While betting can be a fun and enjoyable experience, if your aim is to make money from it, it can be very difficult. A lot of people want sports betting to be their job but don’t understand how much hard work is required.

A common misconception about betting is that it is a test of your knowledge about a particular sport. Just because you’re knowledgeable about soccer or basketball, it doesn’t mean that it will translate into being able to make money from betting on those sports. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder; “it is unrigorous to equate skills at doing with skills at talking”.

The fact that (according to Marco Blume, Pinnacle’s Trading Director) sports fans are in the minority when it comes to Pinnacle’s trading department shows how unrelated sporting knowledge and the ability to think probabilistically about sport actually are.

It could be argued that it’s actually a disadvantage for bettors to have knowledge about the sport they are betting on as preconceived ideas may distort your judgement and decision-making. That said, when used correctly, this kind of knowledge could obviously be used to your advantage.

Betting is essentially a competition of who is the most efficient at predicting future outcomes. While you are placing your bet at a bookmaker and it is the bookmaker who collects if you lose and pays out if you win, it’s not just the bookmaker you are competing against - it’s other bettors too.

At face value, the bookmaker holds all the cards. They have more resources and more information to help them set odds, and they also have more money to risk getting it wrong. However, a lot of that will come from the betting market (especially at a volume-based bookmaker like Pinnacle).

This means there will be inefficiencies in a bookmaker’s odds, but very few will be able to take advantage of them before they are acknowledged and removed - this means it is a race amongst bettors to find the available value and take it before anyone else does.