Topic: [AMA] The Life of a Professional Gambler - page 4. (Read 2536 times)

Well, I don't really quit when having a losing streak. I might take a few days off, but in general I am more slowing down a bit and that would be my advice.

Discipline and money management are two big key ingredients, when it comes to professional gambling. If you lose your mind easily in tough situations, this might not be the right profession for you. Tilting has already seen a lot of bankrolls being busted and you better not have a tendency to go on tilt when gambling.
Don't question everything that worked before just because of some variance and keep looking at the big picture. This is pretty general advice, but it's a psychological issue in the end and each person deals differently with it and has to find an individual way to turn things around again. There is no golden way nor any magic pill.

A good and proven money management will help a lot in these situations. It will automatically lower the stakes while on a losing streak and you should even lower the stakes yourself (in addition to your money management telling you to do so). So instead of flat-staking lets say 1.5% of your bank, you can go down to 1% or even 0.5%. Start small again to get your confidence back, you can always up your stakes at a later point again. But during a losing streak you have to protect your bank first.

And as I said earlier somewhere in this thread, you should also have some backup money in place. This should be enough to cover your expenses for around 6 month without winning anything from gambling. This will give you some mental peace, since you know whatever happens, I am safe for the next 6 months.

First of all: Thank you very much for this very interesting thread. I would love to hear some figures, too, but it's very understandable that you don't talk about them

We all know that gambling is (or can be) very addictive. I read that you eg. quit on a losing streak, which is one of the most important things to do to keep a healthy balance and don't get in the struggle of "I have to win back my losses asap" and become slowly addicted. Are there any additional suggestions you could give to an rather unexperienced gambler (like me) so that he or she doesnt fall for common traps and end up losing way too much money?

My betting bank grows/shrinks on a daily basis, or lets say on the days I actually bet, since I don't bet every day. If I had a winning day, my bank would be bigger starting the next day, if I had a losing day it will be lower. But I am actually recalculating my bank after every bet I make - the bet is considered a loss until I know the outcome and my betting bank will be lower for the next bet. My stakes go a bit up and down all the time, since I am staking flat (see one of the earlier posts from today).

And my bank shrinks of course, when I withdraw money to pay for expenses.


See here at the bottom.


If I lose all my money, I would have to quit of course Losing bets, losing weeks and losing months are part of the game and you have to deal with it.

How I deal and dealt with it, you can re-read here and here.

I've watch a related movie regarding this topic, The movie title is "Rounders" it's about making gambling as profession and a source of income, can't believe that it is actually happening in real world, after reading your thread I have a several question.

-Does your base capital everyday/when you play, is always equal? and what is your exiting point when you are gonna quit on that day? For example if you reach x3 you will quit and call it a day.
-If you lose your money how are you going to get back into the game?

This is just basic questions, I really want to know how are you going to get back on your feet if you get a bad beat in poker or in any game.

This is a hard question, since I don't know how much money you have, how much money you need (to make) etc.

But I can give you the most important advice: start small.
If you want to give it a try, to make a bit of regular income with betting, I would advise to take some money, put it aside for betting and consider it lost for the time being. This can be any amount, but it has to be money, that you can afford to lose. This would be your starting bank to start the journey then and you should always look to protect your bank in first place.

I personally play flat stakes, which means I stake a percentage of my betting bank on each bet and recalculate the bank afterwards. I don't always stick strictly to that; if there is a very valuable bet, I might stake more, vice versa with some huge gamble bet. The percentage per bet should be somewhere around 1-2% mark. So if I have lets say 1000,- as my bank and decide to have 2% per bet, I would stake 20,-. After having placed a bet, my bank would have shrinked to 980,- and the next bet would only be 19,60. Same goes for if my bank grows, then I would be "allowed" to stake more.

Flat staking is not the most efficient way of a money management (since you play bets with different value with the same amount), but I am most comfortable doing it this way. In NBA I guess you play in the odds range from 1.9-2.1 most of the time, so flat stakes are an ok-ish way to manage your stakes.
Another commonly used money management is the Kelly System - or a variation of it. You can google for it. With the Kelly System you stake each bet different, depending on the amount of value it has. The exact value of a bet is often hard to tell, so if you are very wrong with the evaluation of value for a bet, you might overstake heavily. For a beginner, I would recommend to start with flat stakes and as you get better with time, you can look into staking more with Kelly.

A friend of mine is doing Kelly, but he is not sitting there calculating the value, he has the value of a bet in his mind/gut feeling. With experience, you don't need to strictly calculate the value, but you know if a bet has low, good or tremendous value and stake accordingly.

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I cash out regularly, because I need the money to cover my expenses and pay my bills. And you don't need to have all your betting bank spread among all the bookmakers you use. You will never need it all, unless you play like 1000 bets simultaneously. Normally you just use like 10% of the bank all the time at once and the remaining 90% just sits there untouched. You should have some money in every bookmaker you use regularly, then some money in BTC, Skrill, Neteller, Ecopayz, credit card to have money available fast for some good bet, a new bookmaker, whatever. The rest can remain in your bank account.

Fully support this reasoning

And it goes far beyond just poker or gambling in general. Such an attitude, in its generalized form, is applicable to how we live our lives, altogether. To be more specific, you can be very well off overall like having a handsome stash of bitcoins (let's talk cryptocurrency here as it seems appropriate), but you may still be somewhat short of cash money, and that will keep you extremely focused and alert on looking out for earning opportunities even if you could just spend your bitcoins and fill your boots to your liking (though that would make you lazy and idle)

First, I don't have any experience in high stakes poker as well

Just wealth will get you nowhere in poker though. There have been quite a few celebrities and/or rich businessman that played with the pros and I don't remember any of them being successful with it. A millionaire playing a 0.01 BTC tourney like you mentioned surely has some mental advantage since he isn't bothered about losing that money and is less pressured with it, but you can't beat skill in poker. In such a tournament, you might have lots of people that get intimidated by an aggressive playing style, but you will also have players, who are not and will beat you skill-wise.

The thing with not being bothered by losing (huge amounts) is, that it will also make you lazy and not being focused. You just want to have fun and don't work on improving your game. Being pressured and alert is necessary to keep your concentration up. So, if you don't bother, you are likely to make bad decisions.

If you are playing a $10k buy-in tourney and it's big money for you and you are scared of losing that money, you shouldn't play such a tourney in first place. This is just a matter of good bankroll management. I don't know the exact number, but there is this rule, that you should have like 100 buy-ins for your limit. So by playing a $10k tourney, you should have at least a $1.000.000 bankroll. If you only have $100 as a bankroll, then you should only play $1 tourneys.

The poker boom some decade ago has brought up a young generation of loose-aggressive players. They very much changed the whole game, which up until then was more of an old mens game, who were playing more tight-ish. These young people were pretty successful and gave the oldies a good run for their money, because they couldn't adapt. But there are also tight players, that are successful.

We can see lots of aggressive players being successful, but what we don't see, is all the aggressive players that fail - and that is the overwhelming majority. Even with an aggressive playing style and being "rich", you have to know what you are doing (often times it's already suffice, if you know, what you are better NOT doing). And not everyone likes to play aggressive, you should play the way it suits your style and not try to force something that just isn't there. You should always work on many aspect of your game - and that can be getting more aggressive - but a change to a playing style that is totally opposite to your temperament won't work as well imo.

In general, having a good financial background definitely helps you mentally, but it's only one of many ingredients of being successful in poker.

I always believe that making money in sports betting is possible, if you can advise how much bankroll you think would be a decent for a start and how do you manage that bankroll? I am gambling for long term like the whole season of the NBA, or do you cash out more often when you are in profit or you will just wait until the season is over?

I play small stakes poker normally. Yes, I participated in tournaments with 0.01 BTC buy-in 4 times, but I was either awarded with a ticket, or I won it in a satellite. I would never buy such an expensive ticket with my own money. And 0.01 BTC buy-in is still far from high-stakes poker, so I can say that I have no experience in playing high-stakes poker.

But if you do have such experience, can you please confirm or deny my theory regarding the high stakes poker players' aggressiveness, which helps them to win in many cases.

I think it's not so much their skills as their wealth is what helps them to play aggressively, and win as a result. If you can easily afford to lose a $10k buy-in, it gives you an advantage over those for whom it's a big money. Imo, they wouldn't look so skillful under equal conditions.

What are your thoughts on this theory?

This clarifies all the things I'm wondering about gambling, I hope all the gamblers and those people that wants to try gambling should consider these pieces of advice of yours for them to avoid diving too deep in the realm of gambling world. But since most of the gamblers are hotheaded jerks, I bet they are just going to laugh at this when they read such advice, oh well, can't blame though, since it is their own money and decision.


This hit home, mate, this is true as hell. I hope they don't misunderstand the whole thing you've just said.

Thanks for sharing all your experiences and views, Op. I admire you for inspiring especially those who are not gaining much from gambling these days. You're able to answer all the questions being thrown to you and we could see from there that you're really an experienced player who knows how to handle different circumstances. I wish I could have the same ability and eagerness to learn everything about gambling.

I talked a bit about that here:


And this was maybe the worst experience, since it was something that never happened before. For the first 3.5 years, the only direction I knew was up. And then suddenly nothing was going my way anymore and I couldn't understand what is happening, because I didn't change anything with my betting style. It was two months, where even a 1.01 bet would lose easily for me. I more or less kept going as stated in the quote, but lowered my stakes of course (also due to the fact, that I was staking a percentage of my betting bank always and that bank was shrinking all the time). Also talked to my fellow punters and they tried to help me with giving more bets of their own and bring back some confidence with winning those. So slowly but surely I got back on track and was able to win again.

Looking back, it was a mix of greed, variance and getting a bit too cocky and/or thinking the (betting) world is mine. I learned my lesson and it made me aware of the fact, how fast this business is and that it can be over any day. So you better not make too longterm-ish plans and take nothing for granted.

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The worst single event of bad luck, was a football match in Champions League. I don't recall exactly whom played whom (tried to search for it, but no luck), I only know it was Bayern Munich playing an away game and I had a bet on the over 3.5 goals. It was 2-1 for Bayern and 3 minutes of injury time were added. The other team had a corner with one minute left to play. The goalie decided to move upfront as well and all 22 players were in or around the Bayern box. A Bayern defender headed the ball away and Paulo Guerrero from Bayern picked it up and ran uncontested towards the empty goal to make it 3-1 and win the bet for me. When Guerrero was past midfield already, the referee blew the final whistle at 92:30 minutes and I couldn't believe my eyes (well, more my ears to be precise). Match ended 2-1 then, with 30sec less played than announced.

I felt robbed and had to buy a new keyboard afterwards, since it hit the wall and didn't survive


Thank you for your feedback buddy.

It's not any particular sport/league that makes it easy to find valuable odds, but more the lower and smaller you go in general. If we look at the NFL, there is really not much hidden or inside information. It's well covered, any stat you can think of is available and news spread very fast. So gaining an edge is very hard there, unless you have a very well developed gut feeling.
Now if you go to Canadian Football League things are different. It's not that well covered, because the public interest in it is not that big. There you are able find some useful information and angles to make profitable bets - if you put in the work.
When you even go one step lower and shift your interest on lets say the German (american) Football League, there is even more information to be found. And in these leagues, the bookmakers don't bother to make any research themselves. They have their statistic models/algorithms and just put the odds up without looking further into it. With you checking the regional newspapers, checking the teams website, reading forums etc., you can get information that is not priced in in the odds. This could be some flu going around in the locker room, some players missing the game because of university exams (they are amateurs and not pros in GFL), some fresh injury to the QB, things like that.

I can give you an actual example of how such information made me some money. It was the last race in winter sports Cross-Country World Cup Season some years ago. For a german athlete it was his last race and he retired afterwards. It was a 15km race and you are allowed to change your ski during the race. That german dude announced the day before, that he would, to honour the sport and his career, change his ski mid-time during the race and instead of using the modern, high-tech skis, he would use some wooden, oldschool skis that people used to wear in the 1960´s. Such wooden skis are probably nice and it was a good gesture of him using them in some pro race nowadays, but there is no way that you can be competitive with these Bookmakers didn't know or didn't bother and still offered a H2H bet involving this athlete. My friend and me placed max bet on his opponent at every bookmaker where this H2H was available. While being on his modern skis, the german dude and his H2H opponent were still together in the pack, but after putting on his wooden skis (and just running for fun), he lost lots of time of course and finished down 5 minutes to our guy. It was easy money for us and such valuable information can often be found in smaller leagues and non-mainstream sports.

The hardest sports/league to bet on for me, and where I actually had some bets, is Baseball (MLB). Results there are very random and the sheer amount of games played (sometimes twice a day) just makes a single game not that important for the players. They play 162 regular season games and swing their bats nearly every day. So they don't bother a lot with losing on any given day - the next game will be just tomorrow. You can already see the difficulty betting the MLB by looking at the odds. You rarely see a team priced below 1.60 and that already shows how random the results in MLB are. Even if the worst team plays the best team, you will have quite balanced odds. And with not much valuable extra information to be found, this for me is the hardest sport to bet on. NBA and NHL are not any better btw. NFL is a bit different in that regard from the Big4 in US, because with only 16 regular season games, every game is very important and NFL players tend to have some pride, even when 0-10 for the season.

If you cheat in gambling, the value or the thrill of playing it will disappear. So for me, every time there's a people cheating in a certain game, I will leave the game with no hesitation because most of us will not enjoy and will loss a lot of money. It is very unfair and most especially casinos should do something about it because they are the one whose responsible for that kind of problems. If they don't suddenly fix it then people will have bad reviews for them. It is not a good thing to fool people and at the same time earning money, it is the same way as stealing.

I just got finished reading the entire thread (good job, I thoroughly enjoyed it) and I don't think I saw anybody ask this question:

Is there any one sport/league that you find to be particular easy in terms of spotting a bargain?

And going in the opposite direction, which sport/league do you find the most difficult to make a correct pick?

@tyKiwanuka. What was your worstest experience on bad luck, how long did it last and what did you do to overcome it mentally?

You can't win in games of luck longterm. I'll give you that Martingale might work to a certain extent, but mathematically it doesn't work as well and I wouldn't recommend playing Martingale.

In contrast to games of luck like dice, roulette etc. there is games of skill and betting/poker fall into that category. Betting/poker are often considered games of luck, even by lawmakers and authorities, but they are not. You don't need any luck to win with betting/poker longterm. I think you can even be a general unlucky person and still make money with these


I'll say it again: You don't need any luck to be profitable playing betting/poker. You can completely discard luck longterm.

House edge is not really important in betting. By shopping for the best odds (= having a big portfolio of bookmakers and check where you get the best odds for a particular bet), you can often play without any house edge at all or a very low one. And you don't need to bet and shouldn't do so, if you think there is too much house edge (i.e. odds are too low).

By reading your posts, I get the impression, that you never actually placed a bet and this is not meant as an offense (it's actually a good thing, if you never did). It's always hard to explain the concept of value to a non-betting person and as you see, I am struggling a bit with explaining it you or you struggle to understand what I mean. So, if you are really interested in learning something about value, you could maybe google a bit for it and find some better explanation, than I can give at the moment. If you do, it's really important, that you distinguish between games of luck vs games of skill - they are different animals.

I'm not sure I understand how it can work out with games of luck unless you use martingale or something similar

As I see it, if you bet long enough, the house edge will inevitably kick in and make luck irrelevant, i.e. you can't rely on luck if you are going to gamble for any extended amount of time. But if luck eventually becomes out of luck, so to speak, you can't be in profit at all after some time, no matter how many bets you made that far, winning or otherwise, as you are expected to lose in the long run anyway. And some would say that even with martingale you are still going to lose (though I for one disagree with them)

The house edge is already included in the odds. In a two way market, with both outcomes having 50% of probability, you will not get 2,0 - 2,0 odds, but something like 1,97 - 1,97.

This was just an example how you can be in profit, although you have lost more bets than won. I have probably played 10.000 bets in my career and lost 6000 of them but I am still in profit. Next year at this point I might have played 11.000 bets and lost 6600 of them (won 4.400) and still be in profit. I never stop betting, it always continues, I am not doing Martingale and "bet in blocks" and start from scratch afterwards.

Betting/poker has no luck factor longterm, so I am not relying on luck in no way. Short-term you might be lucky/unlucky, but longterm it offsets.

You shouldn't compare betting/poker and games like dice/roulette/slots - there is a huge difference.

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Lets have a look at roulette and putting your stake on red/black:

Probability for red: 48,6%
Probability for black: 48,6%

You double your money, if you win, which implies 50% probability. But red/black only has 48,6%, so you are playing something that has no value of making you money longterm. Lets say you stake 1000 times on red, always 100,- units.

486 times red will come and you will have a net win of 48.600 units with that.
486 times black will come and you will lose 48.600 units with that.
28 times zero will come and you will lose 2.800 units with that.

In total you will sit at a loss of 2.800 units. Now you will argument: But with 1000 spins, red can come 700 times, black only 300 and no zero - and that is correct. But we are talking about the statistical/mathematical approach here and your chances to make money with a game like roulette. If you spin the roulette wheel 1000000000000000000000000000000 times, you will end up with 48,6% red/black each and 2,8% zero. So no point in playing odds that reflect a probabilty of 50%, when the mathematical proven probability is only 48,6%.

With betting (and poker) it's different. You can play valuable odds there.

Will take a tennis example here; WTA finals of the Australian Open. Kenin vs Muguruza 2,49 - 1,61 offered by Pinnacle. This implies the following probabilities for either of these ladies winning:

Kenin: 40,16%
Muguruza: 62,11%

Everything over 100% is the house edge of Pinnacle, so 2,27%. Now imagine you are walking through a mall in Melbourne today and see Muguruza twisting her ankle while walking/falling down the stairs, screaming in pain and not being able to walk properly afterwards. Do you think Muguruza still has 60+% of winning the final the next day ? No, she has not. She maybe has 20% now, because she is injured with a high ankle sprain. If Muguruza has 20%, Kenin now has 80%. Now with placing a bet on Kenin, you will play something that has 80% probability of happening, whereas the odds only give it 40,16% probability - you have a value bet. Kenin might still lose, bad luck, but if you play thousands adn thousands of bets like these, you will make money.

This is an extreme example of course and just for illustration.

I may be missing something here

But how are you going to beat the house edge as it will eventually catch up with you? If you made just 4 bets, the luck may of course be on your side, which follows from the example given. With odds 5 you are quite lucky to win on bet #4 and stop there (which you implicitly assume)

However, the longer you play the less you can rely on luck alone (in simple terms, you can't rely on it). So unless you don't play games of luck (think dice here), there is only one way to beat the house and its edge in the long run, and that is via using old-school martingale (or some more advanced variety of this strategy)

Thanks for your responses to my query about how to approach gambling when it is culturally, religiously and legally inappropriate. I of course agree with you,,, that my life is my life, but the reason I ask is simply that, for some of us, we earn money on a normal job and it is enough of course to eat and feed people.

But like now I am not ashamed to say I earn a small amount from a gambling site which I myself play at. And I also invest that amount in another gambling site and profit is good. So I do not earn from gambling, but my extra bitcoin earnings are all gambling related. I am proud of that personally for sure.

But I can never tell my family where it comes from,,, the extra money. They would get upset:) And someone might report me;) So guys like us we have to make things up.

Like I said we all gamble actually everyone does,,, but those who do keep it silent and obviously we in the circle know each other.