What is a good ROI for a sports bettor?
There are lots of statistics, with which a sports bettor can brag! But according to me there is only one that counts and that it the "Return On Investments". This and only this gives a good idea how good a sports bettor is.
First things first!
A smart sport bettor keeps records of his bets. Regardless of the type of statistics you want to brag with, it cannot be done by not keeping a betting record log.
It is time consuming, sometimes confronting and boring but it is besides picking the right bets and bankroll management, utmost important to do.
If you are not doing this and you want to become a smarts sports bettor start with it today!
You can set up your own record sheet in a spreadsheet, keep it on paper, or so on. It doesn't matter how you do it, but that you do it!
If you don't have a tracking spreadsheet and don't want to set up one yourself, I can highly recommend the one created by the aussportsbetting community which can be found here.
What is the return on Investment (ROI)?
Return on investment is a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment.
It originates for investments within businesses but can easily be used for sports betting.
The calculation is pretty simple. The only things you need is the profit or loss you made and how much money you have wagered. The profit or loss is the payout of the bets without the original wager.
Suppose you have placed a 10 euro bet and the payout was 15 euro. Than the profit would be 5 euro.
Now you can calculate the ROI! You can do this for your overall sports bets, but you can also per betting type separately. This way you will have a good overview of your overall performance but also of the performance of the different betting types. It could be possible that you discover that there is a betting type or system which is really costing you money. This could mean that you have a leak and that you should stop with this betting type or scheme or that you have the adjust the wagers!
As you can see, the number of bets you made is not important for calculating the ROI!
So people do see a difference between Yield and ROI. But I don't. They do see yield as how I do calculate ROI and the calculate the ROI based in the betting bankroll. I don't think that this is correct. Only the combined ante is the money invested. If I do start with a bankroll of 1000 units, but I do only has a combined ante of 500 units, why should I incorporate the unused 500 units in my calculations?
This money was never at risk!
So what is a good ROI?
First we have to name a cat a cat! More than 95% of the sports bettors are loosing on the long term. They could have some (bug) winnings in smaller periods but overall they will make a loss.
So a positive long term ROI is great.
If you can manage a long term ROI between 2 and 5% than you can be consider an average winning sports bettor. This would mean that for every 1000 units you would bet, you will have a profit of 20 to 50 units!
If you manage a ROI of between 5 and 10%, you are a very good sports bettors. Here the average profit per 1000 units would be between 50 to 100 units.
A long term ROI (watch the long term) of above 10% is exceptional!
Most professional sports bettors aim at a ROI of between 2 and 5%. You have to think that they wager a lot, and based on the big number of bets in combination with higher stakes (compared to us) can make them a living!
Remember that sports betting is more like running a marathon than a 100 meter dash sprint!
Other type of statistics
Like I wrote in the beginning there are lots of stats where sports bettors like to brag with. So are more or less just useless. For sure the hit rate or winning %.
Winning % (hit rate)
The only thing which this says is that the bettor places more winning bets, than loosing bets. But this doesn't mean shit!
Let suppose that a sports bettor has a winning percentage of 65%, than it is still possible that he is loosing money! It should not be the case but it could be the case. Let assume that he played 100 bets all with a 1 unit bet size, all bets have odds around 1.2. 65% of his bets where winning ones. In this case he would have made a loss of 22 units! The ROI would indicate: -22%.
Do you track your bets? And how do you track them?
What's your ROI?
Keep the faith,
Peter
Great ROI for sports bettor is to be positive even 1%. If you do any betting to earn money instead or fun, you will be loser for sure. Odds are made for house to win...
That’s true. Even a 1% positive ROI will make you one of the happy few!
Did you write this the same time I was writing mine ? spooky ! lol :-)
I agree with keeping a trading / betting journal, just the figure at the bottom doesn't tell you the whole story. For instance, I never trade on Mondays because there is a probability for me that I'll lose 76% of my trades on that day. It could be for many reasons, too eager from the weekend, wanting to start the week with big wins, who knows ? It's just the worst day for me so I put the odds in my favour and don't trade Mondays.
I did an article way back about the mathematics of winning, how it's perfectly normal to have a win rate of less than 50% and still make a good profit. People are obsessed with always being 'right', instead of 'profitable'.
I'm sure you won't mind me linking it, it's an old post anway so no votes.
https://steemit.com/trading/@tradergurl/the-formula-for-success-it-s-literally-a-formula
It's about trading and uses trading language, but just about everything I write about also applies to betting (just another form of trading !)
To be honest you did inspire me for writing this post!
But what you do write is true, there are a lot of similarities between trading and sports betting. You do the math and hope that it was correct! And place the bet or the purchase order!
In sportsbetting more luck is involved than with trading!
I do like all the articles you write about trading, I do learn a lot of them!
Most of my trading relies heavily on maths, but it's the same for gambling.
If you know that historically a particular football team always wins when playing home ground 86% of the time, it makes good sense to bet on that team when they're playing at home...
Most people regard gambling as a fools game, but even though I'm not a gambler I can see it's possible to put the odds in your favour and make a good living from it.
I like to keep things simple like this:
The profit is in the units, the yield in the percentages of the staked amount.
If this works for you then it works for you.
I do like the simplicity!
Sports betting was made illegal here a couple of years back, except through the government's bookie. I gave up because the odds were too shitty and they were stuck in the stone age.
When i bet with the online bookies i used to track the ROI on the total bankroll instead of the amount wagered. Was more for beer money so i probably didn't bet enough times to face the Gambler's Ruin problem lol.
Glad to be living where gambling is officially allowed. The government hands out licenses to bookies, so it is kind of controlled!
I am also betting for peanuts!
Just like the statistical part behind it!
Here in Las Vegas so many of my friends spot bed and they do not do what you do, like record winnings or what is currently working and how they can improve, they they treat it like a game for fun and not a business. do you use like google spreadsheets?
No, all my spreadsheet are in excel!
I am an old fashioned guy 😂
But I also see betting as fun, it gives me a reason to work with numbers
If you are able to beat the bookmakers at +3% ROI with a volume of 11 bets on an average day and apply proper money management you can grow +25% every 2 months. Do this for a couple years and you are a millionaire, so beating the market with +3% on a sample of 10.000+ bets can be seen as totally crushing it imo. the compound interest in Sports Betting is Crazy. Beating the market with a sample size that actually represents something is really difficult.
I actually find two things interesting. First I wonder if you keep track of your positions? And what return you have?
Secondly, will you write a follow up about the strategies of the best sport betters?