I am somewhat fed up with the whole industry and nowadays I only play for fun, but seriously, Moniveto.
I used to be a semi-pro gambler, spending 24/7 on it. You can gauge the volume of my play from the fact that in a year, I wagered a sum equivalent to 150 times my bankroll. In practice, almost my entire bankroll was tied up in bets every day. How? By playing my own picks and using tips from a massive betting ring as well as paid services—which, by the way, I also ran myself back then. If there was any cash left over at the end of the day, I often used it for arbitrages.
It all started to end for many different reasons. I get somewhat sad just thinking about that whole time. I had come a long way, and the gambling was undeniably profitable over sequences of tens of thousands of bets. It was also profitable in the records of my friends at the time, across samples of hundreds of thousands of bets.
However, the gambling didn’t produce enough for a living, despite the fact that I spent all the time a human has on turning over the bankroll. My bankroll was simply too small. Then came a time when challenges in my life outside of betting forced me to eat into the bankroll. That was the final nail; I could no longer produce even what I was taking out of the bankroll. The situation started to become overwhelming, and I was mentally exhausted.
At that time, I suddenly had something like 50–100 accounts around the world. At first, it was easy to win big using small bookmakers. I got banned or limited by all of them. With the remaining larger companies, the odds decreased somewhat, or rather, they lacked the outlier odds (härökertoimet) that smaller bookies repeatedly churned out.
I also focused on playing opening lines. This meant being on standby at the computer for hours, and then when the odds were released, bang bang bang—getting the bets in as fast as possible. No matter how fast you were, there were always others at those spots, every single time. You noticed this with bookmakers like Pinnacle, where the odds dropped immediately as bets came in. I also lurked for Veikkaus’s opening lines during the dark hours of the night. You could often find arbitrages there. On the other hand, Veikkaus showed such good expertise in some sports that I found it profitable to utilize their estimates and play them on the international market.
I still like following and betting on Liiga, but I refuse to keep a log of my bets. I used to type thousands of rows into Excel and I’ve had enough of that. Gut feeling tells me enough; I do this for fun. And on my phone—I haven’t opened a computer much.
Looking at it, the betting world has certainly become much more difficult. Bookmakers copy each other’s odds. To me, even the odds comparison tools look much worse than before, or the pro versions cost astronomical sums. You used to be able to get decent tools for free. Bookmakers handed out bonuses generously, and they were easy money. Those also seem quite terrible nowadays, looking at them superficially, and full of hidden terms in the fine print.
I started playing seriously right at the dawn of online gambling, and I played with goals even before the internet.
Fortunately, I can now play for fun and without any targets.
. Very primitive, but there seemed to be some logic behind them. Well, for obvious reasons, the KHL is dead and buried. Superpesis has also dropped out of my betting repertoire, even though interest in it is starting to return. It just seems there’s no time to do my own modeling for it. My betting tracking nowadays focuses on football and to some extent ice hockey. The main leagues in the summer are the Swedish Allsvenskan and the Finnish Veikkausliiga. This season, the plan is to get a better handle on Ykkönen as well. During the winters, I follow the Premier League and the German Bundesliga.
