WHAT IS IT LIKE BEING A PROFESSIONAL SPORTS BETTOR?

For the ones who don’t know me, my name is Jonas Gjelstad. I’m a Norwegian sports bettor and former professional poker player. I’ve been profiting from sports value betting for a couple of years and this is how it all started.

In January 2015, I started betting on sports with $12,800. During my first month of hard work, I got $58,000 in profits. At the beginning of February, I already had $70,000 in my bankroll to bet with. During that month, my stakes were around $600 and $3,000, ending up with a $36,000 profit. After only two months, I had made almost $100,000 only with sports betting.

And then in March, I was almost able to double my profits. I bet for $943,000 and I made a profit of $93,000 with over 10% ROI. In April, I was having my biggest month ever in terms of turnover. I was betting for $1,3 million and I profited $32,000 with a 2.6 percent ROI, which means that I was maybe running at about what's expected or a bit below, but it's still a good month considering the average ROI on value betting.

In May, I had a turnover of $763,000 with 2.68 percent ROI and $18,000 profit. But as you can tell, my turnover is pretty much half of what it was in April, which makes sense because most opportunities came only during the first half of the month as most of the seasons are ending in mid-may. Fewer games played, fewer games to bet on.

During the summer months, I had basically no bets. There were no Euros, there was no World Cup, almost no games to bet on, and that’s known for most sport bettors. So during the summer months, I was betting on some Wimbledon and some lower leagues, for example, Norwegian and Swedish football are on during the summer, but I personally didn't have any success with that. It can also just be due to variance since the number of bets was very low. In June, I had 220 bets and in July, 30 bets and that’s not many.

But then the season started again in August. So I bet for 750,000 and I lost $46,000, leaving me with a negative ROI of 7.23 percent for that month, which can happen. In some of the games, it was annoying to see how they were played out. Even though I felt I was doing everything right, I just happened to be on the wrong side of the variance. You cannot always win, that’s just the way it is.

But then in September, the season started picking up and NFL started to go, a great moment for sport bettors. I tried to figure out how to break down NFL and I bet for over a million. I made over 70K with more than 7% ROI. And then in October, I decided to go big on NFL and just really tried to figure it out, and NBA also started then. During that month, I bet for 2.8 million dollars and I made 150K with less than 6% ROI.

Then, coming up the next month, I bet for six million dollars and I profited over $200,000 with a little less than a 4% return on my money. So, at that point, I didn't even know how much I had in my account, but I had well over half a million dollars.

And then in December, the season was about to end in the NFL, the playoffs were about to start, and then there were much fewer games. Nonetheless, I bet for 5.5 million dollars and I made 400,000 dollars with 7.6% ROI. Throughout that year then, I turned 10k into a bit over a million dollars.

We also filmed a series about my story as a professional sports bettor. Episode 1 documents my rise and transition from the soft books to the Asian markets. Taking my profits from the Soft books and putting in the hours to beat the Asian markets.

I hope you enjoy and don't forget to check out part two, which documents the highs and lows of a professional sports bettor entitled "I Lost £256,000 in one day". You can watch the whole series of 6 episodes on the Trademate Youtube channel.

Cheers!

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