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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The Kelly Criterion.
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.
Yep. And they’re not winning their money from the house. Their winning from other players.
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.
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?
Yes.
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.
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?
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By “consistent” I mean over the long haul. Tens of thousands of hands and at least a thousand hours worth of data to track.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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?
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.
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.
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
What the hell’s 2bb or 300bb?