How do professional gamblers stay in business?

[Lumpy]

If the odds always favor the house and the bookies, and presuming there's no such thing as "luck" (consistanly doing better than the odds would predict), then how do professional gamblers stay solvent? By fleecing suckers?

[JSexton]

If the odds always favor the house and the bookies, and presuming there's no such thing as "luck" (consistanly doing better than the odds would predict), then how do professional gamblers stay solvent? By fleecing suckers?
Depends on the game.

With poker, you're playing against other players, minus a "rake," or money taken out of each pot for the house. Enough skill for a given level (and a deep enough bankroll to weather fluctuations) will let you come out ahead.

Blackjack - perfect play and card counting allow you to win consistently, again given a deep bankroll.

Sports betting - Do your research, and in theory, you can call games accurately enough to win.

Roulette, Craps, Keno, slots, lottery - I don't think anyone can come out ahead in the long run by playing these on a regular basis. Skill cannot factor in. That said, you will find people who claim to be professional Craps player, or whatever. Odds are that they're either deluded, or trying to sell you a system.

[xizor]

I just saw a Travel Channel show about this.
Most make their money from sports betting by doing massive amounts of research and finding sweet spots (example: where one book has a team winning by more than another book. You bet the over at one place and the under at another).
Second most popular is poker, where you take money from others via straight games and tournaments.
Both choices looked like very boring career choices, and the average professional gambler makes about $8 an hour.

[Busy Scissors]

Corruption? Horse racing in the UK, and maybe elsewhere, is bent IMHO. Gamblers gain an edge by being party to inside information such as whether a horse is being raced to win, or just raced for a stretch of the legs. The Kieron Fallon race fixing case would be a high-profile example of this corruption (although I do not believe a decision has been reached yet).

I am not a betting man myself, but maybe someone will explain how internet betting exchanges work. I think that these facilities allow you to bet against something like a racehorse winning (laying?), rather than backing it. This is often cited in the UK news as having opened the door to significant corruption of sporting events. Cricket is another game that is under the microscope for these abuses.

[Chronos]

Nick the Greek made his money through side bets. He would hang around at the roulette table, and wait for some sucker to say something like "I know I'm going to roll a seven this time! I'm sure of it!", and then offer the stiff, say, 3 to 1 odds that he wouldn't. So he wasn't beating the house; effectively, he was his own house.

[lisacurl]

I've known two men who've been professional gamblers for periods of years during their lives. Both played poker or blackjack exclusively, and both had no tendencies whatsoever to compulsive gambling. They were completely pragmatic about the process and had hard and fast rules about "knowing when to hold 'em and knowing when to fold 'em." It seemed a very isolated and cheerless existence.

[Lunar Saltlick]

JSexton called this one. Blackjack is tougher than ever, however. Even knowing basic strategy cold and counting cards, you're not likely to win much anymore, for the reasons Bricker mentioned. Casinos are very good at spotting counters, and in any case, most casinos no longer go deep enough to make counting worthwhile. Good pro blackjack players used to be able to find tables where they could get odds that were as much as a percent better than the house. Those days are gone. There used to be an alt.rec newsgroup that discussed blackjack odds and strategies in great detail. Maybe it's still running.

I think pretty much all pros are poker players now, aren't they?

[Chez Guevara]

Sports betting - Do your research, and in theory, you can call games accurately enough to win.At the Tokyo World Athletics Championships in 1991, Tatyana Dorovskikh was offered at a big price for the Womens' 3,000 metres in the early book. Several good judges availed themselves of this largesse and the price tumbled accordingly.

The unsuspecting layers were unaware that Dorovskikh had recently married and was, in fact, Tatyana Samolenko. As Samolenko, she had won the 3,000 metres at the Rome World Championships in 1987 and the Olympic Gold at Seoul in 1988.

Sorry no cite.

[Gadarene]

The Kelly Criterion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion).

[lonih]

My nephew claims he is making a livng (20-something austerity level) by online Poker.
Claims that there are simply a lot of poor poker players around.
Personally, I worry that's what he tells his folks, and that he really is doing something else, like bank robbery or selling drugs.

[Hampshire]

I think pretty much all pros are poker players now, aren't they?

Yep. And they're not winning their money from the house. Their winning from other players.

[Snarky_Kong]

My nephew claims he is making a livng (20-something austerity level) by online Poker.
Claims that there are simply a lot of poor poker players around.
Personally, I worry that's what he tells his folks, and that he really is doing something else, like bank robbery or selling drugs.

There are lots of bad players online. It wouldn't be very hard to make $10-$20 an hour. You just have to be very careful about knowing when to quit and who to play against. It's really boring, nothing like it's portrayed in the movies.

[Lemur866]

The thing is, being a professional gambler is a job, you have to grind it out. It isn't like the movies, where a gambler will look for one big sure thing, bet everything on that sure thing, and retire a millionaire. Professional gamblers make their money by playing the odds and betting against people who don't understand the odds. So they lose and win, they just win a little bit more often than chance. This means lots of small bets against lots of suckers, which means a lot of sitting around poker clubs grinding out small wins and averaging $10.00/hour. It might be fun to play poker, but would it be fun to play poker 40 hours a week?

[Gadarene]

It might be fun to play poker, but would it be fun to play poker 40 hours a week?

Yes.

[Dinsdale]

Recently read a book called (IIRC) Hunting Fish, about a guy's experience travelling around the nation as a pro poker player, trying to build a stake to buy in to a big Vegas tourney. He played private games and casinos, as well as on-line.

In short, his story was that it is pretty easy for a pro to identify the amateurs at any table. And the pros simply stay out of each others' pots as they proceed to take the amateurs' money.

He also indicated that pros tended to specialize in one particular game. Say Hold em, or Omaha.

Made me leery of playing cards in a situation where I didn't know everyone around the table.

[Enderw24]

Good poker players can consistently earn around 2bb an hour. That's two big bets, or, in say a 30-60 game it's $120 an hour. That sounds like a lot. In fact, it is a lot. I think most everyone on these boards would be pleased as punch to be pulling in $120 an hour at their given profession. But what's this really mean?

1) By "consistent" I mean over the long haul. Tens of thousands of hands and at least a thousand hours worth of data to track.

2) The data. You MUST keep track of how you're doing. Otherwise you're just deluding yourself. We humans have selective memory and we can always convince ourselves that we're winning players when the facts point to something quite different

3) 2BB an hour's a pretty slim margin. A mathematically bad bet here, a mathematically bad raise there? You've just blown your winnings for the hour. You must be on top of your game at all times.

4) You can lose. Shocking, no? You can go long stretches losing even if you're a winning player because of dumb luck and you can't let it affect your game. How many other jobs have you working for 10 straight hours only to wind up poorer once you clock out for the day?

5) To earn that 2BB you should have AT LEAST 300BB stored up as your bank. So if you're a winning player and you're in the 30-60 game for the long haul you're going to need at least $18,000 in savings to be playing the game. What does that mean? Grinding out at lower tables to earn the right to play up to the one you want to play at. Again, this takes patience and discipline.

So yeah, dedicated, disciplined, smart poker players will earn money. But hell, reckless lucky poker players will earn money too. What can you do?

[anson2995]

A lot of pro poker players have endorsement deals, earning money from wearing logos during tv events, appearing in advertising, and collecting appearance fees. Many of the top players also make money from selling books and DVDs.

[Otto]

Depending on the name recognition of the gambler in question, endorsements can be lucrative. Many of the top-level professional poker players have deals with various poker sites which, despite the US government's willful disregard of its treaty obligations, remain undisturbed by the recent pull-out of the US market by a number of the sites. Begore the UIGEA passed, there were pushes to make online tournament blackjack the next big gambling boom, so a number of top tournament blackjack players began landing deals with sites as well. I haven't actually seen any commercials lately for the blackjack sites but then there hasn't been any new blackjack on TV for a while that I know of.

But for the average grinder, yeah, what Ender said.

Apropos of nothing, there was an article in a local weekly the other week about how Wisconsin taxes gambling winnings, featuring a woman who claims to be a professional slots player. She claims to clear $50,000 a year playing nickel slots.

[Annie-Xmas]

Because they know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away and know when to run
They never count their money when they're sitting at the table.
There is time enough for counting when the dealing's done

[Balthisar]

What the hell's 2bb or 300bb?

[Enderw24]

What the hell's 2bb or 300bb?
big bets.

So in a 30-60 fixed limit game, a big bet would be $60. That means in the first two rounds of betting, every bet and every raise comes in $30 incriments. In the second two rounds, it's $60. So 300 BB is 300 x 60 or $18,000.

[Bryan Ekers]

Nick the Greek made his money through side bets. He would hang around at the roulette table, and wait for some sucker to say something like "I know I'm going to roll a seven this time! I'm sure of it!", and then offer the stiff, say, 3 to 1 odds that he wouldn't. So he wasn't beating the house; effectively, he was his own house.

Whatta chump. The real money is in hanging around the blackjack table looking for suckers who think they're due for a Full House.

[Fish]

In one of the Richard Feynman books he mentioned his experiences in Las Vegas, speaking with a professional gambler. As Chronos said, the money was all on side bets. Standing at the craps table he'd some rube on whether the dice would come up (for instance) eleven before or after they came up ten "the hard way" (double-fives). He'd know the odds on each configuration of the dice so he'd know which bets to make, and how often he was likely to win.

[Jackknifed Juggernaut]

What the hell's 2bb or 300bb?

bb stands for big blind. Every round, there is one big blind and one small blind. These rotate around the table and create a small pot at the beginning of the round.

[Chronos]

In one of the Richard Feynman books he mentioned his experiences in Las Vegas, speaking with a professional gambler.Yeah, that was Nick the Greek, and that's how I found out about him. Except I meant to type "craps" instead of "roulette".

[Sublight]

In one of the Richard Feynman books he mentioned his experiences in Las Vegas, speaking with a professional gambler. As Chronos said, the money was all on side bets. Standing at the craps table he'd some rube on whether the dice would come up (for instance) eleven before or after they came up ten "the hard way" (double-fives). He'd know the odds on each configuration of the dice so he'd know which bets to make, and how often he was likely to win.
And then after doing this for some time, he started being recognized as a 'professional gambler' so amateurs and tourists would start seeking him out and taking whatever bets he offered just so they could say they'd played against (and possibly beaten) Nick the Greek.

[Otto]

And then after doing this for some time, he started being recognized as a 'professional gambler' so amateurs and tourists would start seeking him out and taking whatever bets he offered just so they could say they'd played against (and possibly beaten) Nick the Greek.
And then, he met Johnny Moss (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Moss).

[Shagnasty]

I guess I will be the first one to mention Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions (http://http://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Down-House-Students-Millions/dp/0743225708). These young geniuses did indeed make millions in Las Vegas in the 1990's by card-counting blackjack. However, their real strength wasn't quantitative. It was in playing roles and switching their own "high-rollers" in and out of games when the odds became favorable. They built up a massive bankroll and amassed money much more quickly than the more typical stories given in this thread by placing equally large bets when the math indicated it. The hard part wasn't cracking the strategy for a given casino's blackjack tables. It was avoiding getting kicked out which is the biggest problem of successful card counters.

It is a good book if you ever want a true life suspense story. They didn't do anything illegal and they really did make millions.

[TokyoBayer]

Blackjack - perfect play and card counting allow you to win consistently, again given a deep bankroll.Do any casinos have single-deck blackjack anymore? With the multideck game it's much more complex than it used to be.

[asterion]

Do any casinos have single-deck blackjack anymore? With the multideck game it's much more complex than it used to be.You can find single-deck "blackjack." I put blackjack in quotes because most places these days pay 6:5 on a blackjack (http://wizardofodds.com/articles/other/6to5bj.html) instead of 3:2, and I can't believe that there are enough people stupid enough to play it to make the game profitable. I mean, there obviously are, but you'll never see me playing it. The difference in house edge is amazing, going from something like 0.05% to 1.44%. You're better off playing a six-deck or even eight-deck game.

[Silk One]

Most make their money from sports betting by doing massive amounts of research and finding sweet spots (example: where one book has a team winning by more than another book. You bet the over at one place and the under at another).
I don't think this could be a profitable method unless the sweet spot was very wide, which I'm sure would be extremely rare. You are betting that the score lands in the sweet spot, and if it doesn't you have to pay (typically) a 10% vig to the bookie you lost with. You would have to have the score land in what would probably be a very narrow sweet spot roughly one out ten times just to break even.

[Do Not Taunt]

bb stands for big blind. Every round, there is one big blind and one small blind. These rotate around the table and create a small pot at the beginning of the round.No, while BB can stand for big blind, in this case it means big bet. The big bet is typically twice the big blind, which can lead to confusion.

[Otto]

I guess I will be the first one to mention Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions (http://http://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Down-House-Students-Millions/dp/0743225708). These young geniuses did indeed make millions in Las Vegas in the 1990's by card-counting blackjack.
It should be noted that the team documented in the book wasn't even close to being the first "MIT blackjack team" to take Vegas for a bundle.

[Lunar Saltlick]

I guess I will be the first one to mention Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions (http://http://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Down-House-Students-Millions/dp/0743225708)....

It is a good book if you ever want a true life suspense story. They didn't do anything illegal and they really did make millions.
[Bolding mine] This was the big question back when I was interested in blackjack. The blackjack newsgroups used to debate this question endlessly. All the casinos considered card counting illegal. Their attitude was that blackjack, like any other casino game, was only an amusement, a game. You weren't supposed to try to actually make money from it. You were supposed to just enjoy the thrill of playing. Card counters, needless to say, didn't agree. As far as I know, the state of Las Vegas didn't actually rule that card counting was illegal. But it didn't make much difference, because the state did give casinos the right to bar anyone they wanted. So card counters were out of luck and had to devise various strategies to cover their card counting.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression it doesn't make any difference anymore, because even if you know basic strategy cold, even if you're an expert card counter with a team, you just can't swing the odds in your favor no matter what you do. The eight decks, the fact the dealer only goes so far into the shoe, the reshuffling and the local rules all ensure that the house retains at least a slight advantage. Which means, grind it out as long as you want, you will eventually lose it all. This wasn't the case so long ago, but it is now.

You still hear about places where they use only two or four or six decks, etc., but I'm pretty sure all the serious gamblers are now in poker and sports, where they grind away as described in numerous posts above.

[TJVM]

I guess I will be the first one to mention Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. These young geniuses did indeed make millions in Las Vegas

I read the Wired article (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vegas.html) about these guys, and I remember thinking that the winnings weren't that impressive when you considered the amount of labor that went into the enterprise. And, as MIT grads, they presumably could have been earning good money at regular jobs, so there was a substantial opportunity cost incurred.

[Jackknifed Juggernaut]

No, while BB can stand for big blind, in this case it means big bet. The big bet is typically twice the big blind, which can lead to confusion.

Thanks. I stand corrected.

[Trunk]

A couple points about playing poker for real.

2BB is an ideal. I don't think there are many who make more than that, but there are a lot who make less.

Also, making 2BB an hour might be easy in a 3/6 or 4/8 game. There are some really bad players, and at a 10 person table, you might only have 3 people who know how to play well. But when you get to money that you can actually live on. . .10/20, or ESPECIALLY 30/60 and higher, there are people at the table who are better than you, and at a full table, you're probably competing with 7 other people for the dead money from 3 suckers. And you're competing against the rake. You can be a good player, and break even at a table like that.

FWIW, the last time I was unemployed, I played 30-40 hours a week online. This was back in 2001. It gets boring, frustrating, and stressful, and I ended up making about $4 an hour over about 6 months. And, I got totally burned out on the game.

[Bill Door]

Made me leery of playing cards in a situation where I didn't know everyone around the table.

A piece of good advice I once got concerning this. After an hour of play, look around the table. If you can't spot the sucker by then, get up and leave, because it's you.

[Otto]

I read the Wired article (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vegas.html) about these guys, and I remember thinking that the winnings weren't that impressive when you considered the amount of labor that went into the enterprise. And, as MIT grads, they presumably could have been earning good money at regular jobs, so there was a substantial opportunity cost incurred.
The Wired article is blocked at work, damn nannies, so I can't see whether the article factors in the value of the comps the players received as part of their earnings. I saw a documentary on an earlier incarnation of the team and the comps they received were worth tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And having worked at a regular job and having partially supported myself playing online poker, I can attest that playing poker is way more fun than any job I've ever had. I wasn't in it as a revenue stream long enough to get burned out the way some others who've commented have but I didn't get burned out.

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

Depends on the game.
Sports betting - Do your research, and in theory, you can call games accurately enough to win.

.
Betting on the horses is another good example of this; it's considered a game of skill because it's something you can learn if you apply yourself to it. Probably natural inclination helps, too. This is why racetrack betting has been legal in most places for years and years, while most other kinds are illegal except in NJ and NV, and on Native American owned properties.

[Will Repair]

The Sport of Kings, horse racing, has the most professional gamblers (http://www.bannedsystems.co.uk/gamblerxfile/info.htm) because it is parimutuel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parimutuel_betting) betting. Parimutuel betting is somewhat like poker in that you are betting against other players and not house odds. All you have to do is know more about horses and their performance on different tracks than anyone else.

[Opus1]

I don't think this could be a profitable method unless the sweet spot was very wide, which I'm sure would be extremely rare. You are betting that the score lands in the sweet spot, and if it doesn't you have to pay (typically) a 10% vig to the bookie you lost with. You would have to have the score land in what would probably be a very narrow sweet spot roughly one out ten times just to break even.

What you're describing is a "middle," one form of arbing. It doesn't hit often, but if you wager wisely, it happens enough to be profitable. Remember, you win twice your bet if you hit the middle, but only 5% juice (10% on one of the bets) if you don't. So you only have to hit the middle ~1/20 times for it to work.

Another, more common arb, is to bet both sides of a game at different books, guaranteeing a profit. E.g., book A lists the Smith vs. Jones fight with Smith as a 11/10 favorite; book B lists Jones as an 11/10 favorite. Bet 1 unit on Smith at B and 1 unit on Jones at A. Each bet pays 11/10, so you end up winning 1.1 units, and losing 1 unit, for a net of .1 unit on a 2 unit bet. Note that I haven't included the vig, which makes scalping more difficult, since you need to find even greater differences between books to make this work.

But the most common way to make a profit at sports betting is just finding good lines. Lots of times books will vary enough to make a bet at a particular book a +EV wager, even after the vig, but not enough of a diff to arb it. The trick is knowing which book is "off." If the Vikings are a 5 point dog at A but only a 3 point dog at B, you have to know which book screwed up.

[sleestak]

One of my past roommates made a living playing poker. He knew his odds inside and out. He would head down to the casino and look for tourists and take money from them all day long. He did ok at that.

He also played online quite a bit and did ok there as well.

He also played tournaments. Those either he lost his stake or he won fairly big. He didn't do nearly as well at the tournaments because all the players knew what they were doing, it's really hard to beat people that way.

His mainstay though was tourists. They came to Vegas to pay his rent. Every couple weeks he'd have a story about taking some person for a large amount of money. Usually what would happen is that he would get up a decent amont of money and the other player would play to win back the money my roommate had won. That always ended with my roommate making a ton of money.

Slee

[SenorBeef]

I've known two men who've been professional gamblers for periods of years during their lives. Both played poker or blackjack exclusively, and both had no tendencies whatsoever to compulsive gambling.


This makes sense. The vast majority of professional poker players aren't compulsive gamblers at all. Compulsive gamblers tend to be undisciplined, and often stupid and/or delusional (I have a system!). Poker takes skills that people who are there for thrill of gambling typically don't have. I've played thousands of hours of poker, but I wouldn't consider myself a gambler in the sense that people generally mean it. That may sound silly, but poker, when you really study it, is far more like chess with a random element than it is roulette or something.

There are exceptions, though. There are people who are extremely talented at poker, but love the thrill of gambling, and it tends to make them very unstable, boom or bust. They might make a few hundred thousand dollars playing poker because of their knowledge/ability, but then lose it all making sport bets or something.


They were completely pragmatic about the process and had hard and fast rules about "knowing when to hold 'em and knowing when to fold 'em." It seemed a very isolated and cheerless existence.

Well, you can't have "hard and fast" rules about poker. It's not a mechanical game where you can say "ok, whenever X situation comes up, take Y action" - you need to understand the math behind it, but you should be constantly trying to use the information you can observe to refine what you know about people, and constantly be adjusting your game to the circumstances.

It can be isolated - sometimes it's a fun, party-like social experience, and sometimes you have a bunch of losers sitting around the table acting like they're at a funeral.

Good poker players can consistently earn around 2bb an hour.

The old popular grinder rule of thumb was that you'd try to earn 1 BB, actually. Although in the days of the internet, with more hands per hour and less rake, raising that expectation is very practical.


3) 2BB an hour's a pretty slim margin. A mathematically bad bet here, a mathematically bad raise there? You've just blown your winnings for the hour. You must be on top of your game at all times.


This is true. One bad decision - whether by frustration, fatigue, or simply not coming to the right conclusion - can cost you hours of the "profit" (in the form of expectation) you gained over the session in a tough game. 8 hours of good decisions followed by one or two bad ones can cancel each other out in a way.


4) You can lose. Shocking, no? You can go long stretches losing even if you're a winning player because of dumb luck and you can't let it affect your game. How many other jobs have you working for 10 straight hours only to wind up poorer once you clock out for the day?


I've had months, with hundreds of hours of play, that were in the red, even though I was mostly playing well (although in such an instance it's easy to have a bad day or two) because of the strong short-term random element involved. You can be a long term winner at the games you play, and still have an extended rough patch where, even though you're playing well, and better than your opponents, you'll lose. There's no other job where you can put in a few hundred hours, do your best, do good work, and end up losing money. It's a very strong kick in the gut - especially when it's your only income.


So yeah, dedicated, disciplined, smart poker players will earn money. But hell, reckless lucky poker players will earn money too. What can you do?

Only over the short term. Bad players (relative to the game they play) have an infinitesimal chance of being long term winners.

In fact, barely anyone is a winner in poker. The rake is such a driving force that it absolutely dominates any discussion of the profitability of poker players - and yet most players are unaware of it or feel it to be inconsequential. It's a tax on a zero-sum system (zero sum in the sense that the system produces nothing - but money is still added from an outside source) that makes almost everyone lose.

The estimates I've read on the percentage of winning poker players is on the order of 5-10%. Rake tends to be around $3-4 per pot, which doesn't sound that bad, but when you're playing tens of thousands of hands per year, and winning your share of them, it adds up hugely. Money gets passed back and forth, and the rake gets eaten up every time. During the year that I played most, I paid about $30,000 worth of rake. So the first $30,000 I made that year, essentially, I gave to the casino.

What that means is that if I was good enough to beat an unraked game for $40,000, my actual take is $10,000, with $30,000 given to the casino. If I was good enough to make $25,000 in an unraked game (which is beating the game, and being a winning player), I actually lose $5000 for the year.

The rake turns losers into huge losers, break-even players into losers, minor winners into losers, moderate winners into break even players, and takes away a large part of the profit of big winners. I've never calculated how much rake I've paid lifetime - money that would otherwise be in my pocket if I were playing in an unraked game - but I suspect the number would make me ill.

The OP might be interested in this thread (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=362377) about my experiences as a professional poker player.