Yes you can, but to do so you need to find value and stop trying to pick winners.
1. Find value from odds deviations at bookmakers.
Value occurs when you've got the upper hand on the bookmakers or the markets. There are mainly two reasons an valuebets occur - and to understand them, we need to cover how the bookmakers operate. All bookmakers and exchanges have a margin - that's ultimately how they make money. Their margin may vary from as low as 3% to as high as 20%. Imagine a pure coin flip where you can bet on heads or tails. The odds should be 2 on each side, which means 50% probability of hitting one of the sides. For bookmakers to make money, they put their odds at 1.8 on both sides, skimming 10% off whatever the winning bet is.
The best and sharpest bookmakers in the world are purely market driven, which means that when enough money are put on one of the sides, that odds will decrease while the other one increases. This means the odds are ultimately decided by liquidity in the market. When the amount of money going through is high enough - the odds are as close to perfect as it will be. By looking at the odds of these high liquidity markets, one can acquire the knowledge of hundreds of thousands of people. Not many bookmakers can pull this off, because they don't have a large enough customer base makings things too uncertain. The ones that can are mostly placed in Asia. Value occurs when any kind of new information that impacts the game is acquired.
A very good example is the FA cup game between Chelsea vs Manchester City on February 21st. A couple of hours before the game, the best odds you could get on Chelsea to win was around 1.75-1.8. Then, exactly 1 hour before the game the lineups went public - and it turned out that Manchester City brought five teenage full debutants in their lineup. As seen in the picture, that information triggered a huge change in the market. All the high liquidity markets dropped from 1.75-1.8 to 1.35-1.45 in less than 10 minutes. However - a lot of the European bookmakers didn't react nearly quickly enough. Some bookmakers spent more than 30 minutes changing their odds. That means you could now get Chelsea to win at 1.7-1.8 when everyone else agreed they should have no more than 1.35-1.45. This turned out as an edge higher than 15%.
An edge can be reviewed as a bet with a +EV%. If you place $100 on a 15% edge, you can expect to net profit $100 * 15% = $15. Edges as high as 15% is a bit uncommon, but plenty exist in the range of 2–6% at the soft bookmakers. You can look for value manually or you can look for services which does this for you. If you go for the latter option, make sure to find someone who is fast.
The aim is to get in a high volume of bets / turnover with a small edge to make a profit in the long term.
2. Start with clearing signup bonuses on the soft bookmakers.
The majority of soft bookmakers offer bonuses with a turnover requirement, e.g. a 10x. You can use arbitrage to clear these bonuses. For instance let’s say you are betting on an Over / Under in a basketball game. Bookie A offer 2.05 in odds on an over, while Bookie B offers a 2.05 in odds on under. By placing $100 on each side, you have a surebet with a guaranteed profit of 2.5%. [ 1 / (1/2.05 + 1/2.05)]. Remember that you’re goal is to clear the bonus, so you can go break even by taking 2.0 and 2.0 or even go slightly below. Just make sure that your bonus is large enough to justify taking bets with a slightly negative expected value.
3. Know that “tipsters” who are profitable would never give away their advice for free.
Most tipster make money from affiliate deals with bookmakers where they get money if you use their links to sign up to the bookmaker site or by getting a percentage of losses made by bettors. If a tipster has an actual edge or inside information they will act upon this themselves. Only once they have taken a position in the game will they be willing to give up this information. The result being that they get better odds than you. For instance if a tipster recommends Troy at home versus South Florida in the NCAA at 1.75. They could take an earlier position at 1.80. Once people start following their advice and the market drops to let’s say 1.65 they can take a bet on the other side to make a surebet. Most tipster also don’t want to give away their track record and for the once that do, there is no guarantee that they have not simply deleted some of the bets they have lost. For the tipsters who actually do show you their full track record, the sample size is often very low. If they only place 250 bets a season for example their results will mainly be down to luck. There are two good articles on Pinnacle, which covers how to evaluate tipsters track records and survivorship bias.
4. Don’t bet on accumulators.
Bookmakers need to be profitable so on every bet they offer, they take a cut which typically on average is around 10%. Thus the odds you are getting is lower than the actual probability of that outcome and in the long run you are losing 10% of every bet you make. By combining multiple bets your disadvantage gets compounded, actually making you lose on average 34% of your stake. Let’s say you place a £10 on a 4 leg accumulator at 60 in odds. The bookmaker is essentially saying this will happen 1 time every 60 times. However, you should be getting odds of 91 (average payback at 90% giving 0.9^4 = 0.6561, 60/0.6561 = 91.45). That means the bookmaker has an edge of 34% over you. Doesn’t sound very fair does it? That’s why bookmakers are spending millions on advertising accumulators.
5. Not having a staking strategy.
Even if you are placing profitable trades, without a correct staking strategy, variance could wipe you out. So what does a profitable staking strategy look like? Well there’s two options you can deploy profitably. A flat stake, and a proportional stake.With a flat bet size, you either put the same wager on every single game, or you put the same wager on games that have the same odds and edge. Flat bet sizing is fairly easy to use, but it's hard to select a proper size. A size too big will increase the chance of going broke, while a size too low will not yield big enough profits.A proportional strategy is where you place a certain percentage of your current bankroll on each bet. Kelly's Criterion is a formula that maximizes the growth rate of your bankroll. You should be aware that following the Kelly Criterion is high risk. You can reduce your risk by following for instance 30% of whatever the Kelly Criterion tells you to. Top soccer picks is a good football tips website.
6. Know how bookmakers work and measure by whether you are able to beat Pinnacle or the closing lines of the other sharp bookmakers.
As part of any form of investing it is important to have a benchmark that you can compare your performance against. Otherwise, you do not know whether the results you are getting are because you have made smart decisions or luck. Professional poker players use analysis software to track their hand history, enabling them to review whether they make decisions with a positive expected value. E.g. calling hands where they have pot odds. For stock investors, a suitable benchmark is how you perform against the S&P 500, an index fund consisting of the 500 US companies with the highest market cap (Stock price x volume of shares). For sports traders, the benchmark is the odds at the time the match kicks-off, what is known as the closing line.
How bookmakers decide upon their odds
Typically an odds line will be placed by a bookmaker after they have performed a statistical analysis, which takes all the information they have available into consideration for instance, the team’s lineup, injuries and historical performance. Once the initial odds line has been set it will be adjusted based on market movements, meaning how much money is put on the different outcomes. The efficient market hypothesis used in financial markets states that it is impossible to beat the market because the existing asset prices always incorporate and reflect all relevant information. So if an asset is underpriced in the stock market, it will lead to investors buying the stock until it returns to its intrinsic value or in other words a fair price. The same applies to the sports market, if a bookmaker underpriced the odds of a particular outcome, let’s say a home win to Liverpool vs Manchester United, then smart sports traders will put money on this outcome until it is priced at a fair value. So for instance, if someone places a $1 million on Liverpool to win, the odds will shift. If another person believes that the odds is now mispriced and that there is value on the other side, they might place $1 million on Manchester United to win and the odds will shift again and thus eliminating the inefficiency. The more money that is put on the outcome of a game, the more likely it is that the all of the inefficiencies have been eliminated. Thus the odds at the time the match kicks off, the vig-free (bookmaker’s margin removed) closing line, will reflect all of the information that is in the market.
