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The daily life of a professional bettor

The daily life of a professional bettor
I'm a professional trader, punter and tipster in football and horse markets. I have already written several articles for the Betting Academy, and I now take the opportunity to introduce myself and tell what is one day of my life as a professional gambler.

I begin by remembering that it is possible to make money from sports betting: it is not luck, it is mathematics.
by Josué Ramos   |   comments 0
Wednesday, April 14 2021

Today, all over the world, hundreds of billions of Pounds are traded in betting, that kind of thing would not happen if it did not make a profit and I am not talking about the profit only from bookmakers, but also from the professionals in the field.

The first question is, how is this possible?

And the answer is simple: mathematics allows this. Because a bookmaker wins with you losing the bet or winning, it doesn't matter because there is a commission that it puts on top of the projected odd, odd that is the probability of that possibility happening.

And the second question is, how does a gambler manage to be profitable in this game?

It's not a game to begin with. We bettors are not players, and sports betting is not a type of game of chance, this information is totally wrong. And the answer to this question is also simple and is similar to the first, because if the bookmaker puts her commission on top of the odds and wins anyway, the bettor does the same, and in the long run he manages to be profitable .

The difference is that the professional bettor seeks to identify misadjusted and wrongly made odds by bookmakers, thus gaining value in these lines and thus in the long run of a season, with much study, he manages to be profitable.

This has nothing to do with making a bet or making a mistake, a bettor does not aim to make a bet, he aims to bet on lines with proven values ​​in his mathematics.

Confused? Well, you shouldn't, see a gambler as an investor, because that's what we all are, contrary to what everyone thinks, we don't play with luck, but we rely on numbers.

I am not writing this article to teach probability classes, but basically sports betting is pure mathematics and the difference for other games that have the same mathematical basis, such as roulette, is that in sports betting you can extract value by the variables that are attributed to the events, a fact that does not let bookmakers reach real odds in the events.

It is precisely at this point that a great bettor stands out, as he manages to get closer to the real odds for that event than the bookmakers, this with much study and dedication.

In roulette, however, any bet you make is already mathematically losing in the long run, just study the bets on that type of game and do the math.

Another factor is, bets are a type of contract about who would be right in an event, so it is always strange to see sports bets framed in a game of chance, but we are in Brazil, a place where a poorly told lie has more credibility than the truth.

Just like any math fan, I don't believe in luck or bad luck, I think that everything that happens was supposed to happen, and if there was a possibility that it would happen, then there is a probability to describe it numerically.

The same study that managers, entrepreneurs do when opening a business, we gamblers also do to invest our money. So betting on the victory of a team is not so different than investing in a restaurant for example.

That is, sports betting is purely mathematical. We do not look for winners, but we aim to project the probabilities as correctly as possible and applying our knowledge in the sport, we evaluate the best choice and if the given probability is of value to invest ...

It's complex. We study for hours a day, we run as many hours for information, but when we ask an ordinary person how he imagines a professional gambler, the person either cannot describe the gambler, or describes the stereotypes that the cinema presents to them, being bored rich people or mobsters smoking Cuban cigars and living a life of drugs, women and crimes, and the reality is very different...

Today in Brazil we have some professional bettors, including traders, brokers, tipsters and punters who manage their own newsstands. Of those mentioned there are very few that have sports betting as their main income, most of them have bets as a source of extra income and even so, most of them are still a qualified professional in the medium, for making the bets only extra income.

MY EXPERIENCE AS A PROFESSIONAL BETTOR


Of those who have betting as a major source of income, few are punters, I know only 3 in Brazil and one of them is a well-known broker and tipster and does not have a bank of his own, but lives exclusively on sports betting. I fit into the group of just 3 punters who get most of their income from their own bankroll. It is more difficult to see professional punters managing a bank and living on it, than traders, since to be a professional trader and get good annual earnings it is not necessary to have very high banks, already in the punter market, with all the sincerity of the world, with less than 100 thousand you would almost go hungry.

In the beginning, being a trader helped me a lot to raise my income, but today dedicating my full time to trading is no longer necessary, so I focus on a few transactions a week and I focus on pre-live in markets with a lot of liquidity, where I can make few moves and make good profits out of them. Trading during the live of the event, I only trade in football and hand-picked games.

My routine starts at 5:00 am Brasília time without delay, and then it doesn't matter if I slept well or not, or if I turned up at night, because the market doesn't stop because of me. Today I am a bettor in two very different markets, football and horse racing and I also trade in both, but it is worth noting that the knowledge to be a trader in that market and to be a punter are totally different, so being a punter is a lot more work.

Think about it, wake up at 5 am, drink coffee and eat something, right after:
  • I do the first surveys at racetracks in Great Britain,
  • I see atmospheric conditions, terrain status 
  • I get the latest general information from some attendants who work at the event venues,
  • and then focus on the databases to project the odds for some pre-selected runs.

However, I alternate the days when I start studying horse racing, as there are days when I need to focus on opening the odds of certain football championships, which usually open around 5 am in Asian houses, generally I already have the lines projected on the night before the opening, in the morning I just confirm the lines and the odds and place my bets.


But in football, the confirmation part doesn't take long, half an hour or less, I confirm the lines, place my bets and I'm already free to focus on horse racing.

The studies of the horse market always finish around 8 am, then I send the betting tips to the groups of investors that hire me. After that I start writing predictions for the sites on which I provide this service. Which ends up being something very important in my routine, since during the writing of these predictions, I realize several times that the bet I was going to make, maybe it was not the best line for the event, because when we write about a confrontation, we analyzed the event in depth and did not miss anything, and then, what was good before looking only at the numbers, shows that it is not so good when analyzing more deeply, and this becomes something vital in my view.

I usually spend the whole day focused on betting, then I spend the day writing about. I take some breaks to watch some horse racing, sometimes I do some trading before the races, never during.

After lunch, I follow the same writing routine, but during the afternoon I usually take a lot of breaks, alternating a break between 1h30 of work so as not to stress me out. Because sometimes you spend so much time in front of a computer that you have to go out and talk to someone just to remember that you are still human.

Pauses are very important to avoid stress, I learned this in the worst possible way, but I know that physical and mental health must always be up to date, because being overloaded in any function gives you a bad harvest of the fruits of your work, in addition to compromise your health.

During the week, except on Champions days, I usually end my work at 4:30 pm and on Champions days I just wait for the game I'm watching to end. From 4:30 pm onwards I always have free time, since I don't bet as a punter in the live events and I handpick the games in which I will trade as a trader, I always have a lot of free time, the only days I work at night is when it's the last on the day of the round of some championship that I follow professionally in football, soon I wait for the round to end to project the lines, or in the case of MLS, I project before the last games start and then check some results to change one line or another. On the weekend I only work on Saturday morning trading as a trader in some Bundesliga game.

Everything that has been said sums up my days in the gambling profession. Speaking like this it seems that everything is very simple and calm, but at the same time that I am managing my own bank with 6 digits, I am a horse racing bettor, market where the variance is huge and the sequence of reds sometimes seems to never end. I have already had a loss of more than 40 thousand in a row in less than 1 month, which for a bank like mine, which intends to extract in a year something over 100 thousand in profit, is painful and frustrating. The important thing is not to lose your head or don't panic. Any red with the right job and without precipitation or nervousness recovers very quickly and naturally, so you can never lose your temper and force something.

What I didn't mention is that during the day we still have the exchange of information with other players, the capture of information from scouts, the search for information about the teams.

I don't comment much on it, but this search for information is always the factor that robs you the most time during the day, however I learned to optimize my time in this regard. Whenever I go to have a snack, have lunch, face a queue at a bank, or anywhere, where I stop for some reason, I open the notebook, or look at the cell phone, and browse news accessible on the large network. I look at the teams' social media pages, I look at forums that could have information about the teams, I talk to other punters and finally I see what my scouts have to show me.

Usually they only cover a few teams, send me hot news, about casualties, overdue salaries, split groups, injuries, changes in tactics, controversial statements, everything I need about a certain team. However, I don't have informants for all the teams in a league and I need to chase the rest of the news, but sometimes having internal information is always vital to increase the stake when betting, as well as contact with other bettors. respect in the scenario, because it helps a lot when thinking about a bet.

This is basically my work routine today, it used to be insane, mainly to try to increase the bankroll, nowadays it is calmer, but the responsibility has increased a lot. I like every part of this routine, I believe that each process is important for a good final product.

Today I have a well-defined banking management, I work for a whole year to close the profit and loss balance only at the end, so I take part of the profit to spend the next year and part of that profit goes back to the bank to increase it. The other part is imposed. Of the slice that I took to support myself during the year, I divide it into 14 parts, one for each month of the year and another for holidays, the fourteenth part is money for an emergency. Other than that, I still count on the income from my services as a tipster, writing for websites, working with investors and selling picks on branch websites, adding all this together with a good monthly salary.


This is basically my life as a betting professional, and I am still at the beginning of it, I like this line of work, I like the mathematical basis that is used in this, it is a profession that I will take for the rest of my life.

Many think that there is no financial stability with the bets and are completely mistaken, because management should be done as you do in a company, it is something simple, just think a little, because for you to profit with your company, the company needs to profit, betting is the same, however you do not depend on anyone, because your choices define your future.

You need to invest right and know how to calculate your variance, because you will have ups and downs during a season and this has nothing to do with luck or bad luck as it was said at the beginning, because sports betting is purely mathematical, and for mathematics, luck does not exist. So dribbling variance is a simple matter, all you need is patience and focus, keeping that in mind, you will have no problem leaving with a good profit from one season.


I talked about my routine and didn't introduce myself. My name is Josué Ramos, I am Brazilian, from Rio Grande do Sul, I live in the countryside of Rio Grande do Sul. I am a professional trader, punter and tipster. As a tipster I work for the biggest sites in the world of the industry, such as the Betting Academy, where I also already have several articles written by me. I am just at the beginning of a career, I have many goals yet to be reached and many others to be achieved, I still have a lot to learn and evolve within this market. This is just the beginning of the road.


I hope you enjoyed the article, a big hug and good profits to everyone.

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