Going Pro, Full Time!

Come on, we've all thought about it. 

You've got the game by the bollocks and 'nobody's chains are holding you.....you hold your fist up high and rule the ZOO!'

(or not)

Twitter @RacingWhat

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You say you don't want to starve or take the table crumbs that fall. You don't want to beg or plead at all. You don't want no nine to five, your fingers to the bone. You don't want the rock piles, bloodied stones. Okay, welcome to episode 21 of the Rap, the What's Raising About podcast. We've all done this at some point. Dream the dream. Usually after a huge win that we've had, and we think uh we've got the game by the bollocks, and we could probably, if we were a little bit more brave, go and do this full time. And that's what today's cast is about, my friends. We are going to be talking about going professional. So let's get into it. We have probably all dreamt that dream, and it's a usually post-big race win. Or maybe not. Maybe it's we've been taking it from the man at our work, whatever we do, and we've come home and we're possibly good gamblers, and we think I'm not gonna take this from him anymore, him or her anymore. I'm gonna hit out and go pro. I am a great gambler, I can make this game work, and and off into the golden future of dirty money, lots of rock and roll, professional gambler, here I come. Most of us at that point would then go back to sleep and turn up again the next day for another day of you don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps. And and you know, that's 99.99999% of us, and fair enough. But what if it's not you? What if you have this burning desire to go professional, and that's a route that you're gonna try and explore? Well, yeah, this is the cast for you. How does one go professional? I venture to suggest it's very much similar to setting up a business, which in point of fact is pretty much what you're gonna be doing. But you've got to be starting out with some vaguely realistic goals as to what you're trying to achieve. Bit of maths coming up. The average UK wage is about 39k. Your mileage might vary, but that's what the stats say. And if you're getting 10% profit on turnover, what do you mean you don't know if you've done that? You've not been keeping records? Chances are you're not gonna be able to go professional if you don't know what your hit rate is, what your turnover is, what your return on your investment is. If you don't know that and you haven't got a good couple of three years worth of data to back that up, chances are you're probably not ready to go professional just yet. But let's say for argument's sake that 10% profit on turnover is what you're hitting by by whatever medium, whether you're backing short price winners, a very high hit rate, or vice versa. Let's just, for argument's sake, say yeah, it's 10%. To make that 39k, or let's round it up to 40k, you're gonna have to turn over 400,000 pounds per annum, 7,700 pounds per week, 1,100 pounds per day with no rest day. You have to do that every day of the year. Now you're not gonna be able to do that because there's certain days that people, you know, that we don't race, but yeah, those are the broad brush figures that we're talking about. So let's say for argument's sake, you have got to place a minimum of £1,000 per day. No rest days, that is what you've got to do. Psychologically, how do you feel about that? How much per race does that break down to? Are you gonna put £1,000 on just one race that you have intensely researched, or are you gonna split it up to £100 quid across 10 races? These are the basics that you have got to get involved with before you even contemplate going professional. Take a step back from even doing that basic math. You've got to establish a betting bank to enable you to be able to do that, and you've got to have done some statistical analysis on how long a loser run that betting bank can sustain. And if you're not prepared to do that and be ruthlessly blunt and honest with yourself about that, you're not you're not gonna make it. It's as simple as that. You've set yourself your goals, you have made them realistic, and you have come to terms with the way that you're gonna go about your betting. As I've said, this is very much akin to setting up a business. So every business needs to have a basic sort of business plan based on two principles: a SWOT analysis and a pest analysis. SWAT, the acronym. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Let's have a look at those in that order. What are your strengths? Are you disciplined? What is your edge? Are you a good paddock watcher? If you are, that will mean you're going to be going racing every day, betting on course, so you can see horse in the paddock, you can gain your edge from your paddock watching. You then have to build in costs of doing that, race course attendance. We will come on to that in a second. Are you a master of what we'll loosely call new data? Horse's stride length and how that infers into handicapping a race, sectional timing methodology. You don't need to particularly be well, you do need to be good at formal analysis, of course you do. Arguably, I would say you need to be equally good at market analysis, placing a bet when the market is stretched wide enough in your favour. And for the record, that is something which I am particularly crap at. I will often take a price, watch the horse's price length, and go in and win. And yes, I'll get a momentary buzz because I've got a winner, but underneath that that is the non-sense that you know I didn't back it at the best possible odds that I could have done. Are you an expert? Can you insure it and see which way a market is going to go? Is that your strength? Again, I keep coming back to this phrase: be ruthlessly honest. Strength. What is your strength? How are you going to make the game pay? And then your weaknesses. What is the opposite of what I've just talked about? You just got to be honest with yourself. Again, you know, what aren't you good at? Are you ill-disciplined? Do you have a great winning run? Think you've got the game by the balls, and then place a series of stupid bets that fritter away your winnings. I know that I am a sucker for an each-way double. Never make them pay, but if I've seen a few horse on the day which I think will come in at each-way odds, I'm often tempted to line them up in a double, treble, multiple bet. They never come off, and I end up sort of frittering away my winnings on those stupid long shot bets which don't work for me. What are your weaknesses and how are you going to eliminate them? Opportunities. What opportunities are out there for you, the professional punter? Are you going to be able to take advantage of better sort of IT? Are you going to be strike able to strike your bets quicker using better technology? Dare I say, the borderline legality of drones analysing a race? Have you got access to very, very quickly put on bets with Betfare at optimum odds through better sort of IT pipelines into Betfare? Opportunities in terms of establishing stable contact. Are you a personable soul that can do that? Do you have contacts within the racing game? Are you able to get pucker information that will come to you before it goes to anybody else? Can you leverage those opportunities? So, you know, think about opportunities threats. A very basic one. What if there's no racing? What if racing is completely abandoned? What if we have scenarios like we had at Beverly the other night, what we've had at Cheltenham, what we've had at Hayduck Park, where you know you have got a bet lined up in the third race, a hole appears in the course, and racing is abandoned. You know, it it sounds far-fetched, but it's not. It's an increasing reality of life as a punter, and certainly as you know, this professional punter. You know, and that's before we get on to abandonments due to the weather. And if your strength is in the national hunt game, the winter game, that has got to be a reality. You know, you may face several days, weeks even, where you have no access to racing. It's not happening. How are you gonna make the game work in that sort of scenario? Can you make the all-weather work for you? What if you have lack of internet access, so you're you're you're betting from home? What if the internet suddenly falls down? It can happen. So, you know, threats. If you're not gonna be an on-course better, what if you can't get to a course? What if the trains aren't running? What if the car breaks down? Think about the threats to your future as a professional punter. Strength, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and then we get into pest, political factors, economic factors, social factors, technological factors, pest, there's your acronym, political, I mean, this is obvious, increasing taxes, affordability checks, it's happening, it's gonna come to all of us. How are you, as a professional punter, gonna be able to walk around affordability checks? Chances are you're probably not, and therefore you're then faced with the black market, and if you're putting on this £1,000 per day, and if you're making this 10% then profit on turnover as a bare minimum or as a as a way of hitting this 39, 40k per year, this average UK income per year, how are you going to be able to do that in the black market? Will you be able to do that in the black market? Will you be able to do that in the existing market with the threat of affordability checks coming down your way? A political factor that has to be hit head on by everyone who is considering or who is a professional punter. And if you want a chapter and verse insight into that, have a look at Lee Key's experience, he of the Bar Stewards Inquiry, who has gone from largely online betting to now going full circle and going back on course. Worthwhile looking at him on Twitter and seeing how he's making the game pay or not, on course. Economic factors, the E factor of the pest analysis. Uh, economic factors, how do you deal with long losing runs? What draws are there on your income? You'll probably have a mortgage andor a rent to pay. There are cost of punting, access to data, there is access to information you may have to pay people to get information from them. There are legitimate draws on your income. As I say, you don't have to pay a mortgage, you will almost certainly have to pay bills, water bills, electricity bills. How are you going to pay for those out of what is definitely going to be, and you know, accept this right from the get-go, what is going to be fluctuating income if you go on a full-time professional basis? Social factors, the S of the pest analysis. What is your tax situation? You should be largely tax-free. Betting income at the moment is tax-free. But essentially, for HMRC's purposes, you are suddenly going to be disappearing off-grid. How are you going to deal with that? What is your relationship with HMRC going to be going forward as a professional punter? Worthwhile checking out, worthwhile thinking about. Socially, you know, are you mentally equipped to deal with people asking you what you do for a living, and you say to them, I'm a professional gambler? That can bring opprium. You know, people will look at you like you're dirt on their shoes and the scum of the earth, and you're as good as on the way to Skid Row. Or alternatively, they can think you're some sort of Daniel Craig in Casino Royale type who is uh flush with money and is a bit of a sort of rock and roll, a bit of a high roller, and and they you know they may want to sort of start pumping you for information and certainly give you an ear bending as to how you maintain your flash Ferraris and champagne lifestyle. How do you deal with people coming up to you and buttonholing you with that thought in their heads? So, you know, the the social stigma of being a a gambler. And and finally, technological investment. What investments are you prepared to make up front in establishing robust IT networks and IT infrastructure if you're gonna be betting from home, in getting a car, uh you know, a car that's gonna break down and not an old jalopy if you're gonna be going to the course on a regular basis, if you're gonna be on the trains, well, you know, what sort of investment are you gonna be making into getting the you know the best possible deal for you on the rail network? What software are you gonna employ, not just in terms of a form database, but in terms of any sort of data manipulation, modelling software, etc. What data sources are you gonna use? What technology and the software and hardware and data resources are you gonna use to realize this dream of you going professional? So, SWOT analysis, pest analysis, you've got to do those before you even consider going professional. So, what I'm suggesting here is a uh a hard copy, a written, fully costed and honest plan of how you're gonna go professional, including a worst case scenario. What happens if you've done all that, you've got yourself a betting bank, and your first 20-30 bets are all losers. What are you gonna do in that scenario? If you're not prepared to contemplate that, it's it's basically Nick Maud in time. And what do I mean by that? He wrote a book called Betting for a Living. It's an entertaining read, but cut into the chase, he went professional in inverted commas for six months, and at the end of which he claimed he had been able to bet for a living. No, you didn't, Nick. You arguably got lucky for six months, and that was it. You did not bet for a living, you did not commit your entire future to living off of your wits and living off of your knowledge of the form book and living off of being able to purely punt on the horses to make a living that you could call anyway a living. So if you're not prepared to put in those hard yards up front, put in place a written plan with a worst-case scenario, I think you're playing at it. Other than that, yeah, the mentality that you need, discipline we've talked about, you've got to be able to handle variants, the losing run, or conversely, the winning run. I mean, what happens if your first 10 bets are all winners? Have you got the equanimity and the discipline to skim off your win-ins, put it into a I suggest a high yield pep or something like that, and go back to your basic betting bank and carry on along your next 10 bets are winners? So contemplate variance in terms of the losing run and the winning run. Basically, have you got the mentality to stay in the game in the long run? And I'm not even talking about thriving here, I'm just talking about the ability to grind away and hit this mythical 39-40 grand a year, talked about as being a possibly objective goal for you as a professional gambler. There's some ideas, there's some things to sort of float with and and and have a think about if you have ever remotely thought about going professional. The reality of it, in my view, is it can't be done. I don't think it could have been done maybe in the past just solely from betting. Now, with bookmakers excluding winners, the the whole sort of scenario of affordability checks, I just don't think it can be done. But if you do go down this route, you will acquire skills that you can leverage to make a betting, uh make a living from maybe just your betting, but also other adjacent activities, the obvious one of which is running a tipping line. You may well have enough form book knowledge in the fullness of time to become an advisor to a stable or a racing manager, and yeah, this is pie-in-the-sky stuff, but it can happen. You will have knowledge that you can leverage to go down these work. You can you know you can go into media work, and we've seen that happen with people that have been professional, semi-professional punters. You know, I'm thinking of the likes of Dave Nevison here that can that can go on and leverage that knowledge and and and go into media work. So, you know, one way is not to think purely about betting for a living, but to put that adjacent to being a well, let's call it a takeout merchant to make a living out of racing, if not by just purely your punting. Personally, in 2026, if you are gonna go full-time purely in betting, I think you need to be a maths modeller, a statistician, somebody with good math lab or simulink skills, somebody skilled in Python code in machine learning, somebody with AI knowledge that can develop models that links into bots that link into Betfare Online, bookmakers, and basically just chip away. You don't get involved at all, you just let the algorithm work for you, you make your 100, 150, 200 quid a day chipping away at every race. There will still be issues regarding affordability and all the other sort of things that I've talked about. How do you continue to make deposits, what's your tax situation, etc. But I think if you can spend the time and have the resources and the intellectual capacity to become a MATLAB or simulant, you know, a math math modeler basically, and and link that then into establishing bots which will generate a turn on every race. And then I think that that is personally the only way that you're going to be able to make a living as a punter, quote unquote, in 2026. Feeding back into my last podcast, which was all about the love that I have from racing, I would not encourage you to go down that route. And that's a selfish view because I just personally think it's loveless and it's cold and it's a pretty dystopian view of racing and all that makes racing beautiful. Just to set up a model, set up a bot, and then you know go away and come back and see how much you've earned at the end of each day. Nah, it doesn't do for me, and well, a pox on you if that's the way that you want to go about making a living. I genuinely could not encourage you to do that because there's no love involved in it, and you are not good for racing or racing as I understand it. So that's it. I don't know how long this has been. Let's say somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes. Hope it's been of interest. Hope it's given you some sort of thoughts or ideas, and and let's be honest, it's not a how-to guide to become a professional punter, which is what I started out by saying 20 or 20, 30 minutes or so ago. It may, though, give you some sort of ideas as to how you can improve your existing betting and take it from the recreational to the semi-professional to somebody that can generate a nice little side hustle from their betting. It's maybe that that this cast has turned into, as opposed to somebody that is going to go absolutely sort of full-time and make a career and a life out of betting on horses for a living or a living that as most of the population understand it. That's it. Thanks a lot for listening, as always. Uh thanks a lot for showing up. See you again soon and be lucky.