Ask HN: Who Earns a Living of Betting?
Specifically advantage betting in soccer,NBA etc.
How did you get started? Do you do it full-time? What's your experience during corona?
How did you get started? Do you do it full-time? What's your experience during corona?
It's an interesting space, but don't expect to be profitable without investing 1-2 years of your time into building good models, infrastructure and data access. This already assumes you have that kind of freedom/capital and are able to stick with it through tough times. Also, edges can be fleeting, so it's a constant race against time and other players to find new opportunities. A bit similar to online poker. It was possible to be highly profitable with online poker 5-10 years ago, but over the last few years it has become very hard to impossible to beat the odds, so a lot of poker people have moved on to gambling on other things, sports betting included.
Would you say that there's a difference in the number of skilled / unskilled market participants in the stock market and in the betting markets? E.g. majority of market participants in the stock market are skilled institutional investors vs. majority of market participants in the betting market are casual bettors?
I'd say the same is true for betting. Your competition will vary depending on the market size and liquidity. Small unknown markets are typically not worth going after for large teams of highly-paid individuals. For example, you probably won't find as much competition betting on eSports events than betting on horses [0] (in jurisdictions where it's legal). So yeah, I think you're right that the professional competition in betting is probably a lot less than in the stock market.
Finding a market with the right characteristics is IMO the most important thing. If you're an individual, you ideally want to find small unknown and relatively illiquid markets where you can make enough money for yourself, but where it's not worth for large players to get into.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl...
I can't say too much as I was on the dev side of things not the stats modelling. But at a minimum you'd need a good statistical model, high quality data and a way to get great odds on your bets. If you can make the money using just Betfair (etc.) that is better because bookies are going to ban you if you are making smart bets so it's chicken/egg. You also need a big bankroll, for that inevitable stream of bad luck. And lots of little bets are of course better than small number of big bets that could wipe you out. I'm mostly here to say yes it's possible and can be very lucrative.
No corona experience.
Things were harder during corona but not impossible.