Sure bets

When I was 16 years old I was looking for some ways to earn easy money with hacking the system.

First I came up with the idea of betting on roulette. The idea was to make a bet on one colour. If I lose I place the same bet , with twice as much money. In case of lost I would duplicate it again and again until I win. In theory I would make a bet of 2€ on red first. If the winning colour isn't red, I repeat the bet on red with 4€, so in case of winning the previous losing is covered. If I fail again, I make a bet of 8eu and so on until the ball finally hits the red colour, and all my losings would be paid out . Everytime the ball hits red I make 2€. Otherwise I just duplicate. But soon or later I should bet 1024 or 2048€. It would happen once in every 780 games , which doesn't payoff. Even if I had 100k to bet, this wouldn't payoff in a long term, and soon or later I would lose all the money I gained. Thankfully I realized it before I was able to go in a casino.

But then I found something very cool on sports betting forum. It was called "sure bets". The thing is , that different bookmakers place different odds for each market. For example I would like to bet on: Which one of the following football players will score more goals in the next season? Is it gonna be Lionel Messi or Christiano Ronaldo? If 2 friends would make such bet, each of them would place a 100€, and the winner's gonna get 200. But, the bookies make it with the odds. If bet365 thinks the chances are 50/50, they place the odds of 1.9 on each outcome, so they also earn something, because if the odds were 2.0-2.0 as in betting with a friend , there would be no profit for them.

But, if they think Messi is more likely to win, the odds are setteled 1.8 - 2.1. In other words , if I bet on Messi to score more goals, I win 180 out of 100, and if I bet on Ronaldo I get 210. But bwin thinks Ronaldo has more chances to score more goals in the next season, so they make the odds of 2.1 - 1.8. Just the opposite. And here we have the arbitrage. Usually the market regulates the odds by itself, but for a short period of time the odds are so different that some might earn money with placing bets on both possibilities. I bet 100 € for Ronaldo to score more on bet365, and 100 for Messi on bwin, and in any case I get 210 €! I placed 200eu, and I don't care who wins, because I covered all the possible outcomes! I can also place 2000eu and earn 100€. (If they both score the same goals, I just got money back on both bookmakers.)

I did many reaserches until I was finally 18, and I had 1500€ at that time. I started with arbitrage betting. First I had to sign up on 10-15 bookmakers. More accounts- more opportunities. I was learning first with small amounts of money, but very quickly I started to make bigger bets- of few 100€ on each outcome. The first problem I've met was mistakenly event pick. Same opponents playing 2 games in next two weeks, with different odds for each, might look as a nice arbitrage, but in fact it wasn't an arbitrage at all. Fortunatley I haven't lost, but I could lose both bets that I made , because they weren't for the same event. So first lession was learned. Always check the event date, not only the opponents! The other problem I experienced was very dynamic odds changes. The program I used for sure bets finding, showed me the odds that would payoff, while the real odds weren't the same anymore, so there was no place for an arbitrage anymore. Actually this happened with 80-90% of all "sure bets" I found. After a month of doing it, I already earned around 200€ only with, so called, arb bets, plus some additional cash with bonuses. But in a very short time , some of my accounts were blocked. First bookmaker was Marathonbet. Soon after, BetVictor blocked me as well. I recived all my money back tho, but the opportunities for making money with arbitrage bets were decreasing. Some bookmakers were also holding my money and didn't want to payoff for some time. They had all kind of excuses, mostly my ID picture wasn't quality enough, or proof of evidence didn't match their requirements or they simply didn't answer my withdrawal request at first. Many times it happend that I haven't meet rollover requirements, and in some cases there was 500eu was sitting on one account , waiting for next arb on particular bookie. Nevertheless, in a first year I earned around 1200€, that almost doubled my investment. So far so good.

Because I didn't want to make this post too long , I decided to split it on a half. If some of you show the interest in this story I will post the 2nd part where I am going to describe what happened in the next 3-4 years. Feel free to ask me anything about aribitrage bets.