This is great, congratulations

My betting bank grows/shrinks on a daily basis, or lets say on the days I actually bet, since I don't bet every day. If I had a winning day, my bank would be bigger starting the next day, if I had a losing day it will be lower. But I am actually recalculating my bank after every bet I make - the bet is considered a loss until I know the outcome and my betting bank will be lower for the next bet. My stakes go a bit up and down all the time, since I am staking flat (see one of the earlier posts from today).

And my bank shrinks of course, when I withdraw money to pay for expenses.


See here at the bottom.


If I lose all my money, I would have to quit of course Losing bets, losing weeks and losing months are part of the game and you have to deal with it.

How I deal and dealt with it, you can re-read here and here.

This is my embarrasing result:

• Coin Toss Winner Chiefs / 49ers WON
• First 1st Down Chiefs / 49ers LOST
• First Scoring Method Touchdown / Field Goal / Other  LOST
• First Touchdown Scorer Jersey Number Over 26.5 / Under 26.5 / None LOST
• First Team to Call the Time Out Chiefs / 49ers WON
• Team Scoring First to Win the Match   Yes / No LOST
• Super Bowl Winner   Chiefs / 49ers WON
• Total Over 53.5 / Under 53.5 LOST
• Any Player to Score Multiple Touchdowns   Yes / No LOST
• Total Interceptions in the Match Over 1.5 / Under 1.5 LOST
• Missed Field Goal in the Match? Yes / No LOST
• Longest Field Goal Scored Over 47.5 / Under 47.5 / None LOST
• Total Touchdowns in the Match   Over 6.5 / Under 6.5 / None LOST
• P. Mahomes Total Passing Yards Over 300.5 / Under 300.5 LOST
• Last Team to Score   Chiefs / 49ers WON

4 out of 15, a monkey can do better.

And when you then have a look at the leaderboard and see people getting 13 out 15 this is just unbelievable, considering all these bets were a flip of a coin more or less.



Our little internal contest here in this thread was a disaster for me too, so not much to cheer about.

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Tough loss for the 49ers. They looked in control, had a solid lead and that bomb from Mahomes to Hill changed the whole momentum. 49ers defense was very good throughout the whole game and got a lot of pressure on Mahomes, but that one play ruined it all. It was a few plays here and there in the end that decided the winner and probably the fact of Mahomes being more clutch than Garropolo (that overthrow to Sanders was poor). Happy for Andy Reid though and the 49ers have a bright future ahead of them, if they are able to keep the core pieces together.

Have a great offseason everyone, free agency and the draft should give some food for discussion the latest again.

This is a hard question, since I don't know how much money you have, how much money you need (to make) etc.

But I can give you the most important advice: start small.
If you want to give it a try, to make a bit of regular income with betting, I would advise to take some money, put it aside for betting and consider it lost for the time being. This can be any amount, but it has to be money, that you can afford to lose. This would be your starting bank to start the journey then and you should always look to protect your bank in first place.

I personally play flat stakes, which means I stake a percentage of my betting bank on each bet and recalculate the bank afterwards. I don't always stick strictly to that; if there is a very valuable bet, I might stake more, vice versa with some huge gamble bet. The percentage per bet should be somewhere around 1-2% mark. So if I have lets say 1000,- as my bank and decide to have 2% per bet, I would stake 20,-. After having placed a bet, my bank would have shrinked to 980,- and the next bet would only be 19,60. Same goes for if my bank grows, then I would be "allowed" to stake more.

Flat staking is not the most efficient way of a money management (since you play bets with different value with the same amount), but I am most comfortable doing it this way. In NBA I guess you play in the odds range from 1.9-2.1 most of the time, so flat stakes are an ok-ish way to manage your stakes.
Another commonly used money management is the Kelly System - or a variation of it. You can google for it. With the Kelly System you stake each bet different, depending on the amount of value it has. The exact value of a bet is often hard to tell, so if you are very wrong with the evaluation of value for a bet, you might overstake heavily. For a beginner, I would recommend to start with flat stakes and as you get better with time, you can look into staking more with Kelly.

A friend of mine is doing Kelly, but he is not sitting there calculating the value, he has the value of a bet in his mind/gut feeling. With experience, you don't need to strictly calculate the value, but you know if a bet has low, good or tremendous value and stake accordingly.

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I cash out regularly, because I need the money to cover my expenses and pay my bills. And you don't need to have all your betting bank spread among all the bookmakers you use. You will never need it all, unless you play like 1000 bets simultaneously. Normally you just use like 10% of the bank all the time at once and the remaining 90% just sits there untouched. You should have some money in every bookmaker you use regularly, then some money in BTC, Skrill, Neteller, Ecopayz, credit card to have money available fast for some good bet, a new bookmaker, whatever. The rest can remain in your bank account.

First, I don't have any experience in high stakes poker as well

Just wealth will get you nowhere in poker though. There have been quite a few celebrities and/or rich businessman that played with the pros and I don't remember any of them being successful with it. A millionaire playing a 0.01 BTC tourney like you mentioned surely has some mental advantage since he isn't bothered about losing that money and is less pressured with it, but you can't beat skill in poker. In such a tournament, you might have lots of people that get intimidated by an aggressive playing style, but you will also have players, who are not and will beat you skill-wise.

The thing with not being bothered by losing (huge amounts) is, that it will also make you lazy and not being focused. You just want to have fun and don't work on improving your game. Being pressured and alert is necessary to keep your concentration up. So, if you don't bother, you are likely to make bad decisions.

If you are playing a $10k buy-in tourney and it's big money for you and you are scared of losing that money, you shouldn't play such a tourney in first place. This is just a matter of good bankroll management. I don't know the exact number, but there is this rule, that you should have like 100 buy-ins for your limit. So by playing a $10k tourney, you should have at least a $1.000.000 bankroll. If you only have $100 as a bankroll, then you should only play $1 tourneys.

The poker boom some decade ago has brought up a young generation of loose-aggressive players. They very much changed the whole game, which up until then was more of an old mens game, who were playing more tight-ish. These young people were pretty successful and gave the oldies a good run for their money, because they couldn't adapt. But there are also tight players, that are successful.

We can see lots of aggressive players being successful, but what we don't see, is all the aggressive players that fail - and that is the overwhelming majority. Even with an aggressive playing style and being "rich", you have to know what you are doing (often times it's already suffice, if you know, what you are better NOT doing). And not everyone likes to play aggressive, you should play the way it suits your style and not try to force something that just isn't there. You should always work on many aspect of your game - and that can be getting more aggressive - but a change to a playing style that is totally opposite to your temperament won't work as well imo.

In general, having a good financial background definitely helps you mentally, but it's only one of many ingredients of being successful in poker.

I am not studying any stats in NFL tbh and rarely do in other sports as well. Reason for that is, that I don’t see any added value, since everybody has those stats available and I am not delusional to think I am the best in drawing conclusions out of stats (i.e. beating algorithms). The foundation for the odds is always stats, so hard to find an angle with stats, if they are already priced in.

I am mostly watching lots of NFL games and rely on my gut feeling. But NFL is really hard to bet on and I am just doing it for fun.

Would be cool though, if you give it a try nevertheless next season and share your picks here.

Great position the 49ers are in now imo. Chiefs D has been pretty good in first half, but regressed a bit nearing halftime. I would expect the 49ers running game to wear them down in second half.

Happy for Juszczyk to get that TD, I have a soft spot for the dying species of FB's.

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Some bets from the Sportsbet Promo have already been decicded (and I was wrong with a lot of them, although it started good with SF winning the coin toss^^):

• Coin Toss Winner   Chiefs / 49ers
• First 1st Down   Chiefs / 49ers
• First Scoring Method   Touchdown / Field Goal / Other
• First Touchdown Scorer Jersey Number   Over 26.5 / Under 26.5 / None
• First Team to Call the Time Out   Chiefs / 49ers
• Team Scoring First to Win the Match   Yes / No (SF scored first)
• Super Bowl Winner   Chiefs / 49ers
• Total   Over 53.5 / Under 53.5
• Any Player to Score Multiple Touchdowns   Yes / No
• Total Interceptions in the Match   Over 1.5 / Under 1.5
• Missed Field Goal in the Match?   Yes / No
• Longest Field Goal Scored   Over 47.5 / Under 47.5 / None
• Total Touchdowns in the Match   Over 6.5 / Under 6.5 / None
• P. Mahomes Total Passing Yards   Over 300.5 / Under 300.5
• Last Team to Score   Chiefs / 49ers

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Thanks There were lots of great users applying and I think any of them would have deserved it.

The most satisfactory feeling in gambling is a combination of both. That means putting in lots of work for the first process, doing research, looking for valuable information, analyzing the stats, run through different scenarios and slowly putting all the pieces together. Based on all the details you gathered, you would then place a bet or play a game and enter process two. This is watching it all unfold just the way you anticipated and analyzed it beforehand. In a perfect world you would then collect your money in process three. This process also involves some learning effect, i.e. you realize that hard work pays off. 

In reality, process 1-3 often go in different directions, which can be quite weary, but you can still learn from it. You don't learn as much from winning as you do from losing. By improving the preparation process, the outcomes will also get better. And it should always be your #1 priority to get the process right first, the rest will follow automatically.

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The appeal with lotteries is the dream factor. Hitting the Jackpot will be a life-changing thing and make you financially independent. And by playing lotteries, you can be a millionaire in your mind for quite some time and think about all the nice things you would buy or things you could do then. You can daydream for a bit, which is quite nice and also important imo. The only problem only is: Reality will kick in fast again. Most likely at least.

Because the Commonwealth is so big and cricket has a huge tradition in these countries. Just look at India; they have a population of around 1.34bln (17.5% of the world population) and if I am not mistaken, Cricket is the favourite sport there - one of the few countries, where soccer isn't #1.

Check table tennis sitting at #6. This is mainly because chinese people are crazy about table tennis and they even have slightly higher numbers population-wise than India.

Same goes for Field Hockey, which then again is a big deal in India and quite popular in a lot of other countries (Pakistan, a lot of western Europe countries).

I am watching some MLS games from time to time and think a good amount of fans/spectators is people with european and south-american roots. Now in the US most people have roots from all over the world, but I am more talking about people that live in the US in first or second generation. They are used to soccer being their main sport and probably all have a favourite team in their motherland and "live" soccer from a young age. Now residing in the US, they just look for some soccer stadium feeling and thus attend the games of their local team and have some fun.

The MLS is a very international league with lots of foreign players from all over the world, so these fans can also find some compatriot to support in the teams. And then there is some big names, like Zlatan, Schweinsteiger, who people like to see doing their job live and while still living in Europe were not able to.

EPL is of course the biggest league in all of football, so it's just normal that there is fans everywhere. La Liga being quite popular in the US is probably due to all the hispanic diaspora. It's easier to follow a league/sports if you understand the language it is mostly covered in, can read the news, join discussions in forums etc. And La Liga, with those two big giants Real and Barca are, always catches international interest of course anyway.

I talked a bit about that here:


And this was maybe the worst experience, since it was something that never happened before. For the first 3.5 years, the only direction I knew was up. And then suddenly nothing was going my way anymore and I couldn't understand what is happening, because I didn't change anything with my betting style. It was two months, where even a 1.01 bet would lose easily for me. I more or less kept going as stated in the quote, but lowered my stakes of course (also due to the fact, that I was staking a percentage of my betting bank always and that bank was shrinking all the time). Also talked to my fellow punters and they tried to help me with giving more bets of their own and bring back some confidence with winning those. So slowly but surely I got back on track and was able to win again.

Looking back, it was a mix of greed, variance and getting a bit too cocky and/or thinking the (betting) world is mine. I learned my lesson and it made me aware of the fact, how fast this business is and that it can be over any day. So you better not make too longterm-ish plans and take nothing for granted.

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The worst single event of bad luck, was a football match in Champions League. I don't recall exactly whom played whom (tried to search for it, but no luck), I only know it was Bayern Munich playing an away game and I had a bet on the over 3.5 goals. It was 2-1 for Bayern and 3 minutes of injury time were added. The other team had a corner with one minute left to play. The goalie decided to move upfront as well and all 22 players were in or around the Bayern box. A Bayern defender headed the ball away and Paulo Guerrero from Bayern picked it up and ran uncontested towards the empty goal to make it 3-1 and win the bet for me. When Guerrero was past midfield already, the referee blew the final whistle at 92:30 minutes and I couldn't believe my eyes (well, more my ears to be precise). Match ended 2-1 then, with 30sec less played than announced.

I felt robbed and had to buy a new keyboard afterwards, since it hit the wall and didn't survive


Thank you for your feedback buddy.

It's not any particular sport/league that makes it easy to find valuable odds, but more the lower and smaller you go in general. If we look at the NFL, there is really not much hidden or inside information. It's well covered, any stat you can think of is available and news spread very fast. So gaining an edge is very hard there, unless you have a very well developed gut feeling.
Now if you go to Canadian Football League things are different. It's not that well covered, because the public interest in it is not that big. There you are able find some useful information and angles to make profitable bets - if you put in the work.
When you even go one step lower and shift your interest on lets say the German (american) Football League, there is even more information to be found. And in these leagues, the bookmakers don't bother to make any research themselves. They have their statistic models/algorithms and just put the odds up without looking further into it. With you checking the regional newspapers, checking the teams website, reading forums etc., you can get information that is not priced in in the odds. This could be some flu going around in the locker room, some players missing the game because of university exams (they are amateurs and not pros in GFL), some fresh injury to the QB, things like that.

I can give you an actual example of how such information made me some money. It was the last race in winter sports Cross-Country World Cup Season some years ago. For a german athlete it was his last race and he retired afterwards. It was a 15km race and you are allowed to change your ski during the race. That german dude announced the day before, that he would, to honour the sport and his career, change his ski mid-time during the race and instead of using the modern, high-tech skis, he would use some wooden, oldschool skis that people used to wear in the 1960´s. Such wooden skis are probably nice and it was a good gesture of him using them in some pro race nowadays, but there is no way that you can be competitive with these Bookmakers didn't know or didn't bother and still offered a H2H bet involving this athlete. My friend and me placed max bet on his opponent at every bookmaker where this H2H was available. While being on his modern skis, the german dude and his H2H opponent were still together in the pack, but after putting on his wooden skis (and just running for fun), he lost lots of time of course and finished down 5 minutes to our guy. It was easy money for us and such valuable information can often be found in smaller leagues and non-mainstream sports.

The hardest sports/league to bet on for me, and where I actually had some bets, is Baseball (MLB). Results there are very random and the sheer amount of games played (sometimes twice a day) just makes a single game not that important for the players. They play 162 regular season games and swing their bats nearly every day. So they don't bother a lot with losing on any given day - the next game will be just tomorrow. You can already see the difficulty betting the MLB by looking at the odds. You rarely see a team priced below 1.60 and that already shows how random the results in MLB are. Even if the worst team plays the best team, you will have quite balanced odds. And with not much valuable extra information to be found, this for me is the hardest sport to bet on. NBA and NHL are not any better btw. NFL is a bit different in that regard from the Big4 in US, because with only 16 regular season games, every game is very important and NFL players tend to have some pride, even when 0-10 for the season.

Vielen Dank für die Glückwünsche und Komplimente. Nachdem aundroid und mole0815 bereits verdienterweise aufgenommen wurden, waren die Chancen für einen zumindest Teilzeit-DACH-Poster eher gering, aber ich treibe mich halt auch viel und gerne im gambling Bereich rum und versuche dort ein wenig Qualität - in die doch oftmals sehr spammige, shitpostige Gemengelage - zu injizieren. Das gelingt mal besser und mal schlechter, aber noch ist die Hoffnung für diese Boards/Threads da nicht verloren

You can't win in games of luck longterm. I'll give you that Martingale might work to a certain extent, but mathematically it doesn't work as well and I wouldn't recommend playing Martingale.

In contrast to games of luck like dice, roulette etc. there is games of skill and betting/poker fall into that category. Betting/poker are often considered games of luck, even by lawmakers and authorities, but they are not. You don't need any luck to win with betting/poker longterm. I think you can even be a general unlucky person and still make money with these


I'll say it again: You don't need any luck to be profitable playing betting/poker. You can completely discard luck longterm.

House edge is not really important in betting. By shopping for the best odds (= having a big portfolio of bookmakers and check where you get the best odds for a particular bet), you can often play without any house edge at all or a very low one. And you don't need to bet and shouldn't do so, if you think there is too much house edge (i.e. odds are too low).

By reading your posts, I get the impression, that you never actually placed a bet and this is not meant as an offense (it's actually a good thing, if you never did). It's always hard to explain the concept of value to a non-betting person and as you see, I am struggling a bit with explaining it you or you struggle to understand what I mean. So, if you are really interested in learning something about value, you could maybe google a bit for it and find some better explanation, than I can give at the moment. If you do, it's really important, that you distinguish between games of luck vs games of skill - they are different animals.

Jein. Die ganzen BTC-zahlenden Kampagnen, die zur Zeit für viele attraktiver sind, sind hop-on/hop-off Sachen im wöchentlich Rhythmus. On-hoppen kannst natürlich nur, wenn auch ein Platz frei ist und du für eben jenen akzeptiert wirst Und die meisten laufen halt erstmal open end und enden dann mehr oder weniger abrupt aus verschiedenen Gründen.

Die meisten Altcoin Signatur Kampagnen haben hingegen einen fixen Endpunkt - nämlich meist ICO Ende - und man muss oftmals die ganze Zeit dabei bleiben, um seinen Anspruch nicht zu verlieren. Für Altcoin-Kampagnen wird man idR nicht angenommen/akzeptiert, sondern kann einfach die Signatur anlegen und los(shit)posten. Es gibt einen fixen Bountypool in Token, und dann sind bespielsweise 25% für Signaturen allokiert, 20% für Twitter etc.. Jeder User erwirbt stakes, die je nach Rang variieren und bekommt am Ende gemäß seiner gesammelten Stakes einen Anteil an diesen 25%.

The house edge is already included in the odds. In a two way market, with both outcomes having 50% of probability, you will not get 2,0 - 2,0 odds, but something like 1,97 - 1,97.

This was just an example how you can be in profit, although you have lost more bets than won. I have probably played 10.000 bets in my career and lost 6000 of them but I am still in profit. Next year at this point I might have played 11.000 bets and lost 6600 of them (won 4.400) and still be in profit. I never stop betting, it always continues, I am not doing Martingale and "bet in blocks" and start from scratch afterwards.

Betting/poker has no luck factor longterm, so I am not relying on luck in no way. Short-term you might be lucky/unlucky, but longterm it offsets.

You shouldn't compare betting/poker and games like dice/roulette/slots - there is a huge difference.

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Lets have a look at roulette and putting your stake on red/black:

Probability for red: 48,6%
Probability for black: 48,6%

You double your money, if you win, which implies 50% probability. But red/black only has 48,6%, so you are playing something that has no value of making you money longterm. Lets say you stake 1000 times on red, always 100,- units.

486 times red will come and you will have a net win of 48.600 units with that.
486 times black will come and you will lose 48.600 units with that.
28 times zero will come and you will lose 2.800 units with that.

In total you will sit at a loss of 2.800 units. Now you will argument: But with 1000 spins, red can come 700 times, black only 300 and no zero - and that is correct. But we are talking about the statistical/mathematical approach here and your chances to make money with a game like roulette. If you spin the roulette wheel 1000000000000000000000000000000 times, you will end up with 48,6% red/black each and 2,8% zero. So no point in playing odds that reflect a probabilty of 50%, when the mathematical proven probability is only 48,6%.

With betting (and poker) it's different. You can play valuable odds there.

Will take a tennis example here; WTA finals of the Australian Open. Kenin vs Muguruza 2,49 - 1,61 offered by Pinnacle. This implies the following probabilities for either of these ladies winning:

Kenin: 40,16%
Muguruza: 62,11%

Everything over 100% is the house edge of Pinnacle, so 2,27%. Now imagine you are walking through a mall in Melbourne today and see Muguruza twisting her ankle while walking/falling down the stairs, screaming in pain and not being able to walk properly afterwards. Do you think Muguruza still has 60+% of winning the final the next day ? No, she has not. She maybe has 20% now, because she is injured with a high ankle sprain. If Muguruza has 20%, Kenin now has 80%. Now with placing a bet on Kenin, you will play something that has 80% probability of happening, whereas the odds only give it 40,16% probability - you have a value bet. Kenin might still lose, bad luck, but if you play thousands adn thousands of bets like these, you will make money.

This is an extreme example of course and just for illustration.

The job you do should a) be some fun to you and b) give you enough money to pay for everything.

A job that gives you b) but not a) is doable and is what 80%+ of people are doing imo. A job that gives you a) but not b) is probably not worth doing.

[1] I definitely think that it's worth trying, but thats just me. You always only regret things you didn't do rather than the things you actually did. So, if you are considering to make a living out of gambling, just go for it and give it a try. You will dedicate a huge amount of your life-time to work, so better look for something that makes you happy.

[2] I think at the point, where you realize, that you are not able to make (enough) money (no more). For the start give yourself some time to figure everything out and don't give up after like 1 week. Expect to be losing for some time. If you are seeing no progress at all and are losing for months, you should stop. If you see some progress and are maybe able to break even instead of losing, you should look into improving more and give yourself some more time to turn things around. If after some months you are still not able to make money, you'd better stop.

You can do these 10 posts only in gambling discussion, thats fine. Or do 10 posts only in gambling without posting anything in gambling discussion. Or split them between these two like 5/5, 4/6, 8/2 - whatever suits you best.

This game was fixed some 15-16 years ago and I actually bet on it, knowing it was fixed:



See more here: https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/panionios-athen_dinamo-tiflis/index/spielbericht/30747

It was fixed to HT/FT Tbilisi/Athens. I never looked for fixed matches, but it was mentioned in a betting forum I visited quite regularly at that time. Everyone and his grandmother jumped on the HT/FT bet and the odds were brought down to <10 and lots of bookmakers even suspended the markets for that game. I was lucky to find a bookmaker that wasn't aware and could still place the bet there with the initial odds before the drop; odds of 30.

There has been some match fixing in Germany in the past, the last publicly covered one was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesliga_scandal_(2005)

Austria is known for match fixing as well. It happens all the time in football every day, but often times not 1X2 markets, but some side markets. It's correct, that bigger leagues are more immune to it, since it takes a lot of money to fix matches there and authorities are more alert.

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I don't care a  lot about matches being maybe fixed when considering to make a bet. Longterm it shouldn't matter, because when you are on the wrong side of the fix in one game, you will be on the correct side of the fix in the next. So longterm it should level out.

There is also this 3for3 theory, which is not a fix per se, but some agreement between mostly smaller teams. Each team will win their home match in the mutual matches and thus get the 3 points. Getting one sure win is better than getting only two points with 2 draws or losing one and drawing the other. It helps these smaller teams avoiding relegation. If one team is in dire need of points at the end of the season, they might be gifted the away win from their "friendly" team to avoid relegation. This way, these teams can still play in the same league and continue with that modus operandi.

Spotting these 3for3 matches is not that hard with some experience, but sometimes you might get trapped and the H2H just looks like a 3for3 by coincidence. Once you have spotted such two friendly teams, you can note these teams and just bet on home win twice per season, when these teams are scheduled to meet.

It solely depends on the odds you play and the stakes you use. I stake more or less always flat (% of my bank). I like to play higher odds. Example:

Bet#1: Odds 5, stake 100,-, lost
Bet#2: Odds 5, stake 100,-, lost
Bet#3: Odds 5, stake 100,-, lost
Bet#4: Odds 5, stake 100,-, won

Net win for #4 is 400,-. net loss for #1, #2 and #3 is 300,-, so I have a net win of 100,- over all those bets, despite having only won 1 and losing 3.