Can I Make A Living Gambling
Posted : admin On 4/15/2022Clearly if you hope to make a living gambling you will become an expert on one (or more) of the four major games that can be beaten. They are horse race betting, sports betting, poker, and blackjack. Can You Make a Living from Gambling? Gambling is one of the most popular forms of entertainment around the world today. It takes place in many different forms.
Is it possible to make a living while gambling? The answer will surprise you.
I get this question all the time, and it’s something that I think boggles most people’s minds. The idea that someone can spend their waking hours doing nothing more than playing games and end up making enough money to live sounds almost absurd.
That being said, it’s definitely possible. There are quite a few people around the world who make a living gambling. Here’s how it works.
First, You Need Money
Coming as a surprise to no one, you actually need to have money to make money gambling. The old saying that “it takes money to make money” is as true for gambling as for anything else.
In fact, it’s more true here than anywhere else. If you want to make money gambling, you have to have some money to gamble in the first place.
Actually, let me walk that back a little bit—you need casino money, which can be a little different from money in general.
Let me explain.
When you walk into a casino, you’ll learn pretty quickly that they’re willing to do just about anything to keep you there.
One of the things they do often is to give you some free money to play around with. Now not all casinos are going to do this, but enough casinos do it that you can actually get a little head start on getting money to play with.
Still, it’s the rare person that can take a few free slot dollars and end up turning that into a legitimate windfall that you can then take and use to gamble for the rest of the year.
It’s all about luck really if that’s the route you’re going to take. You can easily walk into a casino, join a player’s club, get your free slot dollars, and spin the wheel.
But let’s say that you actually get some money out of this and start a little pile of cash that you’re going to use to gamble. You’re going to have to be particularly careful with that pile of cash for a simple reason—gambling for a living is mostly about math.
That’s why I say this only really works if you have money to begin with. The way you’re really going to gamble for a living is by playing the odds very, very carefully. And even when you’re doing that, you’re going to lose, and you’re going to lose regularly.
Which means that a small pile of cash is likely going to be insufficient for your needs. You’re going to need a large pile of cash (probably $10,000) to really make this work, as you need to have the ability to keep playing until you get up enough to walk away.
Which leads me to my next point.
You Must Be Willing to Walk Away, And You Must Be Willing to Lose
So before we can get into the actual mechanics of how this works, we have to address what you might call a spiritual issue, or even just a personality issue: are you the type of person who can walk away when you’re winning?
If you’re not, don’t bother—this isn’t the career for you.
Gamling Professionally is No GameA lot of people who enjoy gambling and like the idea of gambling as a career are more in love with the idea itself than the practice. The practice, like any profession, takes serious discipline. If you’re the type of person who ignores the math and believes in hot streaks or cold streaks, professional gambling probably isn’t for you.
Here’s why: there’s only one way to win at gambling, and that’s by walking away at the right time, especially when you’re up.
The reason for that is the house edge. Most casino games are rigged against you. The casino designs each game to pay back a certain amount of money over the long haul. I’m not talking about each hand of blackjack here. I’m talking about thousands and thousands of hands played by thousands and thousands of people.
On average, just about every game is going to pay the house some small bit back.
Take Blackjack for Example:On average, you’re going to lose 1% of your bet each hour. Over time that accumulates, but here’s the trick—somewhere along the line to that 1%, you’re probably going to be up.
Now that’s not always the case, but it’s the case often enough to make a difference. The casino only wins if you keep playing.
However, if you play until you get up, and then you walk away, you have effectively short circuited their strategy.
Now the same applies for losing. Sometimes, you just need to give up and walk away from the table before things get worse. Unlike most professions, gamblers don’t exactly have an hourly rate. I think it would be more accurate to say you have an average weekly rate. So if you find yourself down a certain amount while playing, it’s probably best to cut your losses and walk away before things get worse.
And again, here’s where those house edges and averages come into play. The truth is that over time, you’re going to keep going up and down, you’re going to have an ebb and flow to how much you win and lose. Having a large pile of cash allows you to absorb losses and keep playing until you inevitably win again.
So, What Should I Play?
Now we’re getting into the nitty gritty of this thing. If you have a serious pile of cash and patience, the next step is to find the right game to play.
I’m going to bring up the house edge again because that should be one of the main things you consider when choosing what game to play. The games with the worst edge for the house are the best for you. You’re going to be much more successful at this playing games like blackjack or poker than you are playing something like roulette.
Keep Fun in MindYou need to play something that you’re going to enjoy, and I think this is something a lot of people don’t really think about either when they think about gambling for a living. Sure, you can play real money blackjack all day and possibly make some money, especially if you have a card counting system and a betting system, but what if blackjack bores you to tears?
Are you really going to play a game that’s boring hour after hour, day after day, week after week, if it takes a huge pile of cash to keep playing it and has some serious ups and downs?
No. Probably not.
I think this is the main reason that you see so many people playing poker for a living. Poker is a lot different from some of the other games where the house edge is low (like craps) because there’s so much going on, and there’s a psychological game happening alongside the actual game.
You’re playing against different people, the characters you play against can be interesting and strange, you can make friends, and each hand is different. Blackjack can get seriously repetitive, but poker, with its variety of hands and ongoing banter, can be quite entertaining.
You’re Probably Going to Have to Move Around a Lot
This is something else that I think a lot of people don’t really consider—casinos aren’t exactly super happy to have you hanging around their place and taking their money.
No, they aren’t going to beat you up or anything like that, but they can absolutely kick you out if they catch on to the fact that you’re winning too much.
You might think this is unfair, but the fact of the matter is that these are private businesses, and they can essentially do whatever they want. You don’t get a choice in the matter, so if you want to keep winning and keep money in the bank, you have to play by their rules.
What that means for the professional gambler is that you have to spend time moving from casino to casino. This is why most professional gamblers go to a gambling mecca like Las Vegas or Macau and live there permanently. It makes a lot of financial sense, and it’s easy to just walk or drive from one casino to the next as you work each day.
Trying to do this in a smaller city with only a single casino is probably going to end up with you banned from that casino and your career over before it really began.
Conclusion
Sure, it’s possible that you can make a living gambling, but for the vast majority of people, it’s not really an option, and even for the folks for whom it is an option, it’s probably not going to be much fun.
Are there any angles I forgot to explore here? Let me know in the comments.