How Much Money Can You Make With Betscope?
A realistic look at the profits you can expect to make at all levels of sports betting.
How much money can you make sports betting? It’s a question that produces a lot of snake oil-type answers, if not outright predatory ones. Plenty of products and services know the best way to get a clickthrough on an ad or a subscription trial is to start with putting out as big and juicy a number as possible and reverse engineer a methodology that supports that number, regardless of how robust it is. As I’ve mentioned before, it can be frustrating competing against places like these; there’s just massive incentives to be as dishonest as it takes to drive subscriptions and user numbers in the sports betting world. We built Betscope with a clear vision of people being able to use it to make more money than they would have otherwise, and it deserves a clearer articulation of how much money you might expect to make, especially if you ended up limited like we did.
Expected profits from sports betting can be summed up with a straightforward formula:
Dollars per bet * number of profitable bets made per game * number of games bet * expected ROI per bet
We can break down what determines the values for each of these components to come up with some working ranges.
Dollars per bet: this is ultimately determined by the betting limits at each sportsbook. Markets like props and alternate lines will have much lower overall maximum bets, especially if you’re limited at sportsbooks. More standard markets like spreads and totals will have higher overall limits, but these are also affected by the timing of the market as well: opening lines have much lower limits, as they don’t have any market action to help shape them as much as closing lines do, which is why you can bet much more 5 minutes before a game starts than 5 minutes after the lines open.
Number of profitable bets made per game: this is determined by your ability to identify value in the betting markets. A lot of people conflate identifying value with handicapping markets, and while handicapping markets is indeed a precursor to identifying value, there are more elementary steps, such as knowing what markets are available to you across all sportsbooks and what their prices are. This sounds like a trivial step, but the fact that line shopping isn’t common practice among all sports bettors illustrates how it’s a point that bears repeating. In fact, if you’re able to identify price discrepancies alone, you’ll eventually see opportunities like arbitrage bets, which require zero handicapping knowledge to extract value from. Identifying prices in all markets and observing where the biggest discrepancies are is a much more reliable driver of finding profitable bets than handicapping the outcome, as it contains zero uncertainty compared to handicapping games.
Number of games bet: this is determined by each sport’s volume of games on the schedule. While this isn’t something you as a bettor can control, it’s still worth bringing up to help prioritize which sports you might want to focus on to maximize your returns. As a very simple illustration: there are 272 regular season NFL games, but 1,230 regular season NBA games. If you had to pick a single sport to focus on to maximize your profits, even though the NFL might be more popular and you think you might know the sport a little better, the much higher volume of sheer games available for the NBA gives you a much higher upside for how much money you can make, assuming there are roughly the same number of markets available per game.
Expected ROI per bet: this is ultimately tied to how well you are able to handicap games. While it’s theoretically possible to come up with a handicapping process that produces outrageous ROI numbers, we can bound this value with some industry standards. A good rule of thumb is mainstream markets like spreads and totals can produce 1-2% ROI; derivative markets like alternate spreads/totals and props can produce around 4-5% ROI.
With those guidelines established, let’s come up with how much money we can expect to make using Betscope. Basketball is a good representative for a single sport: it has a high volume of games, a robust derivatives market, and reliable handicapping methods. From our backtesting, Betscope is typically able to find 4-5 bets per game per day that cross our value threshold; those bets are also within the 4-5% ROI range. Let’s also make a conservative assumption that we will eventually be limited across all our books, since we can’t expect to fire into these markets forever and go unnoticed. Using our recent limiting experience, we can assume we’ll be limited to around $75 per bet over the long run. If we bet something like 70% of NBA games, since we can’t be realistically expected to be available to bet every single game, here’s what that math looks like:
$75 per bet * (average 4.5 bets per game) * (1,230 games * 70% of games bet) * (4.5% ROI) = $13,076 for NBA
You can rerun that same formula across multiple sports with different numbers; your results may vary depending on what your assumptions are, but if you apply that to all sports available during the calendar year, you can comfortably get to a number in the $25,000-$40,000 range.
This is not an earth shattering amount, and not nearly in the ballpark of what professional sports bettors make (more on why their numbers are so much higher in a bit), but it is a realistic number for a sports bettor whose primary skill is the ability to identify value in the sports betting market through price sensitivity and price awareness. What that number undersells, though, is the time and effort required to make that money. If you were to manually check every single market all the time to hunt for that value yourself, that would be a full time job to identify and bet on markets where value opportunities might be available for only a couple minutes. But having a tool like Betscope that automatically identifies those prices for you, and makes it as frictionless as possible to place those bets, dramatically reduces the time and effort you need to execute on that process. If you’re conservatively spending an hour a day, 5 days a week betting, your hourly rate works out to just over $100/hour- not bad for a hobby!
So where do these 6 and 7 figure sums come from for all the professional bettors you might have heard about, and what numbers are different for them in that above formula? By far the biggest difference for them is how much they’re able to get down per bet. Once you have a reliable handicapping process, the biggest challenge becomes how much money you’re able to get down. Some places develop sophisticated syndicate operations, complete with runners, burner accounts, or any number of ways to expand their operation horizontally to increase their volume. The other way to be able to get more down is to find edges in markets with higher limits: if you only stick to props and alternate lines, you will have to expand massively horizontally in order to increase your volume, but if you can find profitable bets in spreads and totals markets (harder to do), you’ll be able to bet larger volumes in those markets, unlocking the required volume to achieve those higher gross returns.
If you want to move to the professional level, some combination of expanding your volume and the range of bets you are able to make will be a requirement. But if you’re earlier in your sports betting journey, the ability to identify basic value in the market is a necessary first step to master, and you can still make a healthy amount of money doing so. And even if you don’t want to become a professional bettor but still want to become profitable at the recreational level, not only is that possible, but we’ve also built Betscope to be part of that process for you to make sure it’s still a convenient, fun, and enjoyable process for you as well.