but Im only doing betting for a living. Using a simple staking plan and only bet what I think is value! Its really easy in my place' date=' where online betting is still illegal and there are different local bookies offering fixed odds only. With the standard here I can hope for a job payed 300 euros at best and with the average ROI of 12% in the last 14 months Im more than happy to be in front of the pc when ever I want/can. Doing the usual staff, lurking through the forums, following odds by the opening, checking team news, infos, etc. Sometimes follow tipsters, mainly loungers which proved to be profitable. I have a great edge over five locals and their fixed odds and its much easier compared to worldwide bettor. Its not that easy, but its possible and very simple if you have the edge.[/quote'] What's the overround at the bookies you are playing? Can you provide a typical set of odds for a football match? Let's say the Euro 2012 matches tonight. -
Re: ATP Tennis model
Frankly speaking' date=' I don't know will be there profit or not. Let's wait until the end of the season. I think the beginning of december 2012 would be much more better time for desicions than now.[/quote'] That's a long time to wait, and I have absolutely no problem with that. However, you can have an idea right now, by training your model over the first, say, 70% of your data and then betting on the remaining 30%. This is to get a ballpark idea of your system's predictive capability. That said, good luck! I have made many betting systems in the past, but none have been profitable, and I would find it very interesting if you could discuss how your system makes its selections. -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
I think this is off-topic here, but let me just say that "making a profit from betting" is light years away from "making a living from betting", so your comparison makes no sense. But really, let's not derail this interesting discussion, if you want to discuss the other thread, take it to the other thread please.pinkisntwell, On this thread you have argued that no one makes a worthwhile living from sports betting. I think you've made a reasonable case. On another thread you started, you asked about peoples experiences following tipsters, with the idea that you would like to follow some yourself. Given your well-argued views about how hard it is to profit from sports betting, can I just ask you what you are trying to achieve by following tipsters? I'm not taking sides with or against you, just genuinely interested in what you are trying to achieve by following tipsters. -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living. Okay guys, I won't take this any further since I don't think we're adding anything to the discussion. Despite that, my offer stands, as does my intention to consider any alternative offers to prove that there is such a thing as a professional sports bettor.
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Re: ATP Tennis model Doktor Lektor, how did you come up with the results you posted in your first post? Did you optimize the parameters of your model over the whole data set? If so, I believe you will find it hard to get any profit in real betting.
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Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
Well, Simmo made a claim and he has the burden of proof, don't you think? If you can think of any other way, let us know. I tried to put you guys to the test, I tried to put my money where my mouth is, what else do you want? :-)LOL. This really made me laugh. So actually you are saying that you are willing to pay 500 euros for a system that will bring you 20k in a year??? That's good. Besides this "joke", I don't think it's important the actual money he does, but the ROI that he will have. After all the ROI is everything. If you have a decent ROI you can make more money by betting more money. -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
Well' date=' you are so wrong its laughable. I'll happily put you in touch with a longterm pro if you like.[/quote'] Yes, I would like your pro to get in touch with me personally, or even better, with the forum in general. I would have many questions to ask to such a person. But I find it hard to believe that such a person exists and, as I have learnt to put my money where my mouth is, I am willing to bet 500 euros that your friend cannot prove that he's a pro. To prove it he will have to:- Post his selections and stakes.
- Satisfy us that he would be able to get the bet on, at the stakes he's going for, at Pinnacle or the exchanges (Pinnacle lists the highest stakes allowed at each event and the exchanges show how much money there is available to be matched). Everyone else would have banned him anyway.
- Make at least 20 thousand euros within the next 12 months.
I think those conditions are the bare minimum to persuade us that he really is a pro, although 12 months don't qualify as "longtime". If you want to get this bet on let me know; we'll have to find someone in here of common trust to hold the money for us.
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Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
To make a profit from gambling all you need to do is estimate probability better than the bookmakers. However hard this may be' date=' it is clearly possible.[/quote'] I think it's more accurate if we put it this way: To make a profit from sports betting all you need to do is to be more accurate in your predictions than the millions of people who are betting alongside you. Because the people shape the odds, not the bookmakers. If you try to be a smart guy and bet early you will find that bookmakers have very low stake limits on their early odds and they can ban you at the drop of a hat (i.e. when you accumulate a miniscule profit). If you try to play at the exchanges you will struggle to get matched on most of the markets that you could have an edge at and most of the time it will be for peanuts (for example, yesterday's snooker qualifiers had matched bet totals about 2 thousand per match at betfair). That is why I stand by my opinion that there are no long-term professional sports bettors. -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
I don't think it's realistic to either follow 60 leagues or expect 10% yield. If there is someone getting a 10% yield then they're probably claiming odds that cannot be actually be gotten or they are just being lucky.Although it might be true what you say, it can also be wrong. This is what you think it can happen with a system, but this doesn't mean you cover all the angles. If you want to generalize you need to use more general terms and situations. Even though you say that you can follow (at maximum 2-3 leagues) I can easily say that it isn't the case. I followed more than 60 leagues during the period of the football matches, and I can say that it isn't that difficult. The hardest part would be to get the wright matches that will play (which is kind of difficult, but you can't miss more than 10 matches - which also could make a difference between losing or winning in the long term). After you have automatized most of the system, you could use less and less time to do everything. The next part which will eat you a lot of time will be looking for odds and get them. But there are sites that can help you with the odds, in the way that they crawl all the odds available the moment they birth, and send them to you instantly. If you watch a movement of the odds, you can see that these move fast, but you have at least 30 minutes or more to make the bet. So after automatizing most of the parts of a system, I think you could run it easily, and with less effort. Using the system to automatically crawl all the info (from the internet or your own database), get the odds of the matches the moment they pop up, using 2-3 bookmakers to place your bets. The next factor I am curios that you point out is the 5% ROI. Even here on this forum you have examples that argue what you said (people having more than 10% on a period >3years). Besides this fact, you could always be on the watch and try new systems on paper, and in the event that your first system shows signs of "drowning" you could change with the new one, or try to adjust the initial system with some new factors you saw would influence it's S/R. The sign of "drowning" could be a result of many factors, besides the fact that team members change constantly (from year to year), coaches, and of course the bookmakers who are always on guard and watch with their odds. The final big step is to find a bookmaker that won't ban you. This is hard, but there are a few. This is more than enough. After all you want to make money. If one accepts your winnings, then that's the one you've been looking for. Even if his market is smaller (eg. Pinnacle), you need to apply to it. I can agree with you on the fact that I, too, haven't seen a "Grand Master Bettor", but maybe we expect to see a sign, that will never come. Anyway, my idea is as follows: even if there are or not "Grand Master Bettors", this doesn't mean you can't be one. After all this is what you are after, if you want to make something out of betting, else you are just trying to prove something to you. As I've always said, you must be one step ahead of the bookmakers. This means your system must always and constantly be cheked, so that you can't be behind the bookmakers. -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
I completely agree and here is another argument: A good bettor, one that is very knowledgeable and with years of experience can expect to have a ROI of at most 5%. I think anything over that is highly unrealistic. That means that to have an expected income of 100 euros/dollars/pounds in a bet he needs to risk 20 times that, or 2,000. In many betfair markets you can have trouble getting matched on top price at that amount of money, unless it's at very high volume matches (Premiership, Serie A etc.) in which there is probably no value anyway and in which you would probably not want to bet. And that's just to make 100 per match, which is not that big if you think about it; because the "good bettor" in question can only be "good" if he spends a lot of time following at most one or two divisions. Let's say a single division has 35 match days per year, or about 300 matches in total. For two divisions he will have a total of 600 matches per year, adding some cup matches he can expect to have about 700 matches on which he knows enough to be able to bet. Now, to maintain a ROI of 5% it will not be possible to bet on more than 200 of them, because it is extremely unlikely that there will be value on more of them. So in the end, if he risks 2,000 per match, he has an expected profit of 200 times 100 or 20,000 per year. That's not very big (for the amount of time he's spending doing it) and you need to keep in mind that that's only expected profit. In reality it can be much more or much less, and it's very difficult to rely on it for a living. Of course, the above applies to football betting. There are sports that have more events per year (NBA, tennis) so it's possible to make more money, but you would also need to spend more time following them. Those are the reasons why I believe there is nobody (other than bookmakers) who is making a (worthwhile) living from sports betting.I've often thought that one of the things that would stop someone taking their betting more seriously is that you don't actually make that much money on most bets! Whether it is finding value (there's a difference between finding value and finding winners or so I am told) or some sort of trading on betting exchanges. During a football match if you can make £20 on Betfair or whatever then great...but that's £20 for about 2 hours work....most peeps probably earn that anyway. -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
even a modest one who whitsdraw monthly say' date='one hundred bucks or euros?You think he can be listed and more,blacklisted?[/quote'] Of course. To take it one step further, I've heard of cases where losing accounts are restricted, just because their betting choices indicate that they might one day become winning (for example, betting only when the price is the highest across bookmakers, betting only on low-overround markets like asian handicap, etc.). It's not possible to honestly (that is, without abusing terms and without fixing matches) make money from most bookmakers. The only way to make money is to bet with Pinnacle or with the exchanges. But winning at the exchanges is very difficult as well, because in the great majority of markets the early prices have no liquidity and by the time the liquidity arrives the market has moved and the value is gone. -
Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living. Does anyone here know anyone who is a professional sports gambler (this does not include bookmakers)? Also, if you do know someone, do you know how much time he puts into his betting research and whether he would be making more money if he was to be working instead of doing betting research?
The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
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Re: The reality of sports betting/trading for a living.
You are, very simply, wrong. Read this http://www.gamblingonlinemagazine.com/gambling-features.php?articleID=35 and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favourite-longshot_bias. I also have some data handy, they are from the Greek state bookmaker, they are located here http://www.anendotos.gr/stix/stapodstat.asp (sorry, page is in greek). Here is some examples (all the following concern home teams): Odds of 1.1: won 87.2% of the time, that means your expected return per unit staked was 0.959 Odds of 1.2: won 76% of the time, that means your expected return per unit staked was 0.916 Odds of 1.5: won 59.47% of the time, that means your expected return per unit staked was 0.893 Odds of 2.0: won 44.4% of the time, that means your expected return per unit staked was 0.888 Odds of 5.0: won 15.64% of the time, that means your expected return per unit staked was 0.782 Odds of 10.0: won 4.17% of the time, that means your expected return per unit staked was 0.417 There is more data if you want, but I'm at work right now. Do yourself a favour and forget the smart-ass way of thinking, i.e. mug punters bet on low-odds favorites, I am smarter than them therefore I will bet against said favorites and will make money.