Betting sports full time is not as easy, fun, or glamorous as it may seem. Work Required and Success Rates The standard vig (fee for the house booking your action) is 10% of whatever you bet. You must bet $110 to win $100, $220 to win $200, and so on. Get the latest Sports Betting Odds. At 888sport, we’re passionate about all kinds of sports betting, from odds on premier league football, to racing and tennis. We’re committed to providing a fun and responsible gambling environment for UK sports fans, so you can bet on the games and contests you love. Place bets online with us on a huge variety of sports, including. An Analyst Sees 36% Upside After fuboTV Enters Online Sports Betting The sports-first live streamer sees more deals like this coming. He hung up his badge and gun to take up a pen full time. Half Time/Full Time betting involves placing a bet on both the half time result and the full time result of a match in combination. A bet on the home team to win both halves is written as home team/home team whilst a bet on the away team to win the first half but go on to lose the game is written away team/home team. Can Sports Betting Be a Full Time Career Before you even start reading – we all know that the answer to that question is YES. Obviously there’s also a big BUT involved.
So you’re ready to make the jump to the big leagues? If you’re thinking about making the jump from a casual sports bettor to a professional, full-time bettor you’ve come to the right place. The idea of professionally betting sports is an alluring goal. Most people think it’s a job where you get to sleep in, kick on ESPN for a few hours, head to the books or online to make your bets, and then sit at home counting your stacks of $100 bills.
While sports betting as a profession can be very lucrative, it’s not always as great as people imagine it to be. There are a lot of people that attempt to make the jump and fall flat on their faces. Is this because they aren’t capable of being a professional sports bettor? Surprisingly, a lot of these failures do have the talent to crossover, but they try and make a move way too early in their career.
Today I want to look at what it takes to be a professional sports bettor. Most importantly I want to discuss when you should be looking to crossover and the implications that making the switch brings to the table. This blog is not meant to discourage anyone from taking their shot. The idea is to make sure that you make your move intelligently so that you have the best chance of survival and success.
Being a professional sports bettor is a tough job that will put a lot of gray hairs on your head. There are a lot of rough nights, last-second heartbreaks, and agonizing defeats. It does come with its spoils, though. If you think you’re ready to take your shot now or are researching how to prepare to take your shot, enjoy this blog. Hopefully, it helps you to decide if and when the right time to jump is.
Before we can go any further, we need to define what it means to be a professional sports bettor. Depending on who you ask you’ll probably get a lot of different definitions or rambling thoughts that don’t directly answer the question. The rule that I go by is that if 60% of your income or more comes from doing something you are a professional at it. If you make 60% or more of your money from betting on sports, then I would say you are a professional sports bettor.
Now, this does assume that you are making enough income to live off of. If you are unemployed and making $30 a week from sports betting you are technically making 100% of your income from sports betting. You’re not a professional in my book. It also assumes that you’ve been doing this for a reasonable length of time. If in your first month sports betting you make $5k, you’re not a professional in my book. If you’ve been making $5k a month for the past year, you’re a professional in my book. You may be on your way to becoming classified as a professional, but you aren’t there yet.
The operative word from that last sentence is ‘classified.’ Many people think being called a professional is a badge of honor that they try to earn. In reality, it’s nothing more than a distinction of what you’re doing for a living. You may also classify yourself as a professional gambler on your taxes. Other than that, though, it really doesn’t mean much at all.
People seem to get so worked up over the classification when they should be spending their time and effort on making money and winning bets. Let’s save the rest of that discussion for another day. For all intents and purposes, let’s assume that a professional sports bettor is someone who is making the majority of their income from betting on sports. The jump to full time is when you quit whatever else it is that you are doing to put food on the table and move over to betting sports full time.
Most people imagine that the switchover is a ‘jump’ like we have been calling it throughout this blog. They assume that it’s a single date on the calendar where you wake up, and suddenly you are a professional sports bettor. While there may be a few people that have made this sort of defined ‘jump,’ it’s not usually the case.
You see, going pro as a sports bettor should be something that happens naturally. It should be a smooth progression that you just fall into. If you constantly have to ask the question of whether or not you should go pro, chances are you aren’t ready yet to make the leap.
You should feel like you’re leaving money on the table if you don’t start betting full time. If you’re making so much in your spare time that you are constantly trying to find ways to spend more time to get more bets in, it may be time to switch over. If you aren’t doing so hot in your spare time but feel like with more time researching you could be a pro, you are probably not ready.
Sports betting is great because it’s something that you can develop proof of concept without taking the big leap. In business, entrepreneurs will attempt to prove their business idea on a small scale before they take the leap to scaling the company to as big as they want it. They also make sure that their small-scale proof of concept is capable of scaling and that the resources and conditions are there to support it.
What does this mean for you? This means you need to be crushing the books on the few bets you’re making in your spare time. You can’t be squeezing by and blaming it on a lack of time and resources. Once you get to this point, you have to evaluate if you’d be able to continue at the same rate by expanding your bets.
For example, let’s say you are looking to go pro betting on the UFC only. Are there more bets available for you to make or are you already betting every fight that you see value in? Do you have the bankroll to sustain betting larger amounts on the fights you’re already betting? Will you be able to mentally handle the swings if you go on a bad run? Will you be able to handle the mental pressure when you know you have to win to feed your family?
Those questions are a great segue into this section on understanding the implications of becoming a professional sports bettor. As a casual bettor who still has their normal job, you have a backup plan. If your sports betting results go to the gutter, you always have your other source of income to keep you going.
But what happens if you go on a terrible run when you don’t have a backup income? Well, the answer is I don’t know. You’d probably be forced to try and hopefully find work quickly before things got too bad. Often this is the first chapter of some terribly depressing gambling stories. Again, I am not trying to deter you from making professional sports betting your goal. I just want to make sure that you fully understand what you’re getting yourself into before you take the plunge.
Decisions get tougher when you need to pay rent. It’s easy to pick winners when the money doesn’t mean much outside of extra spending cash. It gets tough when you have to block out the mental worry when you need the money to pay your bills and keep up your livelihood. Add in a significant other, or a family to the equation and things get even tougher.
I went over a lot of things today that hopefully got your mind thinking. Maybe some of you were ready to make the jump and have decided to slow things down. Maybe some of you are now more confident that you’re ready to give it a go.
If you’re still on the fence, remember the following. Sports and sports betting will be around forever. If it takes you months to get to your goal of betting professionally, that’s ok. If it takes you years to get there, that’s ok too. Sports betting isn’t like a technology boom that is going to go away anytime soon. The ability to make money and find value is not going to go away.
I can promise you that the betting public has no plans of instantly getting better at sports betting and wipe out all the value opportunities. If you don’t believe me, go to your local sportsbook or sports bar and talk strategy with a few people. You’ll quickly find that the value will be there for years to come thanks to the combined ignorance of the betting public.
I want to close by reiterating the whole point of this post. Don’t make the jump to full time unless you are 100% confident that you are ready to do it. You may never get a second opportunity. If you have family or significant others who you have to convince, you may only get one shot. They might support you the first time, but if you fail, they might never get behind you again.
Take things slow and best of luck. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side, but there are some really nice green patches if you follow the right road.
In this article we introduce you to another interesting betting strategy which has become more and more popular throughout the last years. With this online strategy, you bet on the half-time result as well as the full-time result. You can find out how that works and how you can win those bets in the following paragraphs. Enjoy!
A half-time/full-time bet is a special betting variant of the usual half-time bet, and belongs to the category double bets. The only difference is, that at these bets, you bet on BOTH the standing at half-time as well as the result after the full-time. This type of bet is very similar to scorecast/wincast betting.
Important: A half-time/full-time bet is only successful if you predicted the half-time standing AND the full-time result correctly. The only precondition of this bet is that the event has to be interrupted by a break.
The following table gives a visual overview of a half-time/full-time bet, and should help you to understand this betting strategy. The odds indicated in the table are realistic and show the differences between the 9 different outcomes of a game.
tip | halftime | fulltime | odds |
1/1 | home-team leads | home-team wins | 3,25 |
1/X | home-team leads | draw | 13,50 |
1/2 | home-team leads | away-team wins | 28,25 |
X/1 | draw | home-team wins | 5,50 |
X/X | draw | draw | 5,10 |
X/2 | draw | away-team wins | 10,25 |
2/1 | away-team leads | home-team wins | 23,50 |
2/X | away-team leads | draw | 13,75 |
2/2 | away-team leads | away-team wins | 6,20 |
As a typical example we chose three bets from the German Bundesliga and decided on three different half-time/full-time bets.
The first bet is 2/1,where we bet on an Away-Team lead at half-time and a Home-Team win after 90 minutes. The second bet is as easy as it appears. We bet on a half-time Home-Team-Lead, and a Home-Team-Win at full-time – a classic 1/1-bet. In the third bet we guessed that the Home-Team would lead after 45 minutes, but in the end the two teams would draw.
Visit our German Bundesliga betting tips section where we give you a good insight into the most important games of the highest league in Germany, and provide you with information so you can place your bets in the best manner possible.
The popularity of this betting form spreads out into almost every sport. As mentioned earlier, as long as the games are separated into (at least) two periods, you can bet on a variety of different sports.
Although football games are leading the way, other sports like rugby, American football or basketball have often been used for half-time/full-time bets. A special form constitutes ice-hockey games which, most people know, are separated into three thirds. Nevertheless, a few betting sites offer wagers where you can bet on the standings after the first, second or third in combination with the result after the full game. In our sports betting tips section you also get information about half time full time tips.
These bets are most revered for their usually high odds. Bets on a team to lead at half-time but lose at full-time generally go hand in hand with odds between 20 and 30. To play half-time/full-time bets profitably, we suggest specialising on favourite wins.
As an example, look for games in which the favourite (Home-Team) diplay odds of about 1.50 to win. Then place two single bets. In the first you bet on 1/1. That means you bet on a Home-Team-Lead after 45 minutes and a Home-Team-Win after 90 minutes. As a second bet place an X/1-wager where the half-time standing can be a Draw, but in the end the Home-Team goes away with the win again. In this way you can gain the best profit out of these bets.
You can probably recognise that this strategy is, as described, the most lucrative. This is because, even if you guess every third bet wrong, you will still obtain money due to the high odds of the half-time/full-time bets. You can also try half-time/full-time betting as a system or yankee bet.