The Importance of Setting Goals in Sports Betting

When betting on sports, assuming you want to be profitable, it is important to set goals of what you would like to accomplish. Set actual, tangible numbers in terms of monthly profits that you would like to make. Once you have that monthly number, everything else is much easier to back into. 

Along with that monthly number, it is also important to understand what your average bet size is. Obviously, the greater the bet size, the more money you can make, but of course, those two numbers should be connected. If you want to make $100K a year betting on sports, but your average bet size is only $100, there is a major disconnect there. 

Unfortunately, sports betting isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. I’m sure everybody has been on social media and seen a sports bettor who turned a $5 parlay into $100K, but that is certainly not the norm. For every sports bettor who hits that parlay, there are thousands of sports bettors losing them daily. 

To make things easier and use round numbers, let’s pretend we are talking to a sports bettor who would like to make $1,000 a month and has an average bet size of roughly $50. The next order of business is of course to talk about the ROI to get to this number. 

Users of OddsJam and the Positive Expected Value page can get returns of up to 5% on one individual bet as seen in the screenshot below from the Positive EV page, but, to keep things safe, let’s call the average return on a given bet to be 3%. All the information is summarized below.

Monthly Desired Profit: $1000

Average Bet Size: $50

Average ROI on One Bet: 3%

With this information, we can drill down to exactly how many bets need to be placed to get to this number. Please refer to the screenshot below. 

So, to summarize, that individual would need to place roughly 22-23 bets a day in order to get to their desired goal of $1,000 profit per month betting on sports. Pulling 20 bets from the Positive EV page sounds a lot less daunting than staring at the blank number and wondering how the heck you are going to get to $1,000 a month. 

With this information, we can play around with different monthly profit and bet sizing as well. If this individual increased their average bet size to $100, they could place the same amount of bets per day and increase their monthly profits to $2,000! #math

For the big spenders out there, an individual who wanted to make $100K a year betting sports would only need to place roughly 18-19 bets a day to get there, with an average bet size of $500. 

Either way, knowing what you want out of sports betting is a great way to get started, because then you can plan everything else from there.