Sportsbooks have done an excellent job burying the statistics on what percent of its bettors are profiting long term. Sometimes you’ll hear 10%, sometimes 5%, sometimes 3% or less. What is abundantly clear is that the vast majority of people who bet on sports lose — A lot. The number we do have is that for each dollar bet on sports books, the average loss is 7.7 cents. That is to say, if you bet a dollar on a sports bet you will on average walk away with 92.3 cents. Seems to be a pretty shit deal. When you look up how to make money betting on sports, you’ll get all sorts of results about gambling strategies, algorithms, fixing games, and every other scheme concocted by drunk college students with too much time. I consider these to all be absolute bullshit. That being said, I’m happy to report that I’m in the small slice of people who do make (a little) money betting on sports, and I’d like to share how.
I: How to think about Sports Betting.
There is one thing I cannot emphasize enough to you: you’re not smarter than everyone else at this. You’re an idiot. Yes, you. Sorry to be the one to deliver the news. This is an industry that is built upon people thinking they’re just that much more clever than everyone else. Even reading that first paragraph it’s tempting to think: sure, the average person loses 7.7% on each bet — But not ME. I am above average! I took AP classes! Doesn’t matter. You will lose. You need to stop thinking about this as a ‘game’ you can win by having more foresight than everyone else. You need to win 52.4% of your average bets LONG TERM to beat the odds and make a profit. You can do this on a given day/week/month, but you will not keep it up.
So.. how do you think about it then? The answer is you do it statistically. Much like being a baseball GM, this is essentially just applied statistics. I know I know, it’s quite a bit less fun this way. It’s a lot more fun to believe that if the Celtics are playing on a rainy day with a waxing crescent moon at TD Garden then they’ll beat the spread, but that’s the losing mentality. Your average profit on these bets is a curve. It’s a curve centered around an average profit rate of 46.15% (this accounts for the sports books taking their cut from the initial odds, and assuming a true win rate of 50%, which is generally the case long term.)
This is a hypothetical return chart that captures what the average bettor’s returns are for 30 weeks. Each week has its own column. Some weeks are excellent, netting a far above-average return (even nearing ~75% at the highest.) Whereas some weeks have brutally low returns, 0% in one case. Most, you’ll see, are between 37% and 60%. The average is the number I mentioned above: 46.15%. This means this poor bettor lost almost 4% of their hard-earned money gambling on sports. This is the guy you know who swears he’s making money and can happily refer to all the above .500 weeks he’s had when in reality he has lost hundreds betting on sports. Those columns in the middle are what makes this so dangerous, most weeks aren’t disastrous or glorious. They’re just pretty good, or pretty bad. And those pretty bad’s don’t hurt enough to get you to stop. So you can easily keep betting until you lose hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars because the Jets can’t do shit in the red zone.
Colin!
You may ask.
How did you come up with this chart?
Good question, you. The answer is that I took real betting data and adjusted it down to have an average return of 46.15%, the national average as reported by sports books. Who’s data did I use? My own. How did I adjust it? Down 5.3%. In other words, my betting has a return rate that is full 5.3% above average. See for yourself:
It’s the same chart, +5.3%. This post is just a sneaky way for me to brag about this because my loved ones are so tired of me talking about this that they might disown me. I removed a few weeks from the very beginning of my work on this project because there were introductory promotions that were essentially handing out money. I didn’t want those to skew the data here, so I took them out. My average return is not anything to write home about – 51.3%. A 1.3% return might not seem substantial, but given the amounts we’re talking about here, it can amount it a solid return. Recently that has been an average of about $20 a week, for reasons I’ll get into in a moment it can’t be much more reliable. I’ll take what I can get. If you’re looking at that and asking – Colin, I want more! I want to consistently make BIG money doing this. I’m afraid you’re not going to find that here, or probably anywhere. If someone does come up with some gambling strategy to do that they won’t share it with you, and as soon as it gets out the market will correct for it anyway.
So, the focus here is on MOVING the curve. Effecting your return rate on your bets to pull it across that 50% line consistently and make a profit.
II: How to move to curve.
There’s only one way to move the return curve on your bets: when the sports books let you. Fortunately, they do quite often — with promotions.
The sports betting market is currently highly fractured. Some states have legalized it, some are in the process, and some haven’t. We’re looking at a land grab to capture market space and grow it as much as possible. 10 years ago you legally couldn’t gamble on sports in most cities, and now you can’t watch ESPN without seeing some betting ad or spreads displayed at the bottom of the screen. The other issue these vendors have is that the service they’re offering is essentially a commodity. A bet on the Bulls to win is a bet on the Bulls to win regardless of the vendor. It’s like selling addictive corn or oil. So, they’re tasked with differentiating themselves via the marketing as well as the promotions they offer to entice gamblers to their service. Some of these promotions are enough to move the needle and make the bets they support favorable to undertake. This comes with caveats. You as a bettor are limited by which promotions come out when (baseball season, for instance, is generally a slow one.) You’re also limited by what the promotions are on. If Draftkings decides to incentivize gambling on a premier league game that you don’t care about, it’s up to you to either follow the money somewhere you don’t care for or miss an opportunity to move that curve. ANY bet you make outside of a promotion is a LOSING BET. I don’t care if you win, you’ve dragged your curve down towards 46%. The moment you’ve made a non-promotion bet, you’ve lost. As I mentioned above, that limits the ceiling on this. you’re not going to consistently make hundreds a week. There simply aren’t enough promotions.
So, what types of promotions are there and how do you maximize them? And, importantly which should you avoid?
- Odds Boosts
The classic odds boost. Take a game, or a specific bet, or a parlay, and raise the amount that you’ll make if you win. I’ve seen everything from 5% odds boosts to 100%. If you think of an average bet having a -7.7 % return, it helps frame how valuable these odds boosts are. So let’s say we have a typical bet:
It’s +84% because the sports books are deliberately giving you worse odds. So if you were to make 100 of these bets, you’d average a 92.3% return on your 100% initial deposit. Now, let’s look at what a 50% profit boost does.
Now we’re talking. That’s a 38% return on your initial deposit. I.e. you deposit $10, you get $13.80. Not too shabby. Odds boost often do exactly what I described above – they pull the average return in your favor. I’ve done the above exercise with many different odds boost percentages below:
| Odds Boost Percentage | Expected Average Return |
| 5% | 96.60% |
| 10% | 101.20% |
| 15% | 105.80% |
| 20% | 110.40% |
| 25% | 115.00% |
| 30% | 119.60% |
| 33% | 122.36% |
| 40% | 128.80% |
| 50% | 138.00% |
| 75% | 161.00% |
| 100% | 184.00% |
You can decide where you draw the line in terms of leveraging these. The math says you should take any odds boost beyond 8.7%, but I like to only take odds boosts above 20% to ensure there’s room for profit in the randomness of the results. The math also says you should always take odds boosts above 8.7% regardless of the underlying bet. I think this is a very bad idea. A general rule I use is that the less likely the underlying bet is to hit, the more of a boost I need to warrant the risk. You see a ton of boosts on parlays and this is for good reason – most parlays lose. So, yes, in theory, the odds are more in your favor than they would be and if you were to do that thousands of times you’d probably come out on top, but the reality is that this takes quite a bit of losing money and if the luck just isn’t on your side you could lose quite a bit. So when you’re seeing odds boosts where you can choose a single bet to boost – great! Choose something that has around a 50% chance of hitting and enjoy the boost. But if they want you to bet a player — or worse players — do something highly unlikely, that better be a great odds boost to warrant the serious risk you’re taking. If you’re seeing odds boosts in the form of “+350 to +450 odds boost!” simply do the math to see how much that percentage is. In this case, 450/350 is an increase of 28.57%. Not terrible, but +350 is pretty unlikely to begin with so I would not take this offer.
The math also says you should maximize the odds boost promotion every time. Almost all odds boosts have limits (you’ll notice quickly that the limits are more extreme on bigger odds boosts.) Once again, I adjust how much I choose to bet based on the risk of the bet. You will not find me putting $10 on a parlay even if the promotion allows it. Far too much risk. That being said, if it’s a strong promotion on a single bet and you feel comfortable doing so you can choose to maximize. I do this occasionally with mathematically advantageous odds boosts where I’ll put $25 or even $50 on a bet. I certainly don’t win them all, but thanks to the math I don’t have to to profit.
2. Bet insurance / “No sweat bets”
The other most common promotion alongside odds boosts goes by a few names. Sometimes it’s “bet insurance” and sometimes it’s “No Sweat Bets” but they’re all the same – they give you your bet back in the form of a ‘bonus bet’ if you lose your initial bet. This favorably changes the math in your favor but also incentivizes risk with both the initial bet and the bonus bet.
Let’s go back to our standard bet:
And let’s compare that to the insured bet:
The obvious difference here is that there’s a round two. If you lose your first bet, you get another bonus bet to try again. Now, the thing with bonus bets is that you don’t keep the bonus bet when you use it. So if you have a $10 bonus bet and use it to win $9, you take home $9, not $19. The result is that mathematically, once you lose the first bet and are given a bonus bet you’ve already lost money on average regardless of the outcome. The good news is that even just by reducing the loss this lifts the average outcome of the initial bet significantly. On average, you go from losing 7.7% on a bet (see standard bet) to making 38.15%. That’s more than the 50% odds boost! This is the result of the bonus bet padding the losing bet side of the tree, so now instead of averaging 184% and 0%, we’re averaging 184% and 46.15%. Pretty good! Generally, these are worth it.
One key caveat here. You will do better mathematically on these bets if you take more risk, which often leaves me conflicted. This is true of the initial bet as you are not risking capital in the same way you would typically, so the potential loss of riskier bets is reduced as the math of the losing bet ‘branch’ doesn’t change. The other incentive is the bonus bet. As I mentioned above – you do not get to keep the bonus bet capital. It disappears. The typical disincentive to make radical risky bets is that you will lose your capital but in this case, you’re losing it anyway. So if you bet a $10 bonus bet on a likely bet with a return of $0.10, you walk home with $0.10 having successfully reduced the risk of losing a $10 that you lost anyway by using it. Whereas if you take a risky bet to profit $40, you keep the $40 and lose the $10 regardless. This disincentivizes conservative betting here, which, as I said, conflicts with me.
3. Bonus bet on bet placement
This is distinct from the above bet insurance in that you get the bonus bet win or lose, sometimes right after you place the initial bet. This changes the statistical structure:
Instead of adding to the losing side of the tree, we’re just adding an entire additional tree and adding the returns together leading to an average of 134.3% assuming your bonus bet is for the same amount as your initial bet. Sometimes it will be for less, so make sure to consider the math for whatever is being offered. A 50% bonus bet is still mathematically worth it, although you’d only see an average return of 113%. The highs on this are higher if you win both bets but losing all initial capital is more likely than the insured bet.
I’ve decided to limit my odds breakdowns here for now, there are quite a few other promotions that more niche to review (early win promotions, ‘giveaway boosts’, ect.) There are some great blogs online that break down these further, here is one:
https://about.darkhorseodds.com/guide-index/sportsbook-promotions#
III: Conclusion
Milton Freedman famously said there is no such thing as a free lunch, this math begs to differ. I’ve done alright using this as a method to get some free lunches, although it has served as a much more effective machine for entertainment than profit. This is a great tool to make games that you otherwise wouldn’t care about interesting and to enjoy the fun of being right. It’s nice to do that without consistently incurring a cost, but this is a careful line to tow. It’s unbelievably easy to get caught in the excitement of it all, in the feeling of being right and making money as a result. It’s easy to slip into making bets that aren’t backed by promotions, these companies are built on people who do. One minute you’re making a little money from DraftKings, the next you put $20 on a parlay that won’t hit. Please be self-aware of this stuff. I recommend tracking on a simple sheet how you’re doing and paying close attention to how you bet. I won’t lie here, I sometimes make a bet without a promotion, but if I do I’ll bet $1. It’s all just for fun, don’t let it ruin you.
IV: Appendix Data – From 3/8/2023 to 11/25/2023
My return distributions across bet types and leagues. These are highly influenced by what promotions are being offered. One column includes free bets and one doesn’t.
| Return % (Free incl.) | Return % (Free not incl.) | |
| Spread | 12.30% | -10.20% |
| Prop | 71.70% | 8.93% |
| Moneyline | 18.54% | 11.99% |
| Parlay | 26.22% | 10.77% |
| NBA | 48.45% | -5.16% |
| CBB | 64.20% | 7.88% |
| NHL | 56.49% | 19.82% |
| NFL | -0.59% | -2.21% |
| XFL | 85.82% | 85.00% |
| WBC | 66.60% | 66.60% |
| MLB | 11.66% | 6.49% |
| Golf | 109.24% | 29.20% |
| WNBA | -58.33% | -58.33% |
| Boxing | 41.00% | 10.00% |
| RACING | -100.00% | -100.00% |
| PL | 98.61% | 98.61% |
| CFB | 48.22% | 47.90% |
| Tennis | 41.39% | 41.39% |
W/L quantity across bet types. Significantly more losses than wins in just about every category but this is offset widely by higher returns on those bets which makes this operation profitable.
| W# | L# | |
| Spread | 67 | 88 |
| Prop | 88 | 104 |
| Moneyline | 91 | 95 |
| Parlay | 71 | 156 |
| NBA | 55 | 110 |
| CBB | 51 | 53 |
| NHL | 23 | 29 |
| NFL | 50 | 91 |
| XFL | 3 | 0 |
| WBC | 2 | 0 |
| MLB | 81 | 99 |
| Golf | 9 | 14 |
| WNBA | 1 | 3 |
| Boxing | 3 | 1 |
| RACING | 0 | 2 |
| PL | 5 | 1 |
| CFB | 27 | 24 |
| Tennis | 5 | 5 |