From Gambling Addiction to a €1 Million Business

Here’s how I turned my gambling addiction into a business that made €1 million in 2 years.

If you only look at the end result, you’d probably think I knew how to make money from sports betting right from the start. The truth is very different. I started out as an ordinary football fan who believed he knew the teams and leagues well enough to make money from his predictions. But there’s a huge difference between knowing football and making money from betting.

It took me a long time to realise where I was going wrong and why bookmakers almost always have the advantage. I gradually changed the way I selected my bets, started paying more attention to the odds and eventually created Betinum.

But before I got there, I went through years of losses, frustration and making the same mistakes over and over again.

How Did It All Begin?

It all started in secondary school, when I used to place accumulators on Premier League and Champions League matches. Back then, I mainly picked matches involving well-known teams that I followed regularly and thought I knew really well. I combined several matches into one accumulator because the combined odds looked much more tempting than betting on just one match.

You know the feeling – it’s Sunday, 4:30 pm, the last match on your accumulator is still being played, and you’re watching the live score with your hand on your head. Seven out of eight come in, and it’s still just one that lets you down.

That was the most frustrating part. You manage to predict almost every match correctly, but one mistake is enough to lose your entire bet. And when you’re constantly that close to winning, you start believing you’re simply unlucky and that next time everything will work out.

But the next time was exactly the same.

I’d tell myself, “This match is a sure thing, I have to bet on it.” And I’d keep adding matches to my accumulators without thinking about whether the odds being offered were actually worth taking. I looked at which team was stronger, which was in better form and which should win. That seemed more than enough to make a good bet.

Back then, I didn’t realise how big was the mistake I was making. And the problem wasn’t just the long accumulators.

Why Did I Keep Losing Money Betting?

Knowledge alone won’t make you money if the system is working against you.

That was one of the most important things I had to understand. I knew the teams, followed the leagues and often managed to predict the outcome of a match correctly. But I never thought enough about the odds the bookmaker was offering me. To me, they were just a number showing how much money I’d get if my prediction came in.

In reality, the odds are just as important as the prediction itself. Bookmakers set their odds based on the probabilities of different outcomes, while also including their own margin. This means that even if you get your predictions right fairly often, you can still lose money if you constantly accept poor odds.

I gradually started moving away from long accumulators and paying more attention to single bets. That way, one wrong result no longer ruined all my predictions. But that alone wasn’t enough either. If I kept choosing my bets in the same way, sooner or later I’d end up with the same familiar result.

I also realised that I needed to pay attention to bankroll management, rather than increasing my stakes after a loss in the hope of winning my money back. Even the best analysis can’t prevent a run of losing bets.

The Discovery That Changed Everything

Then I discovered something that changed everything – a way to find bets where the bookmaker had made a mistake and was offering higher odds than they should. I’m talking about so-called value bets. The idea is fairly simple, although putting it into practice takes quite a lot of work. Instead of looking for the team most likely to win, you try to work out whether the bookmaker has priced its chances correctly.

Let’s say a team has a 50% chance of winning. That means the fair odds would be around 2.00. But if the bookmaker offers 2.50 for the same outcome, you’ve got a reason to take a closer look. Not because the win is guaranteed, but because the potential return is higher relative to the risk you’re taking, based on your own assessment.

Of course, the hardest part is working out whether the probability really is 50%. If your assessment is wrong, those high odds have no value at all. That’s why I started paying much more attention to information about the teams, rather than relying solely on league positions, famous players and recent results. For me, this was a completely different way of thinking. I was no longer so interested in whether a particular favourite would win, but whether the odds I was getting were higher than they should be.

By the way, you can also check these things mathematically. With the help of sports betting calculators, for example, you can calculate the implied probability of particular odds and the bookmaker’s built-in margin.

That discovery made me start looking for opportunities in places I’d never even considered before.

From Betting to Creating Betinum

So I started following news on X about teams from Morocco and Japan and seeing bookmakers offer odds of 3.00 on a clear favourite. Instead of limiting myself to the most popular European leagues, I started looking for information about teams and matches that most people didn’t follow at all. Sometimes a single piece of news about missing players, a change in the line-up or a problem at a particular club can significantly affect its chances of winning, without that being immediately reflected in the odds.

Of course, that kind of information needs to be checked carefully. Both the latest news and football stats are important, helping you assess whether a particular result or a run of good form actually means anything.

For the first time in my life, I was winning, and it wasn’t down to luck.

That didn’t mean every bet was successful. The difference was that I now had specific reasons for taking certain odds, rather than simply hoping my favourite team would win.

I created Betinum to document everything and share my bets.

At first, we shared our predictions with friends, and interest gradually started to grow. I wanted to show how I arrived at a particular bet, the reasoning behind it and the results I was achieving. Because posting a winning betting slip is one thing, but tracking your betting results over a longer period and knowing whether your approach actually works is something entirely different.

Why Lower Leagues and Lesser-Known Teams?

The reason is simple. For major competitions such as the Premier League and Champions League, there’s an enormous amount of information available, and bookmakers closely monitor everything that could affect the odds.

With less popular leagues, things can sometimes be different. Information is more limited, betting markets are less active, and certain news can take longer to be reflected in the odds. That’s why you might come across a situation where a bookmaker offers 3.00 on a team whose actual chances of winning, according to your analysis, are significantly higher.

However, that doesn’t mean every high price in a smaller league is a mistake. Sometimes the lack of sufficient information is a risk for the bettor as well. You can only have an advantage if you genuinely know something the market hasn’t priced in correctly yet.

How I Turned Betinum Into a €1 Million Business

But not long after that, I needed a team because there was so much interest. More and more people were following our predictions, while the analysis, videos and communication with customers required a serious amount of time. More analysts joined Betinum, we expanded our services and started sharing our football tips with more and more people. And that’s how we turned it into a successful business that helps people make money from betting.

And the crazy thing is that the people who bet every weekend and are so close to making a profit are exactly the ones who need just one thing – to understand how odds work and stop betting on who will win, and start looking for which odds the bookmaker has got wrong.

That’s the most important lesson from my entire story. There are no guaranteed winners, and even the right analysis doesn’t guarantee a profit. But once you start evaluating the odds instead of simply looking for favourites, you begin to see betting in a completely different way.