So you have gotten pretty good at watching the NFL lines and making smart bets that have won you some decent money. You have increased your stockpile of betting money tenfold and are starting to get confident in your abilities to make smart bets and come out ahead more times than not. Could this be an equitable way to make a decent amount of money and put yourself in a good position monetarily?
Don’t quit that nine-to-five job quite yet. Betting on professional sports can be quite profitable if you make smart bets and get lucky, but turning it into your profession would be highly risky and could turn out poorly. Don’t risk your financial stability on the odds of continually winning at professional sports betting.
Betting All The Time
In order to turn betting on sports into a full-time gig that would make enough money to live on would require the person to place bets on a daily basis and minimize losses or win extremely risky bets on a very frequent basis. This means that not only would you have to be good at betting on one sport, but you would need to be extremely good at betting on a wide range of sports.
Your knowledge base of sports would need to be out of this world and the amount of time, research, and studying that it would take to make highly informed bets would almost surely outweigh the return on investment you would receive back.
This would also require you to bet on sports year-round in the hopes of making enough money to live on. Jumping from sport to sport in the hopes of making enough money would be extremely stressful and probably not bring in the amount of money one could live on comfortably.
How Much Would You Need To Win?
That is a loaded question with a lot of different circumstances, but let’s look at an example to give you an idea.
Let’s start with the equivalent of working a $15 per hour job for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, for 52 weeks in a year. All of the numbers below will be gross income before taxes.
8 Hour Day = $120
40 Hour Week = $600
52 Weeks = $31,200
That means that a bettor would need to make at least $120 per day at least five days per week throughout the entire year to equal a job that pays out to $15 per hour. But that would be the bare minimum before taxes, and unfortunately, winnings from gambling are not tax exempt. Any winnings over $600 qualify to be taxed federally, meaning you would still owe the tax man their fair share.
And in today’s world, who wants to only make $31,200? That is right at the poverty line in the United States, meaning that the standard of living would not be the most luxurious. Still thinking you could make a living on sports betting?
Right now, the long-term odds of winning when it comes to betting on professional sports is right around 55%. That’s dangerously close to only breaking even or just slightly better. Let’s assume you place ten bets at $100 each. If you won even six of those bets, you still lost $400 while possibly only profiting a couple of hundred on winnings, depending on the odds.
You would have to be awfully good or awfully lucky to make that profitable long-term.
What Are The Options?
You could definitely risk it, but be prepared and content with losing money. The age-old question of how one can make a small fortune in life comes to mind when thinking about betting as a profession. The best way to make a small fortune at sports betting is to start with a large fortune.
Some could possibly be good at this and make it work, but is it worth the risk to you and your way of life?
The best bet in this situation is to keep your sports betting as a healthy hobby or possibly a type of solo side hustle in an attempt to make money at it. Keep the day job and use sports betting as entertainment and possibly make some money on the side as a hobby.
