Not just football, but gambling in general is usually a losing proposition. You think they build all that new shit in Vegas every year by people going out there and winning? Most people arrive with a bunch of money and leave broke.
That's true, but casino gambling is very different from sports gambling. In most casino gambling games (roulette, craps, slot machines) it is physically impossible to get an edge - there is no strategy at all, just luck, and the odds are stacked against you. In certain card games (such as blackjack) you can get the odds in your favor, but it requires a great deal of skill (and card counting) to do it. In principle, at least, in sports betting you're not betting against dice or a ball rolling around (which is impossible), but against the intelligence of other bettors, and if you're smarter than them, you could win in the long run. This is why there are people who definitely do make a living betting on the horses - they know more about racing than other people do. Unfortunately, there are several reasons why it is very difficult to win at sports gambling, even if you're smart: (1) The vig. The bookies, OTB, or Vegas sports books take a cut. You don't have to just be smarter than the other bettors, you need to be smarter when the house is taking a cut either way every time. (2) The sources of the money involved. Sure, the typical fan probably knows nothing and just bets $20 on his team, but that's not where the big money comes from - it comes from habitual and professional gamblers (and gambling syndicates), and as was noted earlier in this thread, people who gamble all the time have to be at least decent at it, or they run out of money. (3) Gambler's ruin. This applies to casino gambling as well. It is a little-understood fact that casinos could still make millions even if their games were completely fair, simply because they have a much bigger bankroll than a player does. If a game was fair, the path of a player's winnings would wander around, sometimes positive and sometimes negative. No matter how positive it gets, the casino can stay in the game, and perhaps eventually get some money back, because they (effectively) have an infinite bankroll. A player, however, has a limited bankroll, and if his losses happen to hit that limit, he's done, and never gets the chance to win anything back (his bankroll is what a stochastic processes specialist would call an absorbing state).
Wow, good stuff. I agree, that's why when I go I try to stick with football, which I know. I do well with the parlays, where you pick 4 or 5 games and tease the spreads in your favor. You can win a couple hundred off a $20 or $50 bet.
Yep, the floor is what eventually catches all bettors who do not know when to stop. I know a guy who dropped out of NYU about 15 years ago to make a living at sports betting. He did very well for awhile and then something caught up to him and began eating his bankroll. He wasn't calling games any different, it was just a flow thing where the games were not landing where they had previously. In retrospect it was probably the other bettors catching up to him and moving the lines into territory that was uncomfortable for his bottom line. Anyway, he had been an avid backgammon player in high school and college and was actually quite good at it, with a very casual betting routine taht he ran for fun. So now he decided to try it as a professional gambler and make a living off of it. The first couple of years I think he made out okay and maintained his lifestyle. He certainly had the same ritzy address in midtown and I saw him around town looking sharp now and then. Lately he's been down at the ears and I'm pretty sure he's been caught up again in his attempt to make a living off of the odds. In this case it is probably his immediate competitors who have shifted the odds again somehow, by watching his playstyle or something similar. Gambling is a rough life. You not only have to be a lot smarter than the other gamblers but you also have to be lucky enough to avoid the pitfalls that life puts in front of you. Assuming you can be very smart for a long period of time and also avoid getting really unlucky at a bad moment then you can probably make a nice bankroll off of gambling. Of course with those same attributes you'd be a golden boy in almost any industry you chose to go into and you'd make a ton more money than any gambler.
Its very hard to make a living gambling... BUT it's actually VERY easy to make some side money... it really has nothing to do with luck... it has to do with mathematics and self control in maintaning a bankroll... This includes not betting every week, not betting solely because you like a team, and not betting merely because a game is on TV. You should also never drastically change the amount you wager on any given game, and aviod exotics like parlays and teasers - in the long run they are sucker bets. A rule of thumb is to have 100 times your standard betting unit as a starting bankroll. If your standard betting unit was say, for instance, $10 and your bankroll was $1,000, you should be looking to make a profit of 10 - 20 units over the course of a football season. Obviously, at that level, the profit isnt great, but it goes up as the size of the unit increases. Experts say that you should never wager more than a total of 5 units in a week - that way you will have bankroll stability and avoid going on "tilt," and losing a large portion of your roll in one unlucky week... A takes a LOT of discipline, but it's definitely possible...
That is a wonderful summary of the paradox of the professional gambler - to be any good at it, he or she (mostly he, of course) has to have an entire range of abilities that would be amply rewarded in any line of work, with a lot less wear and tear on the body and mind. Unfortunately, such people often aren't really in it for the money, but rather for the rush that comes from beating the odds. I had a colleague who was part of a blackjack counting syndicate while he was a professor. They won loads of money (they actually discovered some highly technical aspects to the nonrandom nature of blackjack shuffles that gave them a real edge), but he eventually quit doing it because of the stress he felt from sitting at a table with thousands of dollars riding on a single hand. He ended up leaving academia and satisfying his gambling jones by going to work for a money management firm instead. Good timing, too - he stayed through the 1990s, made millions, and got out before he was 50 (and before the market crashed and people got fired).
