Sooner or later the vast majority of us have to ask the question - why we are losing money on betting in a long run? There is also an exception: people who do not track their progress or people with prolonged lucky season. However it does not change the fact - all betting offices prosper. While we, bettors need other jobs to finance our betting hobby.
There is wide spread misconception about how the betting odds are estimated. A lot of people still expect some individual human experts to determine the odds for the individual events directly in the betting office. However, this process is mainly done by third party companies who supply recommendations to the betting offices. Those companies are highly specialized in the field of modeling and prediction. They use the best state of the art tools to aggregate and interpolate the data for the best results achievable according to the known information. Furthermore, they have access to more information sources than we can even imagine.
You can see this by comparison of the odds from various betting offices. The odds will be most likely very similar. The observable variance is mainly:
What does it mean for us? No matter how good is your knowledge of your favourite sport and how up-to-date are you information, you are still way behind your opponent. It is like playing sport against the ultimate all-time world master. No matter if you are junior player, or national level pro, you still have no chance.
Really? How many exceptions you can name? A lot of well know betting experts based their business about consulting or selling advices - instead of betting directly. That is quite suspicious. If you cannot win on betting, you can at least pretend you can win. If you gain trust of people, you can sell books, webinars and other stuff about betting. That seems to be quite a better idea than betting itself.
Apparently there is not much space left to win in common betting. The possible opportunity to gain some edge over the betting offices could be on various weird events, weird sports, or weird bets. Keep in mind they need to pay for the intel. So the quality of intel they buy is determined by the quality they really require to get profit. They would not pay for extra precision if it is not worthy. So the less important bets could theoreticaly provide you with some room for profit. Of course, only in case you posses the ultimate expert knowledge of the topic.
In parimutuel betting, the odds are determined according to the actual value of the bets placed on the event outcomes. So the betting office does not control the odds, people who bet do. In most cases the odds converge to similar odds value like in a normal betting office. However, in some cases the people can move the odds in totally different direction. Good example is the US president election in 2020. The betting offices expect the Biden to win, while most people bet on Trump. That was a great opportunity to bet on Trump in average betting office, and also bet on Biden in parimutuel betting office at the same time. It would be profitable no matter the election result.
According to the way how the parimutuel betting work, it gives you a possibly better chance to win. Your opponents there are not the top experts, but just a mass of weekend bettors with no deep knowledge. The bitcoin place where you can enjoy parimutuel betting is freebitco.in.
Sports betting is very difficult game. Your chances to success are not high, because you face an ultimate expert enemy. People who claim to success in this field are most likely faking to gain some additional benefit (sell consultations etc.). According to the theory, you have possibly a better chance on unusual sports and events. The betting game difficulty is probably lower with parimutuel betting.