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Comment by ano-ther | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, the gambling platforms restricted them after they got too successful.

This is from 2017, so I am wondering if the strategy would still work (and how much faster they would be blocked).

In a recent interview with Nate Silver, he talks about how it’s basically impossible to make sustained edge from online sports books. They just ban you if you consistently make large, winning bets.

Anyone who makes a living off of sports betting is paying other people to put the bets down for them. Even the in person casinos will ban you if you win too much.

How has this survived legally? Only non-winners are allowed to gamble?

Yeah it’s extremely sketchy but legal. Sports betting is treated as a game offered on the casino’s terms and they get to choose who and for how much they’ll play with. You can see it in the financials of the big companies. Where the theoretical win for the casino on most sports bets is around 5%, DraftKings and the others are regularly hitting 3x that much. They ban/limit winners and push everyone else toward bad bets (e.g. same game parlays).

This has always been the case throughout history. The difficult part of winning big or consistently is not doing the probability judgments or expected value computations -- it's getting the counterparty to pay you.

The actual long-term winners have to win small and inconspicuously.

> This is from 2017, so I am wondering if the strategy would still work

Knowing the gambling industry, I bet it doesn’t work now

Knowing the gambling industry, it likely does still work, they just ban you if you use it.

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