You can't win in games of luck longterm. I'll give you that Martingale might work to a certain extent, but mathematically it doesn't work as well and I wouldn't recommend playing Martingale.

In contrast to games of luck like dice, roulette etc. there is games of skill and betting/poker fall into that category. Betting/poker are often considered games of luck, even by lawmakers and authorities, but they are not. You don't need any luck to win with betting/poker longterm. I think you can even be a general unlucky person and still make money with these


I'll say it again: You don't need any luck to be profitable playing betting/poker. You can completely discard luck longterm.

House edge is not really important in betting. By shopping for the best odds (= having a big portfolio of bookmakers and check where you get the best odds for a particular bet), you can often play without any house edge at all or a very low one. And you don't need to bet and shouldn't do so, if you think there is too much house edge (i.e. odds are too low).

By reading your posts, I get the impression, that you never actually placed a bet and this is not meant as an offense (it's actually a good thing, if you never did). It's always hard to explain the concept of value to a non-betting person and as you see, I am struggling a bit with explaining it you or you struggle to understand what I mean. So, if you are really interested in learning something about value, you could maybe google a bit for it and find some better explanation, than I can give at the moment. If you do, it's really important, that you distinguish between games of luck vs games of skill - they are different animals.

I just got finished reading the entire thread (good job, I thoroughly enjoyed it) and I don't think I saw anybody ask this question:

Is there any one sport/league that you find to be particular easy in terms of spotting a bargain?

And going in the opposite direction, which sport/league do you find the most difficult to make a correct pick?

I talked a bit about that here:


And this was maybe the worst experience, since it was something that never happened before. For the first 3.5 years, the only direction I knew was up. And then suddenly nothing was going my way anymore and I couldn't understand what is happening, because I didn't change anything with my betting style. It was two months, where even a 1.01 bet would lose easily for me. I more or less kept going as stated in the quote, but lowered my stakes of course (also due to the fact, that I was staking a percentage of my betting bank always and that bank was shrinking all the time). Also talked to my fellow punters and they tried to help me with giving more bets of their own and bring back some confidence with winning those. So slowly but surely I got back on track and was able to win again.

Looking back, it was a mix of greed, variance and getting a bit too cocky and/or thinking the (betting) world is mine. I learned my lesson and it made me aware of the fact, how fast this business is and that it can be over any day. So you better not make too longterm-ish plans and take nothing for granted.

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The worst single event of bad luck, was a football match in Champions League. I don't recall exactly whom played whom (tried to search for it, but no luck), I only know it was Bayern Munich playing an away game and I had a bet on the over 3.5 goals. It was 2-1 for Bayern and 3 minutes of injury time were added. The other team had a corner with one minute left to play. The goalie decided to move upfront as well and all 22 players were in or around the Bayern box. A Bayern defender headed the ball away and Paulo Guerrero from Bayern picked it up and ran uncontested towards the empty goal to make it 3-1 and win the bet for me. When Guerrero was past midfield already, the referee blew the final whistle at 92:30 minutes and I couldn't believe my eyes (well, more my ears to be precise). Match ended 2-1 then, with 30sec less played than announced.

I felt robbed and had to buy a new keyboard afterwards, since it hit the wall and didn't survive


Thank you for your feedback buddy.

It's not any particular sport/league that makes it easy to find valuable odds, but more the lower and smaller you go in general. If we look at the NFL, there is really not much hidden or inside information. It's well covered, any stat you can think of is available and news spread very fast. So gaining an edge is very hard there, unless you have a very well developed gut feeling.
Now if you go to Canadian Football League things are different. It's not that well covered, because the public interest in it is not that big. There you are able find some useful information and angles to make profitable bets - if you put in the work.
When you even go one step lower and shift your interest on lets say the German (american) Football League, there is even more information to be found. And in these leagues, the bookmakers don't bother to make any research themselves. They have their statistic models/algorithms and just put the odds up without looking further into it. With you checking the regional newspapers, checking the teams website, reading forums etc., you can get information that is not priced in in the odds. This could be some flu going around in the locker room, some players missing the game because of university exams (they are amateurs and not pros in GFL), some fresh injury to the QB, things like that.

I can give you an actual example of how such information made me some money. It was the last race in winter sports Cross-Country World Cup Season some years ago. For a german athlete it was his last race and he retired afterwards. It was a 15km race and you are allowed to change your ski during the race. That german dude announced the day before, that he would, to honour the sport and his career, change his ski mid-time during the race and instead of using the modern, high-tech skis, he would use some wooden, oldschool skis that people used to wear in the 1960´s. Such wooden skis are probably nice and it was a good gesture of him using them in some pro race nowadays, but there is no way that you can be competitive with these Bookmakers didn't know or didn't bother and still offered a H2H bet involving this athlete. My friend and me placed max bet on his opponent at every bookmaker where this H2H was available. While being on his modern skis, the german dude and his H2H opponent were still together in the pack, but after putting on his wooden skis (and just running for fun), he lost lots of time of course and finished down 5 minutes to our guy. It was easy money for us and such valuable information can often be found in smaller leagues and non-mainstream sports.

The hardest sports/league to bet on for me, and where I actually had some bets, is Baseball (MLB). Results there are very random and the sheer amount of games played (sometimes twice a day) just makes a single game not that important for the players. They play 162 regular season games and swing their bats nearly every day. So they don't bother a lot with losing on any given day - the next game will be just tomorrow. You can already see the difficulty betting the MLB by looking at the odds. You rarely see a team priced below 1.60 and that already shows how random the results in MLB are. Even if the worst team plays the best team, you will have quite balanced odds. And with not much valuable extra information to be found, this for me is the hardest sport to bet on. NBA and NHL are not any better btw. NFL is a bit different in that regard from the Big4 in US, because with only 16 regular season games, every game is very important and NFL players tend to have some pride, even when 0-10 for the season.

This clarifies all the things I'm wondering about gambling, I hope all the gamblers and those people that wants to try gambling should consider these pieces of advice of yours for them to avoid diving too deep in the realm of gambling world. But since most of the gamblers are hotheaded jerks, I bet they are just going to laugh at this when they read such advice, oh well, can't blame though, since it is their own money and decision.


This hit home, mate, this is true as hell. I hope they don't misunderstand the whole thing you've just said.

I always believe that making money in sports betting is possible, if you can advise how much bankroll you think would be a decent for a start and how do you manage that bankroll? I am gambling for long term like the whole season of the NBA, or do you cash out more often when you are in profit or you will just wait until the season is over?

Fully support this reasoning

And it goes far beyond just poker or gambling in general. Such an attitude, in its generalized form, is applicable to how we live our lives, altogether. To be more specific, you can be very well off overall like having a handsome stash of bitcoins (let's talk cryptocurrency here as it seems appropriate), but you may still be somewhat short of cash money, and that will keep you extremely focused and alert on looking out for earning opportunities even if you could just spend your bitcoins and fill your boots to your liking (though that would make you lazy and idle)

I've watch a related movie regarding this topic, The movie title is "Rounders" it's about making gambling as profession and a source of income, can't believe that it is actually happening in real world, after reading your thread I have a several question.

-Does your base capital everyday/when you play, is always equal? and what is your exiting point when you are gonna quit on that day? For example if you reach x3 you will quit and call it a day.
-If you lose your money how are you going to get back into the game?

This is just basic questions, I really want to know how are you going to get back on your feet if you get a bad beat in poker or in any game.

First of all: Thank you very much for this very interesting thread. I would love to hear some figures, too, but it's very understandable that you don't talk about them

We all know that gambling is (or can be) very addictive. I read that you eg. quit on a losing streak, which is one of the most important things to do to keep a healthy balance and don't get in the struggle of "I have to win back my losses asap" and become slowly addicted. Are there any additional suggestions you could give to an rather unexperienced gambler (like me) so that he or she doesnt fall for common traps and end up losing way too much money?

I'm studying up from a lot of what the boom brought out. It became a game of solvers and pure math for many of them, also online made it possible to rack up a lot of hands combined with HUD's for reads. The materials I see mostly point out to playing x hands this way pre-flop because over 10 000 hands it's +ev, or making this re-reaise or bluff here for the same reason. Tournaments get trickier as they talk about all the moving pieces as the levels progress and stack sizes change, not to mention Itm pressure. When it comes to cash they say it's more straight forwards and it's about getting stacks in when the numbers say you are +ev. They don't deny that there are still moments where you can exploit a player, but that overall you should have a range and play it the same way each time thinking of the long term.

I found that with the wealth = aggressive play is more prevalent making your way through a micro stakes tournament. I used to only play those as they were fun and I could get a lot of time out of the 1$ or less buy-in. It lost it's fun factor though when re-buys became more prevalent as so many people would spew off or jam all-in and say chill out it's only an 1$ tournament. I have always assumed that higher stakes don't really run the same, as most are there trying to play a higher level... unless you watch the Triton cash games  
Watching some cash game vlogs you definitely see some though that are willing to bluff jam for 100's if not 1000's just because, all you can hope for is to have them beat I guess.