One thing I’d like to highlight: our per-hour pre-tax profits were closer to $150–200/​hour than the $500/​hour claimed in the post’s title. I think the main source of the discrepancy was that the author was significantly faster than us at finding and placing bets.
For my calculation, I factored in things such as trip planning and travel time (scaled by 50% because the trip included leisure activities), financial preparation, getting money out of accounts, taking screenshots of losses, filling out 2022 tax returns, filling out the spreadsheets where we tracked our bets, etc. I don’t know how many of these the author took into account in the $500/​hour calculation.
Another factor in the lower per-hour figure was, as mentioned by Dmitriy, that the offers were worse.
Here’s an excerpt that from an email I sent the post’s author:
Some reasons we spent so much time:
We tried to find bets that satisfied multiple criteria (frequent ones were positive EV, long odds, the bet’s being offered by many books [to be more confident in the odds], and acceptance of the full amount of the bet by the sportsbook). If we’d relaxed some of these standards, things would’ve gone more quickly. Also, we probably could’ve used parleys more to get long-odds bets (we avoided them early on).
I didn’t feel comfortable making decisions on my own, so I often waited to run things by other people.
My phone internet connection was super slow (I eventually gave up and used Wi-Fi, which was fine because other people were using their phones).
It took a while for us to all get the geolocation software working on our computers (it required changing a security setting in macOS). One of us couldn’t use certain websites on his work computer because they required this software to be installed, so he had to use his phone instead.
Two of us used obscure banks, so we had trouble depositing money into certain sportsbooks. The solution we came to was to have someone else send us money on PayPal, since the transfers were instantaneous and our PayPal balances could be used.
The same two of us had to pay in cash at a 7-Eleven to deposit money into BetRivers .
We did rather elaborate bookkeeping, partly because we were doing profit sharing, so we needed to record more information than we would’ve if we’d been doing it on our own.
People other than me spent a lot of time on arbitrage (though this also increased our earnings, so it’s unclear whether it increased or decreased our hourly rate).
We read and saved the terms and conditions, and sometimes asked customer service for clarification.
We sometimes had to contact customer service to get our free bets credited or to remove restrictions from our accounts.
PointsBet’s points-betting offer was confusing, and a couple of us spent a significant amount of time modeling it.
One thing I’d like to highlight: our per-hour pre-tax profits were closer to $150–200/​hour than the $500/​hour claimed in the post’s title. I think the main source of the discrepancy was that the author was significantly faster than us at finding and placing bets.
For my calculation, I factored in things such as trip planning and travel time (scaled by 50% because the trip included leisure activities), financial preparation, getting money out of accounts, taking screenshots of losses, filling out 2022 tax returns, filling out the spreadsheets where we tracked our bets, etc. I don’t know how many of these the author took into account in the $500/​hour calculation.
Another factor in the lower per-hour figure was, as mentioned by Dmitriy, that the offers were worse.
Here’s an excerpt that from an email I sent the post’s author: