In the previous article we made some excellent preliminary considerations on how much you can earn with betting in a sports season, which I’ll briefly summarize for you (here’s the link to the article if you haven’t read it yet):
- setting measurable and achievable goals is the foundation to avoid falling into FOMO
- profit is a percentage calculation and should not be evaluated in Euros earned
- there are substantial differences with traditional banking investments
- the more risks there are, the higher our expected return must be
- we cannot settle for a +10% per year
- but as a first goal we must not lose
Good.. let’s go! You’ll see that the more you read this article, the more all the dots will connect and many light bulbs will turn on, which is why I started TheBettorDiary.
When talking about professional betting, there’s almost always a tendency to focus all attention on strategies, systems, indicators, and mathematical models. But there’s a factor often ignored, yet decisive for any sustainable path: the initial bankroll, or the capital you have available to start and that you want to “invest”.
Does bankroll size change everything (?)
Let’s make a simple example: imagine an annual return of 10%.
- With a capital of €1,000, at the end of the year you’ll have earned about €100. It’s a positive result, but objectively irrelevant: it doesn’t change your life.
- With a capital of €100,000, that 10% becomes €10,000. A significant amount.
And this is where one of the great deceptions of the betting world comes into play, and I tell you this for certain because I too a few years ago started thinking this way, thinking:
“Perfect, 20% annually is a lot, I just need to have a bankroll of €100,000 or very high anyway, so even if I earn a few percentage points I can still make good money”
A beautiful reasoning on paper, but unfortunately in reality it’s the death of the bettor, because it doesn’t take into account a decisive variable: who you’re playing against.
Option 1: you play against traditional bookmakers
There’s little to say here: bookmakers are perhaps the most protected entities in the entire world (with all the money involved it’s obvious that it’s so).
If you lose you’re welcome. Gifts, bonuses, red carpet.
If you win consistently and especially with significant amounts, you get limited in your bets or even blocked.
So your beautiful idea of placing €1,000 on each single bet and making little profit at a time, rest assured it will be nipped in the bud after a few weeks/months, especially if you also win a lot during that period.
As soon as you raise the amount of bets you immediately get “flagged” by the books, who will study your way of playing and if they find something that can hurt them, they’ll show you the door.
The absurd thing is that in many cases they don’t give you any explanation.
One of the most ridiculous situations that ever happened to me was with Sisal: from one day to the next (obviously after a winning period) I could no longer place any bets, the system always went into error. I ask customer support why they’re blocking me and they even have the nerve to reply that my account is not blocked, but that it’s a decision by the odds compilers (??? so they don’t work for you??? LOL). After the conversation they send me a bonus to play, which however I can’t play because my account is blocked. Science fiction.
Obviously Sisal entered my blacklist of bookmakers not to use, if I ever had the chance again in the future.
Closing this small anecdote though, what I want you to understand is that if you have a very high bankroll and want to make a low annual percentage, mathematics says you’ll have to bet amounts of: €1,000, €2,000, €5,000 with the result that your account will last from Christmas to Boxing Day.
Option 2: you play on exchanges (Betfair and similar)
Assuming I’d like to talk to whoever does the design for Exchanges (maybe they make these sites crappy on purpose to confuse you and make you click the wrong button), but the great news is that on Exchanges they don’t limit you because you’re not playing against the house, but against other players.
Fantastic right? We’ve solved our problem.
Not really because there’s another magic word that comes into play here: liquidity, or how much money has been put on that market and therefore how much you can win at most.
If you bet €10,000 on Juventus’s victory to understand, but on the other side there’s no one willing to give it to you in case of victory then the castle collapses.
This happens for 90% of the betting menu, where liquidity, especially in Italy is really very low. We’re not even talking about other sports besides football.
The famous big money that you’d like to bet, simply you won’t be able to bet it, except on very rare occasions and on specific matches and markets.
This dramatically limits your ability to play on many events and consequently your ability to build reliable long-term statistics, which connects to another tragic thing I see around..
The elephant in the room: statistics
Let’s also suppose that you manage to find a way to bet high amounts, without being limited, and that you start to see some winning operations and make a +5% on your starting capital. Great stuff right?
Did you do it with 5 operations, with 50 or with 500?
Because making +5% with 5 operations has no statistical value.
It can be compared to a great stroke of luck.
Making +5% with 500 operations is totally different.
It’s a solid, reliable result and above all… replicable over time!
Because negative variance exists and can destroy everything.
If you make few operations, you just need to hit the wrong month to ruin the previous 6 months.. and you know what this means?
That besides maybe losing money, you’ll have also lost a lot of time. I speak from experience because it happened to me in the past, where I believed that having a more “qualitative” approach was a winning move.
I see around pseudo miracle tipsters with ridiculous approaches.
They boast about being experts and having made +50% in a month, then you analyze and see that it was done with 3 winning operations out of 3 and with 20% stake on the bankroll (I really saw this!).
This is pure madness.
It’s easy to hit big when the coin lands on the right side. It’s impossible to sustain such numbers in the long term.
Usually after two months I see them disappear because they made -100% and closed everything.
I wonder why geniuses..
Ok, this article is also becoming very long so I’ve decided to split it further and in the third and final part we’ll put the dots together to reach the conclusion of our reasoning.. keep following us on TheBettorDiary.