Make money with sports betting 1

CHAPTER 2

My Betting History

During the summer holidays in 2016, there was a major football tournament, the European Championship, in which I was sufficiently interested. On the internet, I sometimes read the comments on the sports pages related to an upcoming or past match. On these pages, advertisements of various betting companies often flicker, luring new customers with so-called welcome offers by holding out the prospect of a bonus, usually ?100.

I was never actually interested in betting at that time - it goes without saying for a statistician, that betting providers ALWAYS win - and I never bothered to give these ads even a moment of my time. Betting providers were, in my mind at the time anyway, organisations with a criminal background.

Apparently, I must have been very bored during these holidays because I did click on an advertising banner of a well-known betting provider. At the time, I only wanted to read through the offer to prove to myself once again my above-average knowledge of statistics. After reading the bonus conditions carefully, I wanted to have proof that the betting provider was not giving me ?100, but was making a profit - if everything went "normally", of course!

So, I sat down, studied the rather hidden conditions of participation and began to calculate: Turnover conditions, margins, expected value, etc..

After I had studied the conditions for about two hours and noted down a few sample calculations, I knew that the betting provider would not give a new customer ?100, but at least ?40.

A competitor of this betting provider was also put through its paces by me with an almost identical offer: Here, too, the so-called "expected value for the player" was ?40.

Well, I thought, that can't be true, I'll just do that now. Registered with both providers, deposited ?100 and was pleased with the betting account of "?100 real money" plus "?100 bonus money" in each case.

I placed my bets - and lost all my capital pretty quickly with the first betting provider! With the other betting provider, however, I was pleased to have a capital of over ?350 in real money after going through ?600 worth of bets! I still believed that betting providers were actually criminals and could hardly imagine that the betting provider would pay me the ?350 without any problems.

I was really pleasantly surprised: without any fees, I had my entire betting balance in my current account two days later.

I had made a profit of more than ?150 because I had deposited ?100 twice and now had ?350.

I then played this game - just play the bonus and then cash out - with a good dozen betting companies - I lost my capital with some, but the winnings with the other betting companies exceeded the losses of the other accounts. I then realised during this game that you have to meticulously read and understand the bonus conditions of each betting provider. Because these differ from each other, and there are bonus conditions that are significantly worse than the bonus conditions I had read through at first.

Moreover, soon after I cleared my account, I received new offers -- such as betting offers where you would receive free bets or similar.

I always read through the terms and conditions, kept meticulous records, especially at the beginning, and made a profit of ?800 by around October 2019.

I then decided to open a betting account, i.e., a current account into which I deposit play money once and from which - and only from which - I make my deposits and withdrawals to betting providers. I transferred ?1,000 "play money" to my betting account, which I was prepared to lose, and from then on, I became increasingly interested in sports betting, especially in football.

I studied the promotions pages of the betting providers intensely, had lengthy chats with the hotlines if the conditions were not clear to me, and started to become a real betting enthusiast. Via the promotions, I then also tried my hand at sports I didn't really know at all: tennis, American football, basketball, etc..

It was in the already advanced 2016/17 football season that I first came across a promotion that is particularly interesting when betting on favourites. Calculating the value of this promotion was not so easy, I used a spreadsheet programme and calculated different betting variants of the promotion. I calculated that with this promotion you can expect a long-term profit of about 10%, ideally even 15%, of your stake.

I started placing bets with this promotion and kept a record of it. I was very interested to see if my expected value would actually be the mentioned 10 to 15% in reality. I was disappointed because the theoretical calculation of my expected value was way off the results of my bets.

No, the average profit in the long term was not 10 to 15% as I had calculated in theory, but it was a positive value of about 40% of the bets on average. Yes, you read correctly: For every ?100 I had bet on my favourite combinations day after day with this promotion, I made a profit of about ?40 on average - in the long term, of course.

How could I explain this? Was it pure coincidence that I won so much - contrary to all theory? No, I had placed too many bets for that. I could rule that out.

Had my expertise played a role in predicting the sports bets? No, the teams that appeared on my betting slips were partly clubs from the Italian and English leagues, which I had only known by name before.

Had I made a mistake in my calculations? I checked all the calculations I had made with a spreadsheet programme once again. Everything was correct here as well, and I found no errors in the rather complicated formulas I had programmed.

This is, when I concluded in the style of Sherlock Holmes2: If you excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Inspired by the promotion and my previously made calculations for combination bets, I bet on favourites only and won more than a promotion would theoretically allow me to expect. So, the favourites are apparently given odds by the betting providers, that result in a positive probable value for the bettor, i.e., "odds that are too high". I was in a real celebratory mood at this realisation and relentlessly expanded my strategy: I looked for more betting providers who offered this promotion and had resounding success.

By Easter 2017, my accounts were growing pretty consistently by ?300-500 per week. I had over ?9,000 at Easter 2017 when I added up the accounts of the various betting providers, the value of bets that had not yet been placed and my play money in my current account.

And then came a downright horrific weekend!

I had - which had become quite normal for me - more than 40 bets of about ?50 each with favourite combinations that had not yet expired. I lost ALL my bets in one weekend! It was more than ?2,000 that I lost during a single weekend. My capital plummeted from over ?9,000 to about ?7,000.

"It was bound to happen," I thought to myself, and fell back into my old way of thinking: "These betting providers are all criminals!"

But after I had slept on it for a night and researched the results the next morning, I came to the following conclusion: No, there was not a single mistake on behalf of the betting providers. All the bets had been settled correctly.

The loss was all on me.

But what had I done wrong? Nothing at all! It was a normal "rare event" that can happen! Things can just go completely wrong when you bet. I simply had "bad luck" that weekend, and that's just the way it is with gambling, no matter how good the strategy.

With this realisation, I continued to bet. And won again with my old system. By the end of the season in summer 2017, I had over ?10,000 in my account.

I had increased my capital tenfold within about 7 months. I never managed to do that on the stock market.

The first betting providers contacted me and blocked me.

Either my account was closed completely - at least for sports betting, the casino was still accessible to me - the bets that had not yet been placed were still settled and the amount in my betting account was transferred to my checking account without any problems. With other betting providers, I was completely excluded from promotions.

At another betting provider, I was only allowed to place bets with a maximum stake of ?1.

Yet another betting provider forbade me to place combination bets in general. As soon as I tried to place a combination bet, there was an error message in the system, and I was asked to place only single bets.

I asked the betting providers for the reason why I was being blocked. Each betting provider referred me to their general terms and conditions and said that they could exclude players without giving a reason!

So, I looked for new betting providers with this promotion and found them: Some betting providers granted the same bonus system not for football bets, but for American events such as ice hockey (NHL) or American football (NFL). In doing so, I transferred my findings about the excessive odds on the favourites from the 2016/17 football season to the NFL and the NHL and bet on the favourites with...