Four profitable sports bettors share how they found their first edges, manage bankroll risk and variance, and balance betting with careers and family. Their experiences show why long-term success depends on disciplined processes, honest self-evaluation, and adapting as markets change.
Back to Videos“When you first discover something like that, whether it’s a vulnerability or an advantage angle, it’s kind of like you have discovered how the system operates.”
“We were doing a bunch of Wong teasers and moneyline parlays, and we won a lot of money.”
“It was some contest-related stuff where everything I put into them went away.”
“This sounds like a little bit of a shady league—that you guys are just, ‘Let’s take all these funds and gamble.’”
Why do we as sports bettors do what we do? Why do we spend so much of our time trying to predict the outcome of sporting events? I sat down with four bettors, each at a different point of their sports betting journey. All four focus on sports betting as a serious side hustle, and all four honed their skills at Unabated. However, they all take very different approaches.
We’ll explore their individual answers to common questions, how they got here, and where they think sports betting is headed.
What was your first gambling memory?
I’ve pretty much been around gambling my whole life because of my family. There were always card games going on and trips to the racetrack as a kid. Every holiday would involve some form of gambling game. It was always just a normal part of everyday life around the family.
My grandfather taught me to count cards to play bridge.
Interesting.
He was in World War II. His commanding officer wouldn’t let them play poker, so they played bridge. I grew up counting cards, playing bridge, and doing the whole betting and bidding scheme in bridge. Then, when I turned 18, I realized, “Oh, people count cards to play blackjack.”
But I lived in Oregon and was far away, so I drove to the reservation where I could play blackjack. Then I realized that was just fun. The effort required was more than I would get out of it, and I just did it for fun. Recreationally, it was mostly guys’ trips. I didn’t get into advantage play or sports gambling of any kind until COVID, actually. Before that, it was mostly going to Atlantic City once a year or so, setting aside $100, and playing blackjack and placing a lot of bets. When it was gone, it was gone. It was just entertainment money.
In 2024, I’d say the NBA playoffs were when I started. I opened FanDuel at that time and just started betting totals.
How did you get into sports betting?
Sports betting was something I was always accustomed to seeing in the family. Typically, the men in the family were either playing parlay cards, box pools, or just talking about the line for the coming weekend. As I got older, it became something my friends and I would participate in ourselves, before I realized that it could be a winning proposition long term.
When gambling was legalized in Ohio, we had a fantasy football league. They decided they wanted to take all our league funds and have me gamble on games using those funds.
Really?
So we could theoretically increase our pot, which is incredibly stupid.
Yeah.
We’d gotten lucky because the previous year we’d made a lot of money on GameStop. We invested our league funds in that.
This sounds like a little bit of a shady league—that you guys are just, “Let’s take all these funds and gamble.”
Absolutely. We’re a group of guys for whom the money isn’t important. It’s the fun. Whether the winner gets $500 or whatever doesn’t make any difference in their life. But having that excitement together during the games was fun.
We put $500 of our league funds into gambling, and then I was like, “Well, I’ll gamble too.” That first year, I think it was 2023, I managed to just break even. I now know that, for having no idea what I was doing, we did all right.
The next year, we did it again. In 2024, that was the year with the largest statistical difference in favorites covering in something like 20 years. We were doing a bunch of Wong teasers and moneyline parlays—different positive-EV teasers, essentially—and we won a lot of money. That’s when I started to think, “There’s something here.”
I didn’t know the term “Wong teaser” when we started doing it. But I thought, “This keeps going well.” You know the key numbers in football if you’re a football fan, so we thought, “We’re going to tease across these key numbers. That’s a good idea.” It turns out it’s a very good positive-EV idea.
When you were making that leap from just getting started to wanting to learn more, where did you look for information? Was it social media? Was it a Google search?
Finding Unabated was really good because, to me, it’s about listening to smart people and what they did. I’m not the first person to walk down this path. I read *The Logic of Sports Betting* because people in the Unabated Discord were saying, “Read *The Logic of Sports Betting*. Go read this book before you ask any questions.”
How did it feel when you found that first edge?
It’s a freaking addictive feeling because you want to just hammer it at that point. It’s easy to lose motivation to go find other ones because you know it’s going to go away. It isn’t forever. All edges die eventually.
But it’s a good feeling when you find it on your own and you’re not getting bets down for someone else, moving for something, or playing some other role in the ecosystem. When you find something on your own—whether it’s an origination or something on the book itself that the book isn’t as good at as it thinks—that’s a little bit of a better feeling.
When you first discover something like that, whether it’s a vulnerability or an advantage angle in sports betting or anything else, it’s kind of like you have discovered how the system operates or how the machine works. I liked taking things apart as a kid, trying to figure out how things work and put the puzzle together. It was the same kind of mindset and process.
It felt addicting. I remember the 2024 WNBA season was really profitable with Unabated. I was making real money doing this, and I also wanted to learn more. Unabated does projections, not picks, and one of the concepts that kept getting reiterated was, “Projections are not picks.”
I wanted to perfect my craft and understand how to turn those projections into picks I wanted to make. You can’t just blindly bet every green edge, both for account-longevity purposes and because not every green thing is actually an edge.
Why do you bet? It sounds like you have a very good day job, and it sounds like you’re a very smart person. It sounds like you could do without betting. So why do you bet?
One thing is that I’m a person who is driven by mastery. I want to master something. I love cooking because you can learn a new recipe and continue to get better at that dish, but you can never really reach the pinnacle.
I think betting is the same way. You can learn a new market. You can learn a new angle. You can continue to work on placing those bets, but you’re never going to fully win. You need to continually adapt and figure out how you’re going to do this today.
I have a Major League Baseball moneyline model, and it’s going to spit out some numbers at me. But how am I going to apply that in this moment, today? How am I going to apply it a week from now and continue to adapt and evolve? It allows you to continue to learn, push yourself, and try because you’re never going to fully win.
It’s definitely the problem solving. I’m a software engineer as well, and software is very similar to sports betting in that you’re solving problems. You’re solving technical problems. If you do sports betting intelligently, you’re essentially solving markets. It’s no different from financial markets, where you’re solving markets as they tend toward efficiency.
I like to solve the puzzle. The return on the investment of time and effort has been worth it thus far, so that has kept me betting. But the true reason I do it is that I enjoy it. I enjoy figuring it out.
Do you remember your first big score—the thing that made you say, “Wow, I can’t believe I can make this much money doing this”?
The first big score was a big slate of NBA action with about 12 conditionals for Unabated NBA player props. It was a grind. It was about three hours of work in a night, but it was worth it.
I don’t remember an exact day, but there were days when you’d go 12-5 on 17 total bets, or even better—13-3 on 16 total bets on an NBA player-prop slate. You make so much money, and it’s fun.
Do you think you bet more for the money or more for solving puzzles?
I enjoy solving the puzzles, but I would not put the time and effort into doing that if there weren’t a monetary payoff. The money is the scoreboard, and it tells me that I’m solving the puzzle correctly.
What’s your favorite sport to bet and why?
Favorite sport is the NFL.
Probably the NFL. Football is the most conducive to betting.
Baseball. People like NFL betting, but the NFL only has 17 weeks. How much edge are you actually going to find in 17 weeks? A lot of people hate baseball because it’s a grind.
What’s your least favorite sport to bet and why?
Baseball. Why? Just a slog.
Baseball. MLB, 100%. Least favorite. It didn’t used to be.
How do you know when to pivot from an edge that has dried up?
I think it’s different for each one, and I don’t think there’s a black-and-white answer. Sometimes you’re going to be wrong. Sometimes you pivot too late. How to determine that is really niche, so it gets challenging to know when to pull the trigger. It’s something I could do better at myself.
Moving on from an angle is probably what I struggle with the most, to be honest with you. There have been plenty of angles where I gave too much back before I realized there was no edge anymore.
I’m trying to do better with more detailed recordkeeping that my AI friends and I can evaluate routinely. That can help identify issues or potential issues where maybe I need to scale back slightly until I know whether the edge is eroding.
What’s the most expensive lesson you’ve had to learn?
My most expensive lesson is getting stiffed and trusting the wrong people, whether it’s a sportsbook or an intermediary with too large a sum of money. Start small and keep the leash short.
The most expensive lesson was probably overextending myself on some things last year—bankroll management more than anything else. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in something you find you’re pretty darn good at. You’re trying to hammer that edge, and before you know it, you’re losing sleep. You’re shaking when you think about the alternative: if it goes poorly, how bad is this for me?
It’s really easy to look at the upside, and everyone wants to see the upside. Regular gamblers do as well. But this was contest-related stuff where I got to a point where everything I had put into the contests went away—every single one of them. That was obviously not something I ever wanted, or that anyone wants. I was set up in a position where it was a low-likelihood event, but it happened. It was an expensive lesson to learn.
When I was doing some live MLB betting, the lesson was not to take these heavy favorites, both pregame and live, because MLB is a high-variance game. The best teams only win 60% of their games. That’s about -150. So you should really think hard before betting something that’s -180 or -170.
How do people in your life who aren’t sports bettors react to your sports betting?
People I associate with generally understand that I’m a sports bettor. I’m always looking for an advantage in anything I’m doing. They’re used to me coming up with some kind of system or plan of attack for an angle, whether it’s churning a credit-card bonus, playing in a tournament, or sports betting. I don’t think anybody who knows me well would be surprised.
A lot of people who aren’t sports bettors don’t like to listen to me talk about sports betting. The number-one thing I tell them is how I protect myself, because right now there’s a narrative about two extremes: either I’m going to waste all my money, lose my house, lose my job, and live in my parents’ basement, or I’m going to be a millionaire.
People don’t see that there’s a place in the middle. I make bets. I think they’re good bets. I keep my limits. I never bet beyond my bankroll. I never bet beyond my emotional bankroll.
I’m now at the point where I’m never going to make a net-new deposit into a sportsbook or gambling account. If one day I lose it all, I’ll be done. I’ll walk away. But through bankroll management, I know that isn’t going to happen. My bet size might go down to $25, which isn’t much, but I know I can build it back up.
I think it reassures people that there is a way to do sports betting where it’s just something enjoyable and fun. It’s not something I’m addicted to. It’s not something where I’m trying to hustle the world. It’s something I’m doing because I enjoy it.
It depends on my relationship with the person. If it’s someone I don’t know super well, I don’t really talk about it much because there’s no reason for them to know my personal finances. If it’s family, a significant other, or close friends, they might ask, “How’s it going recently?”
They’ve known me long enough and seen graphs of the long-term trends. I don’t have to prove it to them anymore. But I’ll still say a large number. “How’d it go today?” “Not great.” “How bad?” I say it, and you see the cringe. It is what it is, and you have to deal with it and move on.
Sports betting has gone from a hobby to a side hustle. Have you ever thought about it being a full-time profession?
I know plenty of people who do it full time, and I see the toll and the stress. There was a period when I felt like I needed a new chapter in my life. I didn’t necessarily hate my day job, but the way I was doing it at the time just wasn’t working for me anymore.
My original plan was to take a one- or two-month sabbatical and find out whether I could have gone full time and actually made a go of it. March Madness that year was very good to me, and I made a substantial amount. You ask yourself, “Maybe we’ll ride this a little longer and actually make a go of it.”
I went about eight months. I was running in god mode during the first part of the year, and I knew I was waiting for some regression. But it came full swing the other way. That brought me back down to earth. I could do this, but I didn’t know if I wanted those emotional swings day to day.
I’ve shown I can do it, but I was more comfortable having the money on the side while my bills and general income weren’t coming from it.
If I had been at this stage of the journey earlier in life, I would probably consider it more. I have a well-paying career that I enjoy, with people I like. It’s too stable to walk away from at this stage, with a family and being closer to the latter part of my career than the beginning.
Sports betting will always be part of the calculus for me. When I’m no longer working full time or retire from the day job, sports betting could still supplement my income.
One day, if I get all the bases covered, I could potentially do it full time. But there’s no reason for me to give up my career right now. I have a family and kids, so I’m not in a place where I can turn my life upside down on a risk.
The nice thing is that I can continue to build this while continuing to build my career. If someday I’m at a level where I can make a nice, safe transition, that would be great. If it never happens, that’s fine too.
You mentioned a couple of times that you are comfortable with risk. What made you comfortable with risk?
Time and experience. Time and experience led me to understand that with risk comes reward, and to assess the amount of risk. Risk is not necessarily bad. It’s like the old adage: if you’re not getting stiffed, you’re not exploring all your options.
Whether it’s risk or variance, I look at it the same way. I’ve learned to embrace variance too, and I think that really helps the long-term ROI.
You definitely get some calluses from the bankroll swings and emotional swings. Early in my casino career, you’d walk down the street with $5,000 in your pocket and whip your head around in every direction. You thought everyone knew and everyone was watching you. Then that becomes $10,000. It becomes $20,000. It can become substantial amounts.
The same thing goes for wins and losses. You might get really excited to have your first $10,000 winning day and then be crushed by your first $10,000 losing day. Then you have another one, and another one, and they become routine. Your pain threshold gets further and further out depending on what’s relative to your bankroll.
You do build up a callus, but that doesn’t mean it’s ever fun to go through. It’s just, “All right, I guess we go get it back. Time to buckle down and reevaluate.”
What gives you betting FOMO?
I get a lot of FOMO. Mostly, it’s dead edges: “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Right now, what gives me betting FOMO is what’s happening in prediction markets with market making. I’m starting down that road, but I don’t yet have my own infrastructure or capital where I want it. I know there’s a lot to be made there.
What gives me FOMO is what people have been doing in prediction markets. There are so many automated strategies people are using. I haven’t done much with automated strategies. Most of mine are just market making here and there and picking angles.
But there’s so much edge to be found in automated strategies capturing recreational flow, which I have not been doing. That has been giving me FOMO as I’ve been talking to the many bettors here at Bet Bash.
What are you most excited about in the near term with sports betting?
I’m most excited about the prevalence of prediction markets and where they’re going to take us. Short term, and especially long term, I find it harder to predict. But I think there will be opportunities we aren’t even thinking of that come up relatively quickly.
It’s so open-ended right now, with where prediction markets are and how regulated books are going to pivot and adapt. That’s the game. Everyone learns. Any time there’s newness—anything different—and prediction markets are that hot new thing, there’s going to be an opportunity of some sort. It’s just a matter of finding it.
As they try to add more products, there will be more opportunities. Change equals money.
One thing I’m super excited about is live betting. I think live betting is going to take off with prediction markets. First, if you look at these exchanges, most of the volume is actually live, not pregame. Second, the issue with regulated sportsbooks in live betting is that it can be -115 on both sides. But in prediction markets, the hold can be zero.
You’re going from -115 or -150 to zero hold. That opens up so much more edge and so much more opportunity.
Pregame sports betting is largely solved, which is why I’ve noticed the edges drying up recently. But the way I look at live betting is that there are infinitely many game states. Pregame, there’s only one game state. Everybody has all the information and many days to bet into it. Live betting has basically infinitely many game states, so there are infinitely many opportunities to find edge based on how you price those game states.
My thanks to these four bettors who were willing to share some of their thoughts with us.
