I assume you play poker as well? Is sports betting though your primary source of income?

If
so, and I know nothing about this, is sports betting as potentially +EV as poker, if you put the same amount of time and study etc into it?

Starting to get way off topic so last post about my income.

I use to play poker fairly seriously in the 90s but not really any more. I use to play 10/20, 20/40, 50/100 and now I **** around at low stakes stuff online. I moved and after playing underground games for years I didn't really feel comfortable in the new locations underground community. I then started driving to play but that was getting old. After 9/11 I took a break over concerns of long lines at the boarder and I never started again.

I have no idea. When I started playing poker and betting sports there was nothing to study. You couldn't go to Chapters and buy one of twenty plus books. There also was almost zero NL games. The games were a lot harder than they are now. It was a totally different situation. Same with sports betting. It is completely different now. The thing about sports that is different than poker is that it is scalable and that makes it the much better investment.

it's a little more complicated than that. if you win money from your bookie consistently he is not going to raise your limits if he thinks there's a chance you're have sharp information. bookies go to extraordinary lengths to cut people off who are taking the sharp side of every bet. the only way sports betting is scalable is to keep finding new people to place bets for you, which also cuts into your profits because you usually end up giving them a freeroll.

Nope. Just don't use amateurs and you won't have this issue. Any bookie that cares if someone wins or losses is horrible at his job and would be out of business in the first month of the season if he was handling the type of bets I make.

what kinda swings you encounter? like reak even months?

Also seriously start some kind of Q&A thread in OOT or soemthing about this. That would be pretty interesting. Ofcourse if your willing to do so. but you seem to invest quite alot of time in this forum anyway so that probably wont be a problem right?

I don't talk about dollar amounts for various reasons.

I also did a Q&A thing in OOT a while back and it turned out badly. I'm happy to meet most 2P2 but I don't want identifying information posted in public and someone dug up information so the topic had to be deleted.

this is not even close to true. i personally have been cut off from multiple bookies after winning as little as 20k taking sharp bets (betting and winning a lot of naked 2nd halfs for example). i am also personally involved with a sports betting syndicate so it's not like i'm making this up. also, this is detailed in the well regarded book: Smart Money (even if there are some distortions in that book, the general point i'm making is established definitively).
also, a close friend of mine works with this guy, yet another source that establishes my point (not that this link establishes my point, but just giving reasons why others reading this should trust me on this).

it's crap like this that make me think you really are just a troll. obviously you have a pretty consistent online persona so i still think it's likely you're real. but when you make claims like this i know you're faking at least part of your story. if you're winning 5 figures on a normal week from your bookie he will for sure place limits on you even if he doesn't cut you off totally (and obviously he's not going to increase your limits). this is almost as damning as your claim that you mostly eat filet mignon, since no one who eats steak as much as you do would have (or admit) filet as their favorite cut. and few people with your claimed education level would just dismissing evo psyc out of hand. i mean it's far from settled, but there is substantial evidence backing quite a bit of it. more and more of your story is falling apart i think, which makes me a bit sad for the amount of time i've wasted reading you.

Why would a bookie care if you win or lose if he balances out his book?

look i understand where you're coming from on this. for someone who's never actually bet before this is a question that makes sense. but in the real world people actually do get cut off. smart bookies know who the smart money is and know which sides of what bets are attracting the smart money. there are obviously advantages to having a balanced book, but there are also advantages that come from not taking bets from people who win every week. and theoretical arguments about why bookies should take your bets because it's a smart business practice just won't cut it here, because it is already a well-established fact that smart money has a hard time getting bets down.

If your bookie does not balance his book he is not doing his job. He is gambling. Now I realize plenty of bookies do this which is why they limit bets and why they don't last.

I've been using the same guy for over ten years. From day one I have never had any limits other than what he believes I can afford to pay. Even that he explained that as long as I show up with the funds he would take the wager. At this point that is no longer necessary because we have a good relationship. The only exposure he maintains is the multi-game wagers. He does not care who wins or losses because he makes exactly the same amount of money. The size of wagers we are talking about would wipe out a bookie if he left his book unbalanced and it didn't pan out. I wouldn't bet with someone who left himself exposed because it would only be a matter of time before he defaulted.

even if you have been able to take millions off of your bookie, you seem shockingly unaware of how this goes down for the rest of the world.

and there's no way that every bet you make balances his book. and there's no way that you're a profitable sports bettor if you only use one bookie and do not shop around for the best lines, because if he completely balances his book ever day he has to be moving lines, frequently away from the side you want to play.

No. Bookies who have a unbalanced book layoff the action to balance their book.

this is totally unrelated to the thread so i will stop derailing. but you still are talking theoretically and not about how this actually plays out. i take these last few posts as pretty definitive that you didn't actually make your money through sports betting. i was not lying when i said i was personally involved with a sports betting syndicate. the organization continually has accounts closed because of the amount they win and the type of bets they place. this is a well-documented and understood phenomenon. it's one thing to say you've been lucky enough to not experience it because you have the best bookie ever, it's another to be totally ignorant of this very common fact of sports betting.

ceczar,

Please feel free to hijack the thread with sportbetting stories and analysis.

I don't doubt that you have had these experiences when I started out I had issues with non-payment. Bookies wouldn't place limits but as soon as they lost too much they just wouldn't pay. This happened to me twice before I ended up with my current guy. You mentioned $20k and being cut off after winning that which means we are talking about very different amounts of money. If you are just dealing with random bar bookies or independent bookies then I can see this since these guys are likely using internet sites to layoff and so they are limited by the restrictions of online sites. I'm talking about a more organized bookie who has access to the means to layoff substantial wagers and is happy to make 10% of the low side. Every major city has at least one or two guys who do this kind of business so even if my experience is not common it also is not unique.