Every gambler has thought about what it’d be like to earn a living through casino games. This spawns visions of making a 6-figure salary, feasting on comps, dressing like James Bond and traveling the world.

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Tips on How to Become a Professional Gambler Qualifications. Discipline: If you have to make a bet for the sake of making a bet you are in trouble. Focus: If you are distracted with other activities, people, family or problems you will not be able to give gambling the attention it requires. If sports are your choice, expect to go 2-22 on a. To most sports gamblers, a professional bettor seems to have a perfect life. They wager on sports for a living, make their own hours, and earn serious profits. That said, professional sports gambling may seem like a glorious career. However, it actually involves a long and slow climb to the top.

• Apr 10, 2019 This is Jeopardy! Here is today’s mind-blowing contestant and our returning champion: A 34-year-old professional sports gambler from Las Vegas, Nevada, James Holzhauer, whose four-day cash.
• Nov 16, 2017 The term “professional gambler” is sometimes used interchangeably for both people who earn part-time and full-time income through gambling. This makes sense because both groups have the skills to earn long-term profits.
• Episode 1: Follow professional sports bettor Jonas Gjelstad's journey, as he turned $10,000 into over $1,000,000 in 12 months. Watch Episode 2 to learn more.

But is being a professional gambler really this lucrative?

Let’s begin discussing the matter by defining what it means to be a pro. You and I will also cover the salaries that pro gamblers make in different games.

How Do We Define a Professional Gambler?

The term “professional gambler” is sometimes used interchangeably for both people who earn part-time and full-time income through gambling.

This makes sense because both groups have the skills to earn long-term profits. Therefore, you can technically be considered a pro gambler as long as you’re making profits of any kind throughout the year.

But I keep a much tighter definition of a professional gambler.

A true pro not only makes profits through gambling, but enough to pay all of their living expenses. This includes rent (house payment), utilities, car payment (transportation), insurance, meals, clothes and anything else deemed necessary.

A semi-professional is somebody who makes enough to supplement their income, but doesn’t earn full-time living through gambling. I’m only going to cover full-time professional gambler salaries in this post.

What Casino Games Offer the Chance to Make a Living?

The gambling world doesn’t offer an abundance of opportunities to make a living, but there are a few different games where you can earn some nice profits.

Here’s a list of the most common games that you can make long term profits with:

• Blackjack card counting
• Daily fantasy sports (DFS)
• Poker
• Sports betting
• Video poker

Blackjack and video poker both see you try to win money directly from the house.

Casinos do everything in their power to hinder successful card counters. This includes using continue shuffling machines, multi deck shoes and watching for counters.

Anybody who’s caught counting cards is often kicked out of the casino and banned. This is why it’s so important for card counters to blend in with normal players.

Casinos don’t usually worry about advantage video poker player. In fact, some games are set up to offer positive expected value (+EV) to players who use perfect strategy.

Another problem is that it’s now harder than ever before to find video poker games offering over 100% payback like Deuces Wild (100.76% payback), Double Bonus (100.17%) and Double-Double Bonus (100.07%).

DFS and poker both see you compete against human opponents. The house merely takes a small cut of tournament fees or cash game pots (poker).

Sportsbooks create lines in an effort to get equal betting action on both sides. The sportsbooks make their money by taking 10% vigorish (juice) from the losing group.

Every form of advantage betting has its pros and cons, but the key is that each of these activities offers the chance to make a full-time living.

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Salaries for Professional Gamblers in Different Games

Card Counting

People have been making a living through card counting since the early 1960s, and despite all the obstacles that casinos have put in players’ way, it’s still possible to earn profits with card counting today.

You need a sizable bankroll in order to properly spread your bets and survive variance. The bare minimum you should aim for is $20,000, but it’s better to have closer to $50,000.

How much you make depends upon several factors, including the following:

• Skill level – Successful counters have between a 0.5% and 1.5% edge on casinos.
• Hands per hour – 50 to 200 depending upon dealer speed & table size.
• Bet spreading – Difference between your lowest and highest bet.
• Deck penetration – The further into the shoe you get, the more confidence you can bet with.
• Counting system – Some systems are more accurate than others.
• Game rules – You want the best rules possible in order to lower the standard house edge.
• Tips – $5 per hour for the dealer is standard.

Now, let’s set up an example by creating variables behind your counting session:

• You have a 1% edge based on the rules, your skill level and using the Hi-Lo counting system.
• The dealer is dealing 100 hands per hour.
• Your minimum bet is $25, and you spread up to $175 during favorable counts (i.e. 1 to 7 spread).
• You get 70% deck penetration before the shoe is reshuffled.
• You tip $5 per hour.

Here’s how this example would play out in terms of profits:

• Your average bet is worth $50 ($25 minimum; spread up to $175 for favorable counts).
• $50 average bet x 100 hands = $5,000 in hourly bets.
• 5,000 x 0.01 edge = $50 hourly win.
• $50 hourly win minus $5 tip = $45 hourly profit.

Some counters make $100 or more per hour by improving their edge up to 1.5% and/or increasing bets, but many players are happy with a $45 per hour rate to start with.

The final step is to figure out how many hours you’ll play and convert this into an annual salary. Here are a few different figures on how much you’d make per year:

• $45 x 40 hours per week x 52 weeks = $93,600 per year
• $45 x 30 hours per week x 52 weeks = $70,200 per year
• $45 x 20 hours per week x 52 weeks = $46,800 per year
• $100 x 40 hours per week x 52 weeks = $208,000 per year

The last figure shows what’s possible for a really good card counter who makes $100 per hour. The $45 calculations show that even decent counters can make good money.

The keys, though, include keeping an accurate count amidst casino distractions and blending in with normal players.

Daily Fantasy Sports

DFS is the newest game that offers skilled gamblers an opportunity to make money.

Daily fantasy sees you pay an entry fee to enter contests and compete against other players. The goal is to create lineups that score the most points and rank the highest in tournaments.

Daily fantasy sports experienced a big boom in 2015, thanks to clever marketing campaigns that make it seem like any sports fan can win.

The truth, though, is that only a small percentage of those who play actually win. A McKinsey study from 2015 showed that 1.3% of daily fantasy baseball players collect 91% of the winnings.

Despite these long odds, many people still enjoy trying to win in daily fantasy, but what exactly can you expect to win if you’re among the small percentage of DFS pros?

The potential for big winners is there for the most skilled daily fantasy players.

Saahil Sud, profiled in a WBUR piece, said he made over $3 million in profits in a single year. Former poker pro Aaron Jones switched over to DFS and won a DraftKings contest worth $5 million in early 2016.

Of course, the average professional DFS player doesn’t earn quite this much. To determine a standard DFS salary, let’s consider the following factors:

• Entries per day— Most DFS pros enter several hundred contests every day.
• Stakes – Typical entry fees range anywhere from $1 up to $1,000.
• Fees— DFS sites tack on a 10% fee to each buy in, which is where their profits come from.
• Skill level— Some pros have a bigger edge than others.

Now, let’s input variables to come up with an average daily profit:

• 300 entries per day
• $100 + $10 (fee) average buy in
• 300 x $110 = $3,300 daily fees
• You’re playing for $3,000 after subtracting fees
• Expected value based on skill is 115%
• $3,000 x 1.15 = $3,450 winnings
• $3,450 – $3,300 = $150 in daily profits

If we multiply $150 by 365 days, you’ll earn an annual salary worth $54,750.

Of course, DFS is filled with variance, and you won’t always feel like you’re on the path to a solid $55k per year. This is why it’s key to have a large enough bankroll to survive the ups and downs.

Poker

Poker has long been one of the most viable options for becoming a professional gambler. The reason why is because you’re competing against other opponents instead of the house.

It’s tougher to make a living in poker these days because strategy is more prevalent. Online poker gives players a chance to rapidly accelerate their learning curve by seeing more hands per hour.

You can still become a profitable player with enough hard work and experience though. In fact, some pros still make six or seven figure annual incomes with the game.

However, the vast majority of pros these days earn between $40,000 and $100,000 per year.

Poker is unique in that there are essentially two types of professionals: tournament and cash game pros.

Most rounders mix up their play between both platforms. However, the majority of poker pros also specialize in either tourneys or cash games.

Let’s look at the different considerations for cash vs. tournament play:

Cash Games

• Profit measured in big blinds (BB) made per hour.
• House takes 5% rake from cash game pots for running games.
• More control over annual salary than tournaments.

Tournaments

• Profit measured by rate of return (ROI) on buy ins.
• House adds 10% fee to buy ins (e.g. $10 + $1 fee).
• Only top 10 15% of field makes money.
• Tournaments have more variance than cash games.

A cash grinder needs to figure out what stakes they must play to make a comfortable living based on BB earned per hour.

An example is if you played $10/$20 no limit Texas hold ‘em and made 1.5 BB per hour. This equates to $30 per hour, $1,200 per week for a 40-hour workweek and $62,400 for a full year.

A tournament pro must decide what buy-in level they must choose to make a high enough ROI to live comfortably.

If you spend $20,000 on tourney buy-ins in a week and make $22,000, then your RIO is 10% ([22,000 20,000 / 20,000). This means that you’ll earn a $10 profit for every $100 you spend on tournament buy-ins.

One more consideration here is whether you’ll dedicate the bulk of your time towards live or online poker.

Online cash games and tourneys offer more volume because you can play multiple tables. Plus hands and tournaments go much faster, giving you an opportunity to boost your hourly wages.

Another Internet poker advantage is that you cut out extra expenses like traveling, hotel stays, meals and dealer/waitress tips.

Nevertheless, many players find that their win rate is higher in live games. The most lucrative tournaments are found in land-based casinos, too, such as the World Series of Poker events.

Sports Betting

The good thing about sports betting is that you don’t need to have a massive win rate just to book profits.

Sportsbooks only take 10% juice from the losing side. This differs from DFS and poker tournaments where you must pay an extra 10% fee regardless of whether you’re a winner or loser.

The juice can be lowered or adjusted based on where the sportsbook is trying to push action, but 10% is generally the amount you’ll see taken from the losing side.

The end result is that you need to win 52.38% of your bets to break even. How do we arrive at this number?

You need to bet $11 to win $10 when the juice is 10%. You must win 11 out of every 21 bets to break even at this rate, which is a 52.38% winning percentage (11/21).

This doesn’t sound intimidating when compared to how good you must be at poker or DFS to win long term, but it’s also really tough to continually find value because sportsbooks are so good at setting lines.

Professional sports bettors usually win anywhere from 53.5% to 55.0% of the time.

Some handicappers brag about higher win rates ranging from 58.0% to 60.0%, but these figures are almost impossible to sustain long term.

Pro sports bettors must be very adept at handling their bankroll since they’re dealing with such a small profit margin. They also need to make larger wagers than the average bettor to increase potential profits.

The general rule of thumb is to never bet more than 1% to 2% of your bankroll on any given contest. If you have a $100,000 bankroll, you’d never put more than $2,000 of this on any single event.

Some sports bettors like Billy Walters and Haralabos “Bob” Voulgaris have made millions of dollars with this model. But the average bettors are looking at more modest salaries ranging from $50,000 to $150,000 annually.

The key to figuring out how much you can make involves determining your ROI just like a poker pro. For example, if you make $10,000 worth of bets during a week and earn back $10,500, then you have a 5% ROI for the week ([10,500 10,000 / 10,000).

You then need to expand this to cover an entire year. Let’s look at an example below:

• You place $1,000,000 worth of bets during the year.
• You win $1,060,000.
• Your profit is $60,000 for the year (1,060,000 1,000,000).
• Your ROI is 6% ([1,060,000 1,000,000] / 1,000,000).

A 6% ROI is extremely high for sports betting, but this is just a simple way to show how to calculate your ROI and salary.

Video Poker

Video poker has good and bad things going for it these days.

The good news is that you can virtually guarantee yourself profits if you become a skilled enough player. The downside is that there are fewer and fewer +EV machines in casinos today.

Your best bet is to find a full-pay Deuces Wild machine, which pays back 100.76%. You also need to take advantage of as many double and triple comp point promotions as you can.

You can find which land based casinos offer full pay Deuces Wild by visiting the site vpFREE2.com.

Once here, navigate to the “Casinos” tab and look in the Las Vegas section. I see 13 different casinos that offer full pay Deuces Wild at the time of this post.

Unfortunately, the highest coin denomination for these machines is only $0.25. In past decades, you could find $1 denomination machines that quadrupled your potential profits.

Even under the right conditions, the odds of you making a good living with video poker are slim. Let’s run the math on what you can expect:

• You play full pay Deuces Wild (100.76% payback).
• You bet 5 coins per hand on a quarter denomination machine ($1.25 per hand).
• You play 1,000 hands per hour, which is extremely fast.
• The casino is running a triple loyalty point promotion.
• The casino comps 0.1% of your total bets, or 0.3% for triple points.
• 1,000 x 1.25 x 0.0076 = $9.50 regular hourly winnings.
• $1,200 total bets x 0.003 = $3.60 in comps
• You earn $13.10 per hour.

Even if you spend 50 hours in the casino, this only works out to $655 per week, and you’d earn $34,060 when we stretch this out for an entire year.

Most people can get by on this salary, but it’s far from what anybody envisions when becoming a professional gambler.

Conclusion

Being a pro gambler has some obvious benefits, including flexible hours, being your own boss and the ability to increase your income.

Some gamblers, such as Saahil Sud and Bob Voulgaris, have even gotten rich with their skills. Of course, you may be perfectly happy making mid 5-figures, as long as you get to enjoy the aforementioned benefits, but there are also some downsides to be aware of. These include risk, highs and lows, no sick days and the potential to lose everything.

It’s up to you to weigh the good and bad before ultimately deciding to pursue a professional gambling career.

The potential rewards can be great in the case of card counting, DFS, poker and sports betting, but you also have to be disciplined and good at handling risk.

Everyone wants to know the secret to being a winning sports gambler. But there’s not a single secret that no one is telling you about.

However, there are several tricks that professional gamblers use. Here’s a list of seven tricks that sports betting professional gamblers use for long term profits.

All of these sports betting tricks work together. While you can start with one or two of them; eventually you need to learn how to use all seven of them. The good news is when you get the most important one down, about value, the rest of them fall into place easily.

1 – Know How to Get Big Money in Play

Most gamblers who bet on sports never think about what they would need to do in order to get large bets down. Yet many of these same gamblers dream of betting on sports full time and making a good living at it.

If you’re good enough to make a 1% profit on your bets over the course of a year, you have to get $10,000,000 in play over the course of the year to make $100,000. And a 1% profit margin is not something to take lightly. Many professional sports gamblers don’t do this well.

Can you get $1,000,000 down in bets every month? This is over $33,000 on average every day. And not only do you need to get this much money in play, you have to find enough games that offer value to do it on.

2 – Use Systems and Their Eyes

I’d love to have a complete sports betting system that uses statistics to produce winning bets. And I’m sure you’d like to have one as well.

While it’s possible that systems exist that can do this with no human interaction; I’ve yet to find one. I do use systems to help when I handicap sporting events, but the truth is that I still have to adjust what the systems spit out based on what I know and see from watching games.

Winning sports gamblers use a combination of systems and their eyes and brains to make winning wagers. You should build systems that use statistics and results to help you find games and lines that offer value, but you also need to watch games and use what you see to help you make more profitable decisions.

3 – Always Use the Lines for Profits

Consider two different betting lines on an NFL game offered at two different sportsbooks:

• New York Jets +2 ½
• New York Giants -2 ½

And

Professional sports bettors look for lines that are different at different sportsbooks. When they find different lines it gives them more opportunities to make a profit. One thing that they do sometimes is bet both sides of a game. I cover this in another section on this page.

You don’t really find value just because you find two different lines. But different lines do improve your chance of winning after you evaluate the game.

Using the game with the lines listed above, if you handicap the game and decide the Jets are going to win, you’re going to bet on the line where you get 3 ½ points.

On the other hand, if you handicap the game and decide the Giants should win by six, you’re going to bet on the Giants where you give 2 ½ points.

Pro Sports Gambler

A single point difference in the lines might not look like a big difference, but it can be the difference between winning and losing. Every single time you can make a bet with a better line it increases your long term profits.

Professional sports gamblers understand the long term power of finding and exploiting the best lines. You need to start doing the same thing before you make another wager.

4 – The Only Thing Is Value

Professional sports gamblers focus 100% on value. Nothing else matters. If you find value you make a bet. If you don’t find value you don’t place a bet. It’s as simple as that.

Yet, most sports gamblers let all kinds of other things influence how they decide to make wagers. Are you focusing 100% on value, or are you letting anything else influence your betting decisions?

Betting on sports as a professional gambler is a business. If you’re not treating your sports betting activities like a business, then you’re not going to be a long term winner. A business runs based on profits. Nothing else matters.

Make a decision right now to never place a sports bet if you can’t find value.

Value is a combination of effective handicapping and lines. You don’t know if a game and line offers value until you handicap the game. Once you handicap the game and predict the outcome you compare your prediction to the available lines. Only then can you see if a game offers any type of value.

5 – Manage Their Bankroll

Do you have a separate bankroll for all of your sports bets or do you use your everyday money in your pocket or bank account to place bets?

Remember in the last section you learned that if you’re not treating your sports betting like a business that you’re going to have a hard time making a long term profit? Part of running your sports betting activities like a business is using a dedicated bankroll.

And the other thing you must do is manage your bankroll effectively. You need to know how much you can bet on each game to maximize your wins while making sure you don’t bet too much so when you have a losing streak that it hurts your bankroll too much.

The best situation is to have a large enough bankroll so you can bet the maximum amount of money on every game where you have value. But this isn’t realistic for most sports gamblers, so you have to learn how to manage the bankroll you do have available for maximum profits.

6 – Have No Loyalty

This is much like the section about the only thing being value, but this is such a large hole in most sports gambler’s betting activity that I felt the need to give it a section. If you want to be a winning sports gambler you can’t have any loyalty.

I don’t mean that you can’t have any loyalty to your friends and family. What I mean is that you can’t let anything like loyalty stand between you and making profitable wagers.

You probably started betting on sports because you’re a fan of a team. It’s fine to bet on your favorite team when you’re a fan, but you can’t do it when you start treating your sports betting activities like a business.

Remember, the only thing that matters is value as a sports bettor. It doesn’t matter how much you like a team or how much you want to support them; if there’s no value you have no business betting on them.

7 – Play Both Sides When Appropriate

When you’re looking for value, sometimes you can find it on both sides of the same game. One common way that this happens is when you make an early week bet on an NFL game and then something changes during the week and you place a bet with value on the other side.

Become A Professional Sports Gambler

Another situation that comes up from time to time when looking at sports lines is like the example I used in an earlier section on this page. You could bet on the Giants and give 2 ½ points and bet on the Jets and get 3 ½ points and win both sides of the game if the Giants win by 3.

Professional Sports Gambler Advice

You can also occasionally find arbitrage opportunities where you lock in a guaranteed profit using different sportsbooks, but this is a challenging way to bet on sports.

Conclusion

The number one thing you need to know about the tricks that professional gamblers use when they bet on sports is that value is everything and the only thing. Once you learn to focus 100% on value, every other trick on this page is easier to use and more effective.

Professional sports gamblers know where to find the best lines, how to use lines to increase their profits, how to manage their bankroll, use systems and their eyes, and know how to get as much money in action as they need to.

Professional Sports Bettors

Nothing about becoming a winning sports gambler is easy, but when you use the tricks on this page you have a simple path to long term sports gambling profits.