The Bookmaker, the Punter, and the Horse

I have dabbled in a fair few different projects in my time, but this one is certainly more niche than the rest. I have always had a great interest in maths, and my memory for things like football stats and random dates has caused many a furrowed brow among friends. This interest took me down quite an intriguing rabbit hole a couple of years ago.

I have never been a gambling man, in fact I am thoroughly against it, but I studied the art of professional gambling to see how people do in fact “beat the bookmaker”. I won’t get into the nitty gritty of mathematical detail, but it essentially boils down to one principal, known in statistics as “positive expected value” – the art of making decisions which have a high probablity of yielding positive results over a large sample size.

When we think of success in the gambling world, we think of the glamourised scenes in Vegas, the royal flush in poker, the 100 fold Premier League accumulator, returning a fortune from a fiver stake. We have been indoctrinated with visions of these statistical outliers, these once in a lifetime moments.

It baffled me that success as a profitable gambler looked nothing like that. It actually took the form of countless Saturdays and Sundays spent in front of a laptop screen, betting on 100s of games, and turning over thousands of euros. The return on investment in professional gambling lies somewhere between 1-5%, anything higher than that is considered a unicorn strategy, or sheer luck. So that means, for every £100 you stake, you can expect a £1-£5 average return.

Fun fact, being a successful gambler will result in one getting banned from commercial bookmakers over time, the terrible irony that you are not allowed to beat betting companies at their own game, but that’s neither here nor there. The important point here is not the strategy or the profit, like all things in life, it is the lesson that stands out.

You see, it wasn’t large wins and 100/1 shots that made the effect here, it was the consistent effort of roughly 4000 bets across a 12 month period. My return on investment was 2.7% per bet, and I more than tripled my starting balance. It’s so important to note that this profit was a product of 4000 small positive decisions over a 12 month period.

So where does this idea of positive expected value come into our everyday lives? Fucking everywhere!

It made me realise that every decision we make resembles a bet. Each decision has tied to it an expected value for success, a probable impact on the outcome we want to obtain.

For example, if we wish to live healthier lives, cooking our own food has a higher expected value than eating a take away. Waking up on the first buzz of the alarm has a higher expected value than snoozing. It made me realise that we are constantly placing small bets in every area of our lives. We are constantly placing wagers on our own success. It is up to us, and only us. We are the bookmaker, the punter and the horse all in one.

So my friends, back yourself. Pay attention to the small, seemingly meaningless decisions that you make every day, and see how you profit.

Chat again soon,

Conor