There are few times in life where you truly get a free lunch. You cannot make money from doing nothing, so people claim. Counter-gambling is the exception. I’ve made over $15000 over the past three years doing beating casinos through a ten-minute daily ritual of claiming free daily bonuses and using sports betting promotions.
Casinos and sports bookies are evil institutions that essentially tax poor people. There is no greater feeling than to take money out of this system, thereby reducing their profits while also making money for yourself. This is my guide on how to do exactly that.
The casino counter-gambling methods are well-known but I’ve figured out the sports betting and Canadian-specific aspects pretty much by myself. I’ve read through the promotions for the ~80 casinos on the iGaming website at least twice. I can attest that these strategies are profitable long-term. Most of the available guides online are written for Americans and there are important differences between geographies.
I will avoid naming specific platforms used but rather enumerate the general principles used, in order to avoid getting banned and also to allow room for flexibility on implementation details. If you’re like some more specifics on which sites to use, feel free to email or DM me.
Pre-requisites
Basic Principles
The main principle underlying casinos is the house edge (the equivalent for sports bookmakers is called vigorish or simply “vig”). This means that for every regular action (e.g. placing a sports bet or spinning a slot machine), you are expected to lose more money than you gain. You may be able to win a few bets and make money early on, but over the long term, you are going to lose money without some sort of advantage. The casinos make revenue since most players do not have an advantage.
Therefore, if you want to make money from beating the odds, you need some sort of advantage. Counter-gambling mainly revolves around promotions in order to get this advantage. There are other forms of advantaged gambling; for example, GTO poker, counting cards in blackjack, advanced sports betting modelling, or sports betting arbitrage. These are not the focus of this article and you can explore them yourself if interested.
Understand that bookies and casinos are incentivized to take your money. The only reason they even have promotions in the first place is to get you addicted to gambling and pay. You must keep this in mind and treat counter-gambling as a completely mechanical process. Do not get too emotionally attached to wins and losses and follow the rules you have laid out for yourself.
You may get hard or soft banned from different services depending on how savvy they are at catching profitable players. In any case, if you stick to legal and regulated services, you should always be able to at least withdraw your money from the site.
It is your job to understand the laws that apply to you and adhere to them. In general, gambling is not taxable in Canada, unless it’s considered a “business activity”. This is a bit vague, so it’s best to consult with a financial planner or similar. Gambling purely for entertainment is not taxable, while gambling according to organized betting strategies is taxable (e.g. advantaged sports betting or professional poker). Counter-gambling falls between these two clear boundaries. In general, you don’t really need skill or specialized knowledge to make money from counter-gambling. There’s little mathematical modelling or theory needed. It may count towards “business-like” intent if the gambling serves as a primary or substantial source of income, so this is best treated as entertainment to enhance the enjoyment of the things you bet on.
Geography is incredibly relevant for counter-gambling. The availability of casinos and sportsbooks depends entirely on where you live since they are heavily regulated. Americans can expect to make upwards of $100k/yr since the number of online casinos and sportsbooks is at least an order of magnitude larger than in Canada.
The main metric for counter-gambling is expected value (“EV”). The goal of counter-gambling is to maximize the expected value. Expected value is “the long-run average of results from independent repetitions of the same random experiment”. In practice, legal/regulated casinos are required to provide a related value called return to player (RTP) so you don’t have to guess. If the RTP of a game is 0.96 or 96%, then for every $1 wagered on the game, you are expected to receive 96 cents back. It’s a bit less clear what the EV for a sports betting wager is, but you can be assured it’s negative and the RTP for a bet is something around 0.9. On sportsbooks, you’ll often see odds like -113/-113, which means that assuming both sides of the bet are equally likely, then you’ll gain 88 cents if you win the bet (1/1.13 = 0.88). This means that the EV for placing the bet is 0.94, since you get zero dollars if your bet loses, and you gain 1.88 dollars if your bet wins (EV = 0.5 ⋅ 0 + 0.5 ⋅ 1.88 = 0.94); i.e. you’re expected to lose 6 cents for every dollar bet.
In general, a simplifying assumption you can use in your calculations is that the RTP for casinos and sportsbooks alike is around 0.9-0.95 for single bets. Parlays are an exception and should be avoided if possible since they tend to have lower EV, unless the profit boost is good enough (will be covered later).
Casino and sportsbooks almost always have a clause in each promotion defining the minimum amount of times you must play through your promotion amount. To maximize EV, you’d want to play through the minimum amount of times, then stop betting immediately after you achieve that (since betting beyond the minimum required is negative EV).
I have an entire section dedicated to calculating expected value so I’ll leave it at that for now.
Variance is a measure of how spread out a set of numbers is around their average value. Variance is the secondary metric for counter-gambling. Think about EV as being “the average outcome”, while variance is the shape of the distribution of those outcomes. Lower variance means you’re often achieving the average outcome, while high variance means you’re more likely to lose a lot then win big occasionally. In practice, you’re not actually going to calculate variance explicitly for bets, but you’re instead aiming to decrease variance as much as possible. This means that given all of the options for placing bets, you’ll want to gravitate towards the lowest variance option.
For example, if you see a “40% profit boost for volleyball games with minimum odds of +100” you’d want to find the volleyball bet just above +100 odds (e.g. +105) and avoid anything higher than that. Bets like +1000 are less likely to pay out, thereby increasing your variance for little benefit, and you risk reducing your account balance to zero before you even make a profit.
For sportsbooks: in general, bets that are more popular are more likely to be priced correctly by the market and modelled correctly by the bookie, which means they also tend to have smaller spreads and thus higher EV. Bets that only have two sides (will the game end in an even or odd score?) are also priced better than bets with many possible outcomes (which player will win the golf tournament?). In practice, this means that your sports bets should focus on popular sports, teams, and bet types, and also have binary outcomes.
Also for sportsbooks: assuming you’re making bets that have about even odds (50%), expect to lose 8-10x your average bet amount during unlucky streaks before your balance recovers. For example, if your average bet size is $25, you should deposit $200 initially on the website. You can withdraw anything more than the $200 as profits if you’d like.
Okay, you’ve managed to gain $50! That’s great. But did you spend ten minutes to make $50, or did you spend ten hours to make $50? In the latter case, it’s probably not an activity worth doing. Therefore, it’s good to have a general sense of how much time you must invest in order to earn your money. To give you a realistic idea of what you can expect, I estimate I’ve spent about 200 hours to earn $15k on counter-gambling giving me an hourly rate of $75/hr, which is decent.
In practice, this means that for casino promotions you should gravitate towards “mines” or “crash” style games (as long as this gameplay type counts towards your promotion requirements). These are the best casino games since they minimize time invested while also reducing variance (in general). These types of games allow you to bet an essentially arbitrary amount of money in a small amount of time. Let’s say you have $200 you need to play through; it’s better to play through that with eight $25 bets on the lowest-variance setting on mines (takes 5 minutes) rather than placing 1000 $0.20 bets on slots, which takes about an hour to do, while also producing higher variance.
Note. According to Ontario law, slots must have a minimum delay of 2.5 seconds between spins, and “auto-spin” features are not allowed. (source) This is why slots is worse than mines in Ontario and serves as an example of regulation impacting what kind of stuff you should bet on.
There are several factors involved in calculating whether taking a promotion is worth it or not, and thus these concepts are probably best demonstrated through a few worked examples in each section.
The best promotions are obviously free bonuses, game credits, or deposit bonuses with minimal wagering requirements (0-1x). A 5x wagering requirement is sometimes okay, but it can be marginal. Finally, anything above a 10x wagering requirement is pretty much always negative EV and you will likely lose all of your money. Let’s think about it: if the RTP for a casino game is 0.95, you’ll lose about 5% of it if you play through it once, which is almost nothing. On the other hand, if you have to play through that amount 10 times, you’re expected to lose 50% of it.
Promotion: 10% playback on deposit up to $75
Should I take this promotion? Yes. What this means is that if you deposit $750 and play through the full amount on casino games, the site will credit you with $75. There is a mines game that I’ve found with an RTP of 0.97 (exceptionally good); if you play through the entire $750, you’re expected to lose $22.5, but you gain $75, giving you an expected net profit of $52.5. This is a real promotion that is offered to me twice a week, so I’m currently making about $100 per week off this alone.
In general, for single or parlays you want a profit boost of about 15-20% for each leg of the parlay in order to be profitable. The worked examples provided will demonstrate why, with the power of math. Additionally, I’ve found that to get the best pricing for the parlays, it’s best to make one leg’s odds approximately equal to the “hurdle odds” for the promotion, then the rest of the legs to be near-guarantees. For example, to satisfy a promotion where I get a 60% profit boost for a 3-leg parlay with minimum +100 odds, I might make my parlay legs +100, -10000, and -8000, resulting in a final odds of around +105 or so, satisfying the conditions of the promotion.
| # Legs | Minimum Profit Boost |
|---|---|
| 1 (single) | 20% |
| 2 | 30% |
| 3 | 45% |
Note Pricing bonus bets. Bonus bets are bets that give you winnings, excluding the original wager. For example, if you make a +100 odds bet with a $10 bonus bet, the bet will pay you $10 on a win, rather than the regular $20. Therefore, you should price the cash value of a bonus bet at “about half” of the bonus bet face value. For a rough calculation, a regular 50% bet would pay 1.8x on a win, while a bonus bet would only pay 0.8x; resulting in an EV of 0.9 for the regular bet but 0.4 for the bonus bet (aka “about half”). I made some mistakes early on by incorrectly pricing bonus bets, resulting in some marginal or -EV bets that I thought were +EV.
Promotion: minimum 3 leg parlay, 25% profit boost
Should I take the promotion? No. A three leg parlay will have an expected value of about 0.93 ≈ 0.7; a 25% profit boost on the payout would not push that number up over 1 (EV ≈ 1.83 ⋅ 0.53 ⋅ 1.25 = 0.91 < 1)
Promotion: minimum 2 leg parlay, 30% profit boost
Should I take the promotion? Yes. EV ≈ 1.82 * 0.52 * 1.3 = 1.05 > 1
Promotion: Make a $20 bet and get a $5 bonus bet
Should I take the promotion? Probably not. The profit is pretty much nothing. You’re expected to lose $2 from making the $20 bet (90%), and you’re expected to gain $2 (~40% of the face value) from the bonus bet, resulting in a net gain/loss of $0.
On one particular sportsbetting site, my total bets are $14,854.30 and my total winnings are $16,459.63, giving me an average profit per bet of about 10%, which lines up with the math. However, I know my net winnings from the site are about $2500 (rather than $1600), so I think it’s not accounting for certain types of promotions like bet credits; therefore, my average profit is actually ~18%.
Both Casinos and Sportsbooks
Casinos
Sportsbooks