It is worthwhile to take a look at the turnover. Every company makes its own calculations. That is a matter of course. You have certain expenses, some of them are fixed costs, others are investments. The investments are the risk items. Usually the banks give you the money for that. They estimate the risk for the investments. If they give the OK, i.e. if they think the investment is profitable, they give the loan. And as a rule they make a good and rich profit from it, namely from the interest. The interest is also a risk compensation. For it is said that it has already happened that an entrepreneur has gone bankrupt, i.e. that he could neither cover the interest nor his own costs, let alone make a profit. Whether the banks were right in their decision to grant the loan or whether the risk (of bankruptcy) was too high in this case is not noticeable in the short term. The masses have to pay. This means that those who do not go bankrupt also finance the individual bankruptcies through their interest payments. But if there are too many bankruptcies, there is a simple reaction of the banks: interest rates rise (except that they may also think more about granting a loan).
Now you probably know these things (that word again!) much better than I do. But apart from that, I am not writing a book about economics, but one about playing. One aspect of gambling is professional gambling. And here, too, you have to make your calculations, especially when it comes to turnover. I always hear with enthusiasm the sentence: “What? You’re betting that much? That would be way too risky for me!”
Well, what comes to mind? After all, the calculation itself has various variables that have to be offset against each other. But first of all, this too: I always look for a comparison with another business enterprise. And in the case of any of these, the listener would tend to be all the more impressed the larger and more imposing the figure. And if the 100,000 euros that I sometimes quote (albeit per week) were to seem small to him in another company, he would think (and possibly say): “Hopefully you will soon be able to increase your turnover”. And otherwise one would possibly say: “It seems that the ruble is rolling”.
For me and my company, scepticism prevails. In another company, the 100,000 euros could be too low and not cover costs. And “turnover” alone doesn’t just mean income, of course. If you turn over a lot, everyone who does that is also at risk. He then has to pay many employees, a high rent and buy the goods he needs himself. So, in a nutshell, you wouldn’t actually get involved in the calculation at all. The man is an entrepreneur, he has to calculate it; whether he becomes rich or goes bankrupt in the end remains to be seen.
With me, people always have the prejudice, and this is not the first area, that if you play a lot and bet a lot, you will lose a lot, that’s just the way it is. Play small and careful, not so high and risky. And if you actually manage to earn a little, then congratulations, but you’d better stop. Of course, these are the ulterior motives behind the question and the warning (“too risky for me…”). But I have to make a calculation.
And I am not afraid to present it to you. As I said, there are at least three essential parameters that you then have to calculate. One parameter is the available budget. You have to set, no matter how big the benefit, a “reasonable” percentage of the budget. Another is the expected profit percentage. This, as mentioned before, cannot be clearly determined per game. You can only estimate in the long term whether the calculation worked out reasonably well. But there are games in which you are fairly certain to have the calculated advantage, i.e. games that “taste” good to you. A third factor is the probability of bankruptcy. Because: No matter how big the advantage is, per bet or seen on many bets. As long as there is one probability in your favour and one against you, you can lose. The probability of bankruptcy exists. It is greater than zero. Professional gambling is no exception, even compared to the rest of the economy.
Then there is another, very important aspect. How much money do I need to live? How much do I have to earn every month to be able to live the way I live? Sure, you get used to a standard of living. You could perhaps get by with less. But you have a car, a mobile phone, this flat, a wife, children, this and that insurance, whether compulsory or voluntary. And that adds up to a monthly cost.
My database tells me that I’ve made in the order of 3.7% profit over the entire time since recording the bets, so about 18 years. Unfortunately, it was not possible to actually record every bet. There was a time when a lot was done in cash. So I didn’t bother recording them on the computer. Nevertheless, the value is certainly very good. If you assume that you need about 7000 euros a month to live, like I do, then you have to make a turnover of 7000*100/3.7 = 189190 euros a month to be able to finance your standard of living at all.
Apart from that, my situation is not much different from that of other entrepreneurs: If I make a lot of turnover, I am proud of it and probably also have relatively much money, otherwise it would not be possible. But common sense must also prevail, which lets me keep the risk of bankruptcy low.
So there is also a calculation system for the whole thing, which enables you to calculate how high you should or would have to play something. In order to explain this to you a little bit, I will again use a small example. You have to imagine that you are playing z with a budget of 50000 euros. Now I give you an obvious advantage bet and you have to consider what amount you should reasonably bet on it.
Let’s say I pay you odds of 7.0 on a number on the dice. We know the correct odds, the fair odds, these are the inverse of the probability, probability 1/6, so fair odds are 6.0. But you get 7.0. Nothing is incorrect about my offer (or let’s say the offer). It is a neutral, correct die (as best as it can be). And a neutral person rolls the dice. You don’t have to fear cheating, it’s just mathematics. Now obviously it would be unreasonable to bet the whole budget at once. It will come or it will not come. We know that it will come at a rate of (about) 1/6. Betting all of it would mean: get rich in one fell swoop or go back to shovelling coal tomorrow. And for once we don’t want to shovel coal (a great job! No slurs please!).
So you have to choose a reasonable percentage. You only want to allow for a small residual probability (which, as I said, you can never rule out) of going broke. And, for this example, let’s say you can repeat the experiment.
Now, for example, if you bet 1000 euros, which is 2% of your budget, then there is a 0.011% chance that you will actually lose 50 times in a row (5/6 to the power of 50). So 50 times is not your number. This chance shifts only slightly for the other chances of going bust. Because: For every single game that you win, you have another 7000 euros, i.e. another 7 bets that you would have to lose first. So even if it becomes a little more likely, the order of magnitude is still right. The order of magnitude with which you go bankrupt in this experiment is therefore somewhere around 0.011%, perhaps a little higher.
But now two needs are competing with each other: one is to make as much turnover as possible and thus, through the advantage, also to gain a lot of “equity”, a lot of advantage, the other is to go bankrupt as rarely as possible (how about “never”? It only exists in the movies…). In addition, financing the standard of living is also a factor that should not be underestimated. This means that another question comes to the fore: How many opportunities do I actually have to place such an advantage bet? How much do we actually win (in the long run) on this bet? Well, we already know the calculation: at 5/6 we lose 1000 and at 1/6 we win 6000. So 5/6(-1000) + 1/66000 = 166.67 euros. The eyuity of this bet, the advantage, the expectation of winning, is 166.67 euros. So we should be allowed to make about 50 such bets per month. Because 50*166.67 = 8333.33 euros. If that is roughly possible, then the 1000 euros per bet are enough. If there are only 25, we would have to play twice as high. But that would increase our risk of bankruptcy to 5/6 to the power of 25 (with a stake of 2000 euros) 0.1048%, i.e. tenfold!
In return, however, we would have doubled our profit expectation. So you see, there are a few competing considerations that all have to be combined with a certain amount of common sense. I have developed a formula that can be used to calculate an exact amount per bet. This is budget dependent (so the bet amount is a recommended percentage of the total budget). Whether one can then live on this also depends on the number of available bets. So is there a sufficient number of advantage bets? So this is and remains a complex issue. Because in practice you never know how big the advantage is on a bet (if it exists at all). In addition, you do not know how often an opportunity for a bet will arise. On top of that, all the odds you bet on are different (of course, so is the probability of occurrence). So such a simple calculation as above does not exist in practice anyway.
It is only worth mentioning here that the recommended Kelly Divisor, which already exists, or the formula I have worked out, yields similar results. And there is no such thing as a bust in theory. Because: You always bet a percentage of your budget. If the budget is only one euro, you just bet one cent. But at some point it will no longer be enough to live on. In other words, the budget will eventually be used for living and will therefore run out…
Well, I confess that these calculations are not yet easy to understand. So once again: All the assumptions here are quite realistic. The amount of turnover that has to be achieved in order to make the necessary profit, the distribution among the bets and also the total budget that is available. What sounds unrealistic about this: How do you make 100000 euros turnover per week with a budget of 50000 euros?
Well, the money is already turned over many times in the course of a week, that’s the secret. The bets for a week are not placed before the week, but during the week. So if, for example, at the beginning of the weekend, on Friday evening, you bet 15,000 euros on the matches taking place, spread over 10 bets, then you get something back, hopefully at least, and ideally even a profit. Then the budget for Saturday is available again. Apart from that, the turnover is often only fake turnover. This is the case when it is a matter of so-called insurance bets. These bets are deliberately placed (often live) against the original bet. The intention of this bet is precisely to take out the risk. So you intentionally increase the turnover, but take out swing, i.e. risk.
The number of possible bets depends, of course, on what is available. If there are no advantage bets at all, of course you can’t make any turnover. At the very least, this would be highly inadvisable. And if you do find one, you should of course not make it higher than the other restrictive conditions dictate. If the number of bets you find with a calculated advantage is not sufficient, you may have to change your strategy completely. Or change the profession. And yet we were just doing so well and getting into the swing of things!
However, the betting offers themselves are still diverse enough. I realised some time ago (let’s say it was a creeping process) that the offers on the 1-X-2 market or, connected to that, also on the Asian handicaps on the pure match outcomes (i.e. win, draw or defeat) are no longer so attractive. The change in the entire betting market must also be taken into account. Nowadays, the betting exchanges and also the changing prices often make it possible to bet at seemingly much more favourable prices than you would have got 15 years ago. Only: back then, the inflated prices would have been due to the imagination of a certain, often individual bookmaker. Today, the prices are based on the team news, which is also disseminated through information such as the internet, i.e. actually the overall assessment of many players, who all have their reasons for their assessment. So it is even more advisable to think much longer about particularly tempting (the Englishman or Yank calls it “juicy”) bets today and possibly even to keep your hands off them altogether (I have said very little about manipulation so far, but its importance has also increased; for leaving it out, I quote the Yank again: “Tempting but unsound.”). Tempting but unhealthy.).
This has the following consequence: I am shifting my bets to a somewhat less “cultivated” field. Namely, for example, the formerly quite unpopular “over-under” bets currently take up almost 50% of the betting turnover. This involves betting on the number of goals in the match. The Asian line is usually in the order of 2.5 goals. So, that’s more or less how you would imagine it and how the goals have been scored in Europe over the last 20 years: 2.5 per game, that’s pretty accurate. So you decide whether you expect a high-scoring game or a low-scoring game. There are computer figures and basic estimates for that, too. But the advantage for me is that these numbers are much more difficult to create “intuitively”.
So practically every bookmaker is able to create odds on 1-X-2 immediately and off the cuff. But he lacks any feeling for the over-under. A lot of things are written off because no one knows very well. For me, this has the further consequence that watching football, for example, is less attractive. Because it’s much harder to watch a game where you only have one bet on “there will be three or more goals”, (even worse if it’s “less”; that’s totally boring; but every bet becomes interesting if you have enough money on it, so much for consolation), than if you have one side. The tension is far reduced even if the bets are higher.
Nevertheless, I only wanted to point out that you can still find betting offers in other ways that promise you advantages so that you can achieve the amount of turnover in other ways. And should this market also become uninteresting (the over-under market) because too many people know too well, then you have to shift the activities again. I have heard that actually more and more bets on the number of corners are possible lately.
But the market has become far more competitive (much more competitive), that’s for sure. And while I used to be able to calculate with advantages of 5%, today I can be satisfied if I achieve 2.5%.
If I were to briefly illustrate the differences between the past and the present, it would be like this: In the past, the problem was much more to be able to place sufficiently high bets. The advantages were there and also quite secure. Today I can play as high as I want. But I have to work hard to gain the advantages. In the past, the computer quite reliably filtered out the games that offered me the advantages. Today, there are many even much better odds. But one should only play them if one knows the reasons for the rates. So one should inform oneself comprehensively about why this course exists in the first place.