Sports Betting

Any sports bettors here? Have any insane wins to tell about? Crippling losses?

(I'm talking more about legalized wagering rather than like office pools).

have managed to stretch $70 into $213 through some strategic betting. any tips on how you sustain long term success?

ugh, i hate gambling, in any form. too personally risk-averse, i think.

I can definitely see how it's addicting. right now I'm very careful with how much I bet, and when I bet. ie, never anything close to 'what i can't afford to lose'. I've been on a pretty good streak the last month, wondering how long it will last.

i'm kind of against addictive behavior of all kinds.

oh, except for violent porn and freebasing cocaine.

-- (j/k) --

nothing wrong with that. the 'avoiding addictive behavior', that is, your joke was in poor taste and I am deeply offended and a little hurt.

my great-grandma worked in violent porn

My Dad is fierce into the betting, so as a kid I spent most of my summer holidays going to horse racing festivals. Never made any money worth writing about; these days I barely gamble at all. Last year I bet on the Eurovision Song Contest, made about £50 with an each-way on Romania.

sports betting companies are p heavily involved with the co i work for. don't get involved myself but i kinda understand it

I do a couple of accumulators every weekend on the football. I am invariably crap at it, but it's only ever a couple of quid at a time.

I've stopped picking win/lose/draws now and started doing a "both teams to score" accumulator which has slightly better chance of being right, and hopefully mean that one day all my chosen teams will have scored early on and I can relax instead of sitting in the pub at 4.45 on a Saturday willing on a late Lincoln City equaliser and winner in the space of one minute's injury time or whatever.

^^^^^ once I quit betting solely 'straight up' results, I started making more money. that way if a team has an unexpected off night you can still be alright, it's not all or nothing.

managed to win another $30 last night. no idea how I'm on this hot streak, but think it's time to quit now while I'm ahead!

I have lost 170 quid in the last month. I was 200 up over the last year tho,so breaking even.

i lost over $1,000 one year :/

Does it take a psychological toll? I lost, like, fifty bucks in Vegas once and wanted to shoot myself in the head. Then I remembered all of the free drinks and food. I can't imagine what losing a lot of money in sports betting does to a person.

In a word, yes. Granted I made it all back the next 1.5 years, and I had it to spare, but after I lost a 500 dollar bet on a football game I sat feeling guilty thinking I just pissed away $500 doing nothing.

On the flipside, when I won $425 on a bet the next year, it was exhilirating. Part of the rush is the risk, but the one thing I've learned is to turn a profit, you can't expect to get it all on one bet.

Have to sustain a few losses but keep going and if you do your research on odds and probabilities you can win.

One thing I did though is stick to small stakes after winning the $425.only once or twice have I exceeded the $100 since then and I won both times.

used to bet the odd quid on the football and f1, but can't remember my betfair password now so haven't indulged for a while. I think I was up by about £30. Small stakes and short odds definitely my thing, never took any massive risks.

i stopped putting real money on sporting events and now only bet at centsports, even betting a dime on an event makes it more interesting. i turned a dime into 3 dollars and promptly lost it, which is why i'm glad i stopped real money betting.

I'm down $110 from the last regular season Falcons/Saints game. I should try to collect from the ATL center who botched that snap. Havent touched the playoffs so far, which is a good thing, cuz I would have gone 1-3 last weekend.

I generally don't touch the NFL playoffs, straight up or spread, except for the occasional wildcard round.

I do props instead. IE, placed three bets for Bears/Hawks, one that there would be points scored in the first seven minutes, the other being that the Bears would score first on a passing TD, the last that they would score first on a running TD. Won all but the last one (obv this was an insurance bet)

I used to be huge into Sportsbetting from 2004-2006. Back then there was this online bank called Neteller that allowed you to move around money very easily from one book to another. I wasn't good at handicapping but you could do this thing called "hedging" which was kind of shady but it worked. Let's say there's a Bears/Packers game and one book had say Packers -3.5 -105, where another book had Bears +4 +105. You put $5000 on the Packers and then $4750 (or something) on the Bears. If the Packers win by 4, you win your bet on the first book and push on the other, netting a pretty large amount. In any other situation you will end up even. The problem is that finding lines like this are pretty tough, but if you have accounts on like 15-20 different sportsbooks you could find one or two each week. Also, you could do "correlated parlays", particularly in some of the prop bets - an example would be if you parlay the moneyline on a dog with the over on total points, knowing that if the dog wins it will have to be in a high scoring game. In addition, online poker was super soft at the time and had a lot of great bonuses where you could just deposit $500, play for an hour or two, and get a $100 bonus, which you could immediately withdrawl and put on another site to clear their bonus. Regardless, it was very easy to make money online just playing, since this was at the height of WSOP fever and there were so many terrible players who would stack off with any top pair. Geez, just thinking of this brings a tear to my eye, I mean I did pay my way through college doing this, bought a car, and lived a decent lifestyle, but man I could have banked a lot more if I spent more time with it. At the time I had sort of assumed this online climate would last a while, and made a lot of stupid bets/played poker higher than I really should have, in one case losing $6000 on a dinged extra point in a college game in which I had taken the over on total points. That one really really stung and made me question what I was doing, but I thought that it would be easy to get back through line shopping, hedging, and of course poker. Of course Neteller shut down, the UIGEA got passed (which made online poker semi-"illegal" in the USA, causing many sites to disallow US customers, and which generally made funding your accounts tough), and poker bonuses got much worse as sites got wise to what the "bonus whores" were doing, and stuff like correlated parlays would just get you banned from a sportsbook outright. The UIGEA caused poker to get much tougher (though still profitable), and yeah, that was pretty much the moment I knew I had to get a real job.

Nowadays I still do it, though not as high as I used to. My strategy now is to work the teasers - for example in a two-team 6-point teaser you pick 2 teams and have to win them both in order to win, but you get 6 extra points on both. For example, if you have Packers -3.5 and Jets +3, you will have to hit Packers +2.5 and Jets +9. The trick is to find 7.5-8.5 point favorites or 1.5-2.5 point dogs, because teasing them crosses the 3 and the 7, which is what many games are won by. It's profitable because the bet is a linear thing but football scores (unlike any other sport) are not linear. Consider the difference between +2 and +3.5 as opposed to the difference between +4.5 and +6. The former is huge because you win if your team loses by a field goal, while its rare for a team to lose by 1-2 points. The latter isn't a big difference since teams don't often lose by 5 or 6, so those are kind of "dead" points. So I look for those lines and tease the hell out of them in any combination I can find - generally you either break about even or make a huge score.

Otherwise I do a lot of the total point over/unders, as those are the most fun in general and sometimes you can get ridiculous sounding lines (Bears/Patriots total line was 38, which of course I hammered the over; this week Bears/Packers is at 43, a strange line since they never totalled 43 points in their past 6 matchups - I'd bet it but the Packers are my team and thus almost never bet those games). Sometimes Vegas does ridiculous things - they had the "consecutive wins by the Miami Heat" line at 22.5 to start (it since dropped to 14.5! I locked in at 19.5)

I go to the tracks sometimes but I will never understand the appeal of betting on horses

just won a bet and lost, won one that netted me $45, lost another that lost me $55, so only down ten overall.

I gotta stop this. Now. lol.

won a series of bets. now stretched my original $80 into $611.35. withdrawing it now, time to quit while I'm ahead!

I lucked into a big bowl parlay card in 2003 and bought a Leica M7.

I bet on dara torres to win in that race she lost by .01. That sucked.

i bet the Houston-Minnesota NBA game would be under 110.5 scored in the first half. it looked like a shoe-in for me to win until 30 seconds remained, and the combined score was 109. One basket would kill $200.

Dude missed a hook shot.

My heart about stopped, but the winning streak continues.

won $380 betting on two games today. this will help pay for a trip to North Carolina plus a tire repair, with a lot left over.

think after this withdrawal processes, I'm going to cancel or permanently lock out my account.

i've got the time and spare money to spend on getting heavily into this - i know who makes a good living betting on rugby results - but i cannot stand sports so i guess i'm screwed. any other online gambling thing where a guy with plenty of time and a wily brain can prosper?

lost $70 the other day, and in frustration, punched my laptop like an idiot, destroying the LCD.

I then lost $300 on the Heat.

I just won $455 on Syracuse.

I'm done. email is off to cancel my account -- I have all I need now!

:(

San Te, for fun betting go to Cent Sports. It's "real" money that's free. The website gives you a dime to start off and if you lose it gives you a another dime (over and over again). There's probably no chance to cash in unless you get a huge stake but it's mainly for fun anyway.

Anyway, congrats on your winning.

i'll hafta check that out, thanks for the sugg.!

I gave up gambling for almost 8 months. then the urge hit me again.

but my win streak is over. I got rusty and kept going too all in, lost 4 (big) bets in a row. Finally won a fifth one, that essentially paid me back for the fourth I lost, and 60% of the first one.

I'm done. It makes me roid rage watching sports.

found out I hadn't completed the "rollover" (the rules were confusing, I read them multiple times before betting, but apparently was $20 short of what I had to bid to qualify for a fee-free withdrawal). so I bet $23 I don't want to that the Magic will outscore the Celts by 3 or more in the first half, which seemed pretty legit, but of course they shit the bed.

this reminds me why I quit betting. stuff that shouldn't happen often does without rhyme or reason and often in clusters. playing one last bet now, need to close this account.

lol i didn't know that bet365 shut you down if you win too much -_-

(or restrict the amount you can bet to, like, pennies)

some sportsbooks are definitely very proactive in weeding out anyone they think will cost them money

good work lex

minority sports are probably the way to go for this

not that i am suggesting minor WTA matches are minor as such, but that the level of expertise bookies have is probably less than they do with horses or football

well yeah i've bet on the most minor of minor tennis matches, the bookies' non-expertise is countered by the fact that results can be pretty random down there. i'm surprised i lasted so long in retrospect. it never felt like i won a ton in any given week but over the past year it all added up incrementally - i think actually withdrawing some of that put them on to me :(

OH WELL i wonder whether they'll be able to tell if i just subtly open a new account from a different email address. probably :(

there are a billion other online sportsbooks some of whom probably cover the same matches

nah only bet365 covers the very tiniest, the others will do for now but it was annoying not being able to bet on ana konjuh over elena bogdan today

lol

you really can bet on *everything*

International Basketball Spread Money Line Total Points
Philippines - PBA, Governors Cup
Mon 6/16 1501 San Mig Coffee Mixers -3 -110 -155 o189 -110
8:00AM 1502 Rain or Shine Elasto Painters +3 -110 +135 u189 -110

good day today

not only could this force sites to get competitive it's also one step closer to my dream of being able to just bet on a kiosk at a bar and cash in the ticket

I bet a ton on Amanda Nunes tonight.

Fuck fuck i knew that bet i won two weeks ago would activate my gambling addiction.

Fingers crossed that the expected happens and i can immediately cut all of my cards

Fingers crossed that the expected happens

Even Muhammad Ali lost a few fights he was expected to win. See Ken Norton.

Thanks for freaking me out more :)

Think i won

I won.

Now to find a way to talk my Thanatos brain out of doing this again

congrats, way more fun to realize you got a problem after winning a big one rather than the other way around

Yup.

kinda related I remember that Mayweather/MacGregor fight (which opened at like -2000) dropping to -400 or so and contemplating making a humongous, somewhat life-altering bet on it because I was so sure there was no way Mayweather could possibly lose. but I kept thinking, I dunno, what if...Mayweather is 40, Mac could maybe land a good hit on him and stun everyone. before I knew it the line had moved to like -1000 as a zillion dollars came in on Mayweather and the fight was no contest, oh well. didn't win or lose anything but that was not fun emotionally

Lol i thought about THAT EXACT scenario last night. k3v had mentioned the ridiculousness of that line and being well off at the time, i thought about doing it, but i hadn't used a sportsbook in years and felt like it would take too long for me to find one I trusted.

So Nunes being at -400 was hardly the same "wtf" because it was certainly plausible that she could lose but it seemed low for a fight where i hadn't seen a single pundit back her opponent.

Naturally it was closer than expected and I had no ppv so i had to follow by Twitter comments and all i got was contradictory tweets like

NUNES THE GOAT

Nunes looks bad out there

This fight is amazing

This fight is boring

Nunes is dominating

Nunes is lucky she didn't go out there

i'd be terrified to bet on the NFL right now, but I can imagine if you pick an underdog the day or two before a major COVID announceent, you might bank.

That's actually a pretty good angle, worth looking into

I mean the Saints-Fins game swung 5 points in one direction after two QBs went on COVID list.

gotta imagine some players would move it more than that.

Take it from me, a formerly successful NFL bettor, a couple of points in your favor that your rival bettors aren't aware of or aren't considering could add up to big money, particularly in a long-term situation such as a weekly pool

won a small bet yesterday, three way parlay on Cincy winning, Buffalo covering, and took the Over at 43. tripled the bet.

used some winnings to place another three way parlay today, which include Philadelphia beating the spread, and Dallas and KC covering.

doubting I will hit on all three today as spreads are always difficult but looking to quadruple my bet.

this isn't as harmful to me at the low stakes I'm doing now, compared to the money I was shelling out years ago.

plus I am playing w/ house money at this point.

that won't last

Not currently no. But we're talking $25 so nbd

My site makes it so fucking hard to cash out, because I accepted a free 25$ wager I have to bet like $800 before I can cash out anything. Yes I know this makes no sense

Otoh I did run up $300 to about $700 (thanks mostly to one good year for Wong teasers) and then put my entire account on Joe Biden to win at even odds so it is house money for me at this point too

I gave back my bonus cos of that lol. It was holding my legit money hostage

Dumbest part of it was I lost the bet (it was something stupid like “who will call timeout first”) and it still prevented me from cashing out. Dunno if it’s not coded properly or just if it’s some devious tactic

I covered the spread on the Bucs and won the money line on the 9ers yesterday

Wondering if I should get into tonight’s game

Chiefs -13 seems pretty obvious in retrospect but I'm an idiot so I took the under (46.5) instead

watched a couple minutes into the second quarter, it was 0-0, figured ok this one was easy money right? put the kids to bed and before I put the game back on I see this tweet, lol

First half under bettors be like pic.twitter.com/rwFOZKhxVJ

— James Holzhauer (@James_Holzhauer) January 17, 2022

my only bet that succeeded this weekend was “kendrick bourne anytime td” which netted me a cool 16 bucks

I hate thinking about taxes on my winnings…another line item for my accountant go charge me for uhhhh

What do we like this weekend ?

Thinking the over on the bucs / rams. 48

parlay packers/zverev/monfils ml

the computer says to take the under on all 4 games

I bet on the Bengals to beat spread and for Aaron Rodgers head to come off mid snap

Fucking bengals mang