The Sport of Kings, horse racing, has the most professional gamblers because it is parimutuel 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 about my experiences as a professional poker player.