Betting and gambling is not a hobby for everyone. Infamous for being addictive and even considered a sin, it is a practice where you invest money on the outcome of something, usually sports. To be successful, you have to be intelligent, good with numbers, daring, and brave, but also willing to fail and rise up.
There have been many stories of people who lost everything they once had through betting, but what about the winners? Following is the list of the 10 successful sports betting careers. For more on this topic, feel free to visit betenemy.com and read some of the bookmakers reviews, which will increase the chances for you to be one of the people mentioned in this list.
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1. Tony “Lizard” Bloom
Source: the trademate sports blog
He is said to be the most notorious sports bettor in the whole of the United Kingdom, and is the owner of a betting consultancy company called Starlizard. They are the sole advisers for his betting syndicate, and they have £1 million on any given football game available each weekend. This is a huge prize considering how often it is available. Starlizard is therefore the biggest in Britain and makes around £100 million a year on average. Their leading man is the one responsible for it all. He also owns Brighton FC.
2. Matthew “Moneyball” Benham
Source: Brentford FC
For someone with this nickname, you would think he likes the movie of the same name. He does not however, but he is as close as it gets to it. What this sport bettor does is explore and examine the KPIs, algorithms, statistics, and the whole philosophy that surrounds the sporting world and betting. This is why he is so successful and it is his research and tenacity that made him a winner. He is the owner of Brentford FC.
3. Bill Benter
Source: Bloomberg
Benter is one of the few people in history who has managed to master the crazy and unpredictable world of horse racing betting. During the middle of the 1980s, he developed an algorithm to beat the Horse Racing in Hong Kong. During the following thirty-something years, he has managed to win more than $1 billion. Horseracing can have hundreds of thousands of outcomes, and silly and impossible-to-predict factors can affect it, from what the horse had for breakfast, to what the jockey’s day was. This serves to prove how incredible Benter’s success truly is.
4. Haralabos “Bob” Voulgaris
Source: PokerVIP
He has made betting look so easy and simple, that anyone who has watched him do it believed they could win big as well. From the late 1990s when his career started, to the early 2000s, he has won big amounts of money by exploiting the inaccurate odds on the point totals in the NBA. His win rate during a five-year stretch was nearly 70%, which is unreal in the world of gambling. Bob was successful in finding a flaw in the bookies prices, where the totals in points in the first and second half of NBA games were half of the predicted total.
5. Edward Thorp
Source: MarketWatch
Although not a true sports bettor, he deserves a spot on the list like this one. He is one of the betting pioneers, who became famous thanks to his book titled “Beat the Dealer”. One casino organization even tried to have him killed over the secrets he spilled. His ideas can be applied to a number of different betting and gambling systems. He revealed the phenomenon of card counting in 1962 with his book, which sold more than 700,000 copies and became a New York Times Bestseller. Everyone who deals with betting should read it.
6. Billy “The Great White Shark” Walters
Source: The Wall Street Journal
He earned his nickname from the odds-makers in Vegas, since they viewed him as the most dangerous and feared sports bettor in existence. During a period of 40 years, he won hundreds of millions of dollars, betting on Basketball and American Football. Sadly, he is in prison at the moment, serving a sentence for insider trading. Despite this, his success is undisputed.
7. Zeljko “The Joker” Ranogajec
Source: Manning River Times
The Joker is one of the best and most successful bettors on sports ever. He won billions thanks to Keno jackpots, blackjack in casinos, and horseracing. Weirdly, not a lot of people have heard of him, although he has residences around the world, and owns a Hyde Park apartment, where once such property was sold for $170 million. His average year includes winning around $1 billion. He even managed to bankrupt a betting exchange once. The secret of his success is advanced math skills and photographic memory.
8. James “Jeopardy!” Holzhauer
Source: Vox
Similarly to the previous person on the list, except people in Las Vegas, not many are familiar with the man who holds the record of 32 straight wins on the famous TV quiz. In his appearances, he has won $2.4 million through the use of basic sports betting principles like expected values and probabilities. He has used them his whole life and perfected his skills. Before his fame on the quiz, he was a professional sports bettor, and a very successful one.
9. Jeff “21” Ma
Source: Inc
The life story of this bettor is so amazing that it was adapted into the movie “21”, and the book “Bringing Down the House.” He rose to fame as a part of the MIT Blackjack Team, which he was a part of from 1993 until 2001. During these 8 years, he won more than $2 million from casinos. He also tried his luck in sports betting, and believes that in order to win in this world, you have to stay relaxed under heavy pressure because emotions can lead you to ruin.
10. Jonas Gjelstad
Source: the trademate sports blog
The co-founder of Trademate Sports is a very successful poker player and sports bettor. He quickly managed to increase his earnings from $10,000 to $1 million, in less than a year. How did he do it? Well, it certainly helps that he began betting on football games at only four years of age! He was always destined for this life it seems.
