How can I make money from gambling and betting?

 I could go on all day and bore you silly, but I will restrict my answer to a few important pointers and hopefully they will help, but I suspect the truth may not be exciting enough.

Point number one is terminology. You have to understand that gambling and betting are two different things. It is possible to make a long term profit from betting, but gamblers always lose in the long run unless they get lucky with a big lottery win.

You need to take the gamble element out of your operation. You do this by treating your activity as a business. This means that before you start you need to be adequately funded because you WILL encounter losing runs much longer than you were expecting. Your betting bank must be completely independent of all your other financial commitments - food, household bills, clothing, family holidays etc. The reason most businesses fail in their first year is because they were underfunded. Depending on the type of odds range you bet in, you will need a minimum of fifty times your normal stake for shorter priced bets and 250 times your stake for the bigger priced selections. Even if you are betting on true even money shots, such as the toss of a coin, you will eventually get a losing run of about 13! Try betting on ten to one shots and your nightmare losing run will be about 70.

It is impossible to over-emphasise the topic of value. This is what it is all about. This is the equivalent of the profit margin of a business. To state the obvious, you profit will come from the total of all your winning bets being more than the total of all your losing bets. We all have our own ways of establishing whether a bet represents value or not, and there are some decent tipping services out there which specialise in value-based selections. I only bet on horseracing, but the principle is the same no matter what sport(s) you bet on.The bet you are considering must be offered at a higher price than it should be, in your opinion. If you think a horse has a one-in-three chance of winning a race and you are being offered 5 to 1 that is clearly a bet. If you are adequately funded and you apply this principle to all your betting , provided your judgement is reasonably good you should make a profit in the long term. On the other hand, if you are being offered 3/1 about a horse which you think has a one-in-five chance, then you must walk away. I repeat. WALK AWAY! That bet has in inbuilt loss making factor. It may well win this race, but if you make this sort of bet regularly you WILL make a long term loss.

No matter how good you are you will have losing days, weeks and months. You may have two losing months back to back. You have to have a mindset that can deal with that. Maybe you started with a bank of 150 points and you are now down to say 30 points. What do you do? Do you reduce your stakes? Do you chase your losses because “the next one must win, it’s the law of averages”? No, the correct thing to do is exactly what you’ve been doing so far, because you’ve obviously done your research by paper trading before you started risking your ‘hard-earned’ If you have the results of your research behind you you know that the corner will be turned, and anyway, this is why you had such a large bank in the first place.

The key to everything is to think long term, and not to panic because you are on a losing run.

If you think I am making it sound too easy it’s time to pour water on your barbecue. You always have to shop around for the best odds and the best deal. This is done by opening a number of bookmaker accounts, favouring the ones who offer best odds guaranteed and using a site like oddschecker to find who is offering the best odds on your selection. However, bookmakers don’t like winners. They love the punter who lands a nice juicy treble, or a big reverse forecast, because that punter is a gambler who got lucky and they know that same punter will give them back all the winnings and more besides. They do not like the bettor like you, who know what he’s doing and exercises discipline. The bettor who only bets with them when they are giving the best price on a selection. I know because it has happened to me, with sixteen different online bookmakers to be precise. Some will tolerate you for a year or two. Some will have your measure after the first day. One firm even barred me from placing my seventh bet before any of the previous six had run! Most will not actually close your account because they don’t like the reputation they will get. They just restrict your bets to such ludicrously low stakes that you give up. Don’t believe anything about minimum stakes either. When they want to get rid of you it is not uncommon to get a message like “The maximum stake for this bet is 23 pence”

Anyway, make the most of it while it lasts. If you are successful you may get a couple of good years, but it won’t last. I still turn a profit on Betfair, but it’s a struggle and nowhere near what I could make when I could bet with the other bookies.