Is Consistent Profit from Sports Betting Possible?

[Fella]

Regarding mugging, my view is that even if consistent profit is possible it's highly likely to be far less than you could make using the same time & effort on AP-style techniques.

Personally I like to mug here & there to spice up any event I'm going to watch/listen to. I'm not interested beyond that really.

[Landprofits]

Now, if I had never layed off any bets I would only be £581 in profit. And that is only because of some positive variance recently. At the start of Novemeber (just 10 days ago!) I would have been £60 in profit. And a few times earlier in the I would have been waaaaay down, as much as -£1300.

So mugging IW arbs would not have been a wise idea for me.

Of course who knows where variance will take me from here, I could easily go on a big up swing now and get ahead of my actual profit (by matching all bets). As well, you cannot tell for sure that every bet was a value bet, since it could be that interwetten wasn't the 'value' side of the matched bet every time. However, in the case of IW I think we can say it probably was for the vast majority. Anyway, just some stats from my IW betting this year

You know, that's quite an interesting thought - by betting on value bets you will obviously be +EV so in the long run you would gain, but I think you would also need to know where the point is where you can say that you're "out of the woods", and even if you hit a run of bad variance, it wouldn't take you back into a loss situation.

I think that marker would be a long way down the line!

[Steve_B]

Regarding mugging, my view is that even if consistent profit is possible it's highly likely to be far less than you could make using the same time & effort on AP-style techniques.

Personally I like to mug here & there to spice up any event I'm going to watch/listen to. I'm not interested beyond that really.

Same here, I occasionally mug the odd difficult-to-match low value freebie (eg Lads' tenners). This has, however, spectacularly failed to make me rich thus far.

Slim's bit about IW is interesting too.

[Fella]

I think I got all my interest in mugging large amounts (well, large for me at the time) when I was young. In a way it worked out quite well as I got a good lesson in how hard it is to win when mugging, at a time when I didn't have much money anyway! I would hate to have been earning 100K a year & gambling it all, that would be horrible to look back on.

The funny thing is I get just as much enjoyment from a mugged fiver or tenner as I would with a much bigger bet. Probably more since I get the same buzz from winning but don't care if I lose.

[Human123]

I would still like to know peoples views on researching each bet and basing your picks on statistical and other analysis.

for example, Tod1999 makes some excellent picks from stats in some of his threads so surely its not completly impossible to be able to pick enough winners to yield a long term profit?

Im sure i read an article a few years back about a guy who got rich from betting on just lower division scottish football because he knew so much about it etc.

[leveret]

I would still like to know peoples views on researching each bet and basing your picks on statistical and other analysis.

for example, Tod1999 makes some excellent picks from stats in some of his threads so surely its not completly impossible to be able to pick enough winners to yield a long term profit?

Im sure i read an article a few years back about a guy who got rich from betting on just lower division scottish football because he knew so much about it etc.

That would probably be Sporty who I think may still post on Betfair.Won £300k on Forfar but that was back in the day when shops were actually interested in taking bets and not just FOBT's.Here is the link to part of his story if anyone wants to read it.
Sporty ? the life of a professional gambler part 2