How much do professional sports bettors really make?

A professional sports bettor's results might look a lot different than you'd think

The only thing people seem to care about in sports betting media is win percentage. Internet personalities and touts alike are always bragging about their handicapping abilities and they continue to cite one statistic: record.

You’ve heard it before. You’ve seen the old school tout service ads. You can probably even hear the middle-aged man in a suit screaming in your face for no apparent reason. I’M 8-1 IN MY LAST 9 AND I’M GUARANTEEING TWO WINNERS HERE TONIGHT. Nobody is a better example of this than Stu Feiner.

I think the general sports betting public is smart enough to realize these people are entertainers as opposed to oracles (no disrespect to Stu Feiner, he’s a legend). Anyone claiming to have guaranteed winners is exaggerating for dramatic (and comedic) effect. But the general sports betting public, who I just called smart, keeps going back to win-loss record. Look at any sports betting twitter account today and you’ll probably see something like this in the bio: NCAAB 17-8 | MLB 29-10 | NFL 38-23 | NBA 11-12. They always include the one losing sport to show you they’re fallible and not blowing smoke up your ass.

I’m not saying these records are always lies, either. That 29-10 record in MLB might absolutely be true… but what you don’t see is they’re all -300 moneyline favorites. These people are hacking your brain to associate them with winning. “Wow this guy wins a ton of his bets!” means you’ll follow, engage, and maybe even tail his picks. But when you notice your account balance go down after a 8-3 run you’ll realize record doesn’t mean a damn thing.

There’s increased nuance when a bettor puts their unit yield in the aforementioned bio. You might see something like NCAAB 17-8 +6.8u instead of just the record. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for that person. They’re winning money and you can’t argue with that. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean the person is a good bettor and it almost guarantees they’re not a professional bettor. The main giveaway is sample size. Professional bettors place hundreds, if not thousands of bets over the course of a season. You may have stumbled upon someone hitting a good stretch of variance, maybe even someone who knows a bit more than the average NCAAB fan, but you definitely didn’t stumble upon a professional bettor who you can tail to fame and fortune.

So what do professional betting results look like?

Professional sports bettors GRIND to eke out a small margin.

Margin, by the way, refers to the amount won divided by the amount staked. So if you placed ten $100 bets on +100 odds and went 6-4, you’d be up $200 and your margin would be 20%.

A lot of pro bettors probably don’t even have winning records. They might win at a 47% clip or worse. However, as we established earlier… that doesn’t matter at all. The break-even price for a 47% win rate is +113, so as long as the pro is getting +113 or better on average she will be profitable.

Now we can talk about the important thing: yield. A professional sports bettor wants to maximize yield but does not want to maximize win % or even margin. Let’s dig into this more because it may sound counter-intuitive.

Every bet a professional bettor places has a perceived edge. Let’s put all uncertainty to the side, for simplicity’s sake, and assume the bettor’s calculations are totally accurate. She will have her calculated price, the book’s price, and the expected margin based on the difference. For example: at the end of the season she would expect to be up 10% from all of her 10% edge bets, 8% from all of her 8% bets, and so on and so forth.

If she only places bets with a 10% edge, she’ll theoretically make 10% on those bets. That’s an incredible yield, but it’s not ideal. If she then bets all of her 8% edges (let’s assume the same number of bets/stakes as the 10 percenters) her overall margin will drop to 9% but her yield will increase by 80%. Just to illustrate this point further, let’s say she then chooses to bet all her 6% edges as well. The overall margin will drop to 8% but the yield will increase an additional 33%. Now our fictional bettor is up 8% on triple stakes as opposed to 10% on single stakes. That’s a 140% increase in profit by willingly lowering margin.

This idea was first introduced to me in The Logic of Sports Betting by Ed Miller and Matthew Davidow and it really opened my eyes. In theory a bettor will want to bet on every single position with a positive margin.

Of course the application of this philosophy can only go so far in reality. Every bettor is different but you’ll be hard pressed to find a bettor putting part of his bankroll on a position with a sub-1% edge. The reason for this is simple: no one has unlimited money. If you have multiple positions of 10%, you’re going to bet those before you look at the 5% bets. At a certain point the bettor will be overexposed and the juice just won’t be worth the squeeze on those small-margin plays.

In addition, we can’t assume total accuracy in the real world. Of course a bettor will trust his/her model, but a 5% edge could be a 3% edge or even a -1% edge if the bettor missed a key piece of information. So increasing the edge threshold to, say, 5-6% and above will give the bettor a good buffer zone for miscalculations and all the uncertainty that is inherent in professional sports.

Should I be skeptical of edges that are too large?

Wow, what an insightful question. Well done, reader! The answer is a hard yes. You absolutely should be skeptical when an edge gets too big. There’s no definitive threshold that should set off an alarm but I’d definitely advise skepticism if you see too big of a discrepancy. The reason for this is pretty simple: the market is very smart. If you haven’t already, you can check out my blog about where odds come from which will give some insights as to why books are hanging the numbers they are. If you’re seeing a 20% edge on the Astros and the over, maybe you’ve got Yordan Alvarez in the lineup and Dusty Baker just said he wasn’t going to play. Maybe the model spits out 15% on an under but upon further review you’re using a massive wind number in a domed stadium. Whatever the reason might be, it’s always good to be skeptical.

If 15% edges were consistently real, they wouldn’t be for long because sharps would hammer the 15% side and the number would move. So, as the saying goes, trust not large edges when the game is nigh. I just made that up but basically your skepticism of massive edges should be inversely correlated with the time remaining before the game. Those big positions exist when the lines open, but they likely won’t be around an hour before first pitch/tip-off/kick-off/puck drop/however else sports games start. The market matures and the huge edges die alongside that maturity.

You didn’t really answer the question in the title

Another astute observation. As is so often the case with bettors, I’m hesitant to put an exact number on something. However, the word professional implies betting for a living, so the lower end of the range is “a livable wage”. So you’re looking at mid-five figures as a left-bound constraint. The right-bound constraint is less of a hard stop — in theory there’s no limit to how much you can make betting on sports.

There are stories of people winning millions over years of efficiently exploiting holes in bookmakers’ prices. However, as any professional sports bettor will tell you, it’s not easy. And they won’t say that because it’s difficult to calculate numbers that beat the book… they’ll tell you it’s damn near impossible to get enough money down to make seven figure profits.

I’ll do an entire blog on this in the future, but most books will limit you to pennies if you show signs of being too sharp. This is where the real game begins. Professional bettors will find high-stakes bookies overseas, purchase accounts via lump sum or rev-share from high rollers with large limits (colloquially referred to as whales), or pay a runner to place their bets for them at the counter of a casino sportsbook.

So yes, the upside of sports betting is extremely high if you’re hard-working, crafty, and have a high risk tolerance. Not everyone can deal with getting stiffed for five figures and trying to dance around rules and regulations to get cash down. But for those determined enough, the fruits of the labor are ripe.

One last thing I’ll say here, and I touched on it earlier, is that professional bettors don’t have super high margins. They’ll cash in 2-3% and call it a fantastic year. Some elite bettors will push the number slightly higher. But overall, no one is winning consistently at 10-15%. The market is too efficient to allow that to happen.

Content recommendations

Connected to the beginning of this article: the movie Two For the Money starring Al Pacino and Matthew McConaughey is worth the watch. It’s about a guy who goes on a hot streak and becomes a prolific tout before going cold and getting in some deep shit with his handler. It shows how volatile sports betting is, how easily people are convinced by seemingly prophetic handicappers, and how the old school tout industry was all bullshit.

Until next time

As always, thank you for reading. I appreciate every single one of you and hope you will follow and interact with me on Twitter @Ben13Porter and subscribe to this newsletter. If you’re feeling extra generous, you can share it as well! Hope you enjoyed and I’ll speak to you all soon!