Is the Las Vegas example really good? About big bets, actually!
by
Zsoltfbo
April 19, 2025
in
Professional articles
My name is Zsolt Lázár, I started to get deeper into the world of sports betting between the end of 2015 and 2016, and after a long learning process I started to work as a professional sports bettor, at the peak of my career I was betting with 600 euros and you can hardly find a sportsbook where I wouldn't have been turned away or banned because I was considered as an undesirable person. I've used about 100-120 sportsbook accounts over the years and overnight I found myself in the middle of the incredibly fast-paced sports world due to digitalisation. I worked for several sports betting companies and was part of a number of online initiatives that were relatively long-lived. Anyone who has been involved in the world of sports betting, if not on a daily basis, is likely to know my name and I'm sure there are some of you who I have had the pleasure of speaking to / giving advice to, either verbally or by email.
The fruit of my labour that I am most proud of is the birth of our independent book, written with my co-author László Hajka, and the fact that as a result of a long work the business has been created and when you read the website you see exactly what I dreamed of, because neither the pandemic nor the technical challenges could prevent this site from being created in the quality that I and the whole management are fully satisfied with.
What is professional sports betting really like?
The optimal medium.
Obviously there must be an optimal situation, a medium that allows us, little by little, to stretch a little further than we are. The last period was anything but a normal medium. It is no coincidence that by the end of 2020 it was clear that we would have to go into a forced pause. I'm still in the group of people who went on a break not at the right time but not too late, and of course I wasn't happy to have to give up the lifestyle I'd settled into for years, especially as no one knew when the pandemic would end. On a side note, a bit of an aside: in my opinion, all the professional sportsbooks and all the betting sites that didn't shut down for these few years and go on forced hiatus, didn't retrain, all lost a major portion of their capital, if not all of it. Obviously, I don't feel sorry for the tipster sites and not because "on paper" they are generally opposed by players in the same market, but because it is quite simply unethical and immoral to put your customers' money at risk during a pandemic, when it is clear that sporting events are cancelled, tipsters have quit their jobs in droves and those who remain have presumably relied on luck themselves. Of course, I fully sympathise with my fellow sports bettors, but it was still a very wrong decision to continue. As for the tipster sites, I have concrete information that they have been forced to work with free tipster sources and there has hardly been a month when they have not had to withdraw a service because they have made such a loss, so, as they say, they have to cover their tracks that this has ever happened.
By optimal, I mean that there is a plethora of matches available, the sportsbooks are very active, the more hits they generate, the more likely it is that the pattern is better, from which a very broad and consequently serious pool of tipsters will choose their own operating model and start a battle to beat the sportsbooks, while the tipsters are also competing with each other.
The question must have been raised as to how tipsters compete with each other, it seems logical to explain that it is obviously in profit, but this is only partly true and here we come to the second important component without which capital cannot be accumulated:
Creating the structure.
Let's not forget that because we are talking about sport, the digital revolution has made many tools available that were not available before, how could they have been available when there was no internet. The fact that today we can follow almost any sporting event live and that very accurate monitoring software is available to constantly follow the offerings of sportsbooks certainly results in many good picks being released to the sports betting communities. But a good tip is not a profitable tip! The reason why a tipster (although I try to avoid this word as much as I can, because "tipster" is unfortunately used as a negative adjective in many cases) can charge 300-400 euros for his service is not because he is just a good tipster, but because he is mapping a segment of the sports betting market where his method is the most effective and sustainable.
It is likely to happen to anyone who starts professional sports betting on their own that the tipster they have positively rated and subscribed to will deliver what they expect for weeks or even months, because they have entered a segment of sports betting that sportsbooks have easily spotted and eliminated, which in many cases means a cut in the sportsbook's account. You can read about this in detail in our book, but if you have bet on lower league basketball games in the last 4-5 years where the type of picks were over/under by points, you will know what I mean.
So it's not the good tips that should be paid for, but a well-structured, long-term tipster source, which is usually not one person, but a team of people working together. At the peak of my career, which I wrote about in the introduction, the most expensive source was €300-400 per month and the cheapest was between €50-100 per month during this period (mid 2018 - mid 2020) I was usually sourcing €600-800 per month and working with four different sources at the same time. Whenever I could, each source specialised in a different sport and to keep the variance really low I used 5-6 bookmakers at the same time, carefully making sure that the sporting events I followed were in completely different leagues, so I could influence the fluctuation of my money by at least 25-30%, which of course was not always easy, because betting in 5-6 bookmakers at the same time, most of them live, well, it was a lesson I had to learn.
Discipline
Once the optimal medium is in place, once the structure is in place, all that is needed is patience and precise betting management, in a word: discipline.. Obviously, I can't expect you or anyone else to use five sportsbooks at the same time, to get up at the crack of dawn to bet live, and it's unrealistic to place 400-500 bets while working full-time and having a family. I was in the fortunate position that most of my main jobs were in businesses that were linked to sport in one way or another, and often my job involved, for example, monitoring sports betting offices, and my sports betting was not only tolerated but also desirable, and if it was not seen as such or if there were other disagreements, I left.
We have designed each of our sports analytics services to contain no more than 90-120 picks per month on average, so you can expect to make 3-4 bets a day, which is not demanding, even if you work a very busy schedule. If you look at the statistics, we achieve an average net profit of 7-10 bets per month, taking care to keep the variance (the fluctuation of the money) at an easily tolerable level.
Winning 7-10 bets doesn't seem like much when you can read about 20 and 30 bets on both Facebook and tipster websites, the only difference is that what we write is guaranteed, not just empty words. Believe me, I could put together theoretical sports betting perspectives that numerically translate into 30-40 bets a month profits, but in practice they will most certainly not come true.
As I have written in another thread before and I think it is important to emphasise now, regardless of whether you vote for the FBO or not, never let the theoretical results you have just written fool you elsewhere, even if they seem to be true and even if they are backed up by statistics. Quite simply, it is not possible to make 20 to 30 or more bets a month, it is a pipe dream. But you can check this yourself, you only need to know the principle of such calculations:
You have a platform where you have a number of tipsters, say 300, and the tipster sites will select say three or five of these tipsters, look at their historical results, average them and start adding them up. If you take say five tipsters who have no history of losses (which is not good by default, as you don't know how they will react to a negative period, whether they will give an unreasonable amount of tips or bet in a way that is unrealistic) you will end up with a very substantial amount, which statistically speaking, over a year, could be 20-30 bets a month in profit. Yes, but there will be no uniformity in the stakes, no realistic or traceable amount of bets, and it is inevitable that in a negative period, a lot of bets will result in large losses, not to mention the fact that there is no substantive evidence of either the veracity of the statistics or the pertinence of the bets.
And the most annoying thing is that people who talk about sports betting for a living are the ones who are only ever theoretically capable of such results, and who have never made a living from sports betting alone. If you look at DVO, you will not find any marketing nonsense like "make hundreds of thousands of forints" or even "make big money", because you will see that the reality is completely different from what these sites show. I too have always had some sort of main job and I have always bet on it, and I say this having actually climbed the ladder of the profession and with due humility but with good reason, I can say that there are probably not many people who have achieved the results I have mentioned. I am not just talking about theoretical things.
WHY THE LAS VEGAS EXAMPLE?
The incompatible luxury!
Las Vegas is just a cliché, of course, but usually when you're talking about poker, a roulette table or any kind of financial opportunity where you're taking a gamble, like professional sports betting, Las Vegas is perhaps the best example of the kind of luxury and covetous passion for gambling that looks so good on the big screen, but in real life, of course, the picture is much more nuanced.
My problem with Las Vegas as a "show" is not the glitz, because it is true, in the US people are happy to take their vacations to happily spend their savings in a week, then when they check out of the hotels they get an unmissable offer for next year and can book their accommodation in advance at huge discounts, because they deserve it: they have so much money left over at the casinos that free accommodation and luxury consumption is not much of a payback. But we don't even have to go overseas for similar examples, there are casinos in Austria that are mind-boggling, and somehow this entertainment culture knows no borders.
The problem is that the feeling of life and gambling in casinos has spilled over into professional sports betting, even though we are talking about two completely opposite things. If you look at any betting community, there is never any mention of natural limits, in fact they give you the false impression that whether you bet EUR 10 000 or EUR 10 000 depends on your capital and your risk tolerance, whereas anyone who has actually been around the ladder knows very well that in most cases you cannot even talk about stakes of a thousand - two thousand euros in professional sports betting. So the kind of 'money-spreader' who would bet thousands of euros on sports betting tips according to a preconceived system, in such a way that it is not luck that really determines his success, but the extent to which he can stick to and maintain the strategy he has followed, simply does not exist!
You must have asked yourself when you read that I bet 600 euros at the top of my game: why only 600? Why not 1000 or why not 10 000? Before you read the whole page, you might have concluded from the title alone that it was just a simple arrogance, a simple grandstanding, but the kind where the person is not saying a number so large as to be completely unrealistic.
Realistic bets, risks, returns!
...But that's not the case (and I hope it shows in my writing), I have simply experienced the natural limits that a person will not be able to cross, and there are several reasons for this: firstly, I ask you to believe me - even if you had a different opinion about sports betting before - that you will not be able to make money in the long run with top league sporting events, no way. Of course, you can happily place up to €5,000 - €6,000 on a Barcelona, Liverpool or any other top team match, no one is banning it, in fact sportsbooks will place them on their main sites and give you various other promotions if you bet on such matches.
Yes, but are you able to achieve real growth with these bets? - Because I've never seen a precedent for it, I've seen attempts, but never real results. Why? Because these teams are running on billions of Euros, everyone is watching them, there are so many sports analysis, articles, news coming out of these top leagues that the sportsbooks are guaranteed to make money from them, there is no mathematical and statistical system that would make the top teams' match-ups profitable in the long run. The only ones I saw minimal(!) profit were the tipsters specialising in very small market betting options, for example live corner/shootout/les options, but even these were not worth thousands of euros to bet on. So it's safe to say that only betting on lower/medium class sporting events can be profitable in the long run, or if we're talking about a sport like tennis where the odds change in seconds live and sportsbooks allow you to place a few hundred euros bets in a row. The reason is simple: they are not as well known, there is little news about them, even if the sportsbooks employ live staff to take odds on certain sporting events - and they do - they do not have enough insight into the low/medium class sporting events, and tipsters have the opportunity to regularly refute the odds/odds of the sportsbooks on these matches.
If you see bets of thousands of euros being placed on Facebook or anywhere else, even on high odds matches at Bet365, Unibet, WilliamHill or other big companies, you should know: big fat lie, there is no such thing in reality. In reality, in professional sports betting, you'll find either stakes of 25-30 euros and bets on lesser-known matches in so-called soft ( or European ) betting shops such as Bet365, or bets with higher stakes - but not realistically thousands of euros - such as the ones you can see in the gallery here. Everything else is a lie, a distortion of reality. Just as there are no 30 bets a month profits in the long run, there are no tens of thousands of euros to be made in professional sports betting.
EVIDENCE FROM OUR PREVIOUS PERSONAL ACHIEVEMENTS:
These receipts do not give you a specific betting profile, because if you had to display the individual bets of the people in the team, this would mean approximately 5-10e bets. What you see here has been created with one purpose: to show that for years before the FBO was launched, we were a major player in the domestic betting community, taking risks, but always with a strategy and not in a foolish way.
And the result was the same. Without being exhaustive, we have uploaded around 200-300 betting slips from various sportsbook accounts, some of them with stakes of several hundred euros, but you can also see a number of lower stakes bets placed on limited sportsbook accounts. And as you can see, in professional sports betting, you should be able to realistically hit around 56-57%, so you'll see all sorts of evaluations, including winners, losers, combinations of winners and return (i.e. Refund) bets.
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