How I Got Here
I didn't set out to become a professional sports trader. It happened gradually, through a lot of trial and error, some expensive mistakes, and years of figuring out what actually worked.
Where it all started
In 2007, I was working at a chemical plant. It was hard, physical work, but I actually enjoyed it. I liked the people and I liked the straightforward nature of the job.
Costs started rising and the company began cutting back. I'd been there long enough to qualify for redundancy, and eventually my name came up.
I was worried. I had bills to pay, children to support and Christmas wasn't far away. I'd also had enough of moving from one short-term contract to another. I wanted something more stable, ideally something I could build for myself.
My first idea was Health and Safety. I took a course with the intention of becoming a consultant. Working for myself appealed to me, but the job itself didn't. Too often it felt as though companies were more interested in ticking boxes than genuinely improving safety, and I couldn't see myself enjoying that.
So I ended up back doing temporary fitting work at a power station. It paid well enough and gave me a chance to save some money, but it reinforced something I'd already been thinking: I didn't want to keep doing temporary manual work forever.
The first steps
Betting had always interested me
I'd always enjoyed betting and loved going racing, but I still thought of it as a mug's game. I'd seen plenty of people lose money backing horses they knew very little about, and I had no interest in doing the same.
What interested me was the mathematics. I was naturally cautious with money, and I became convinced there had to be a better way of approaching betting than simply backing whatever you fancied.
Discovering Arbitrage
Arbitrage was the first thing that really changed the way I looked at betting. It showed me how prices, probability and margin fitted together. More importantly, it proved that betting didn't have to mean blindly gambling on an opinion.
Betfair was still confusing to me at that point. In particular, I couldn't get my head around laying. I'd seen the old "Be the Bookie" adverts, but understanding the idea in theory and being comfortable risking money on it were very different things.
My first attempt at laying was England in 2006. I mostly remember being surprised by how much liability was required compared with the amount I could win. It wasn't a successful lesson, but it was an important one.
Learning the hard way
My first goal was simply to stop losing
Confidence was a major problem at first. I wasn't trying to get rich quickly. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could get through a full day's trading without finishing in the red.
That sounds like a very low bar, but at the time it mattered. If I could control the losses and stay in the market long enough, I could keep learning.
A Typical Day
Australian racing: trading small stakes and trying to build consistency.
UK racing: the main afternoon session and the busiest part of the day.
US racing: often carrying on well into the night.
Eventually, the hours became part of the problem
I was persistent, but I was also exhausted. Spending almost every waking hour looking at markets didn't make me better. After a while I started overthinking everything, hesitating on perfectly reasonable trades and finding problems where there weren't any.
Getting football wrong
Football looked like the obvious next market
By this point I had a basic bot making around £60 a week fairly consistently, so I started looking for other markets. Football seemed obvious because it was a sport I already knew well.
That familiarity actually worked against me. I assumed that knowing football meant I would understand football markets. I didn't.
Knowing the sport wasn't enough
I made most of the obvious mistakes: overestimating what I knew, taking ideas from videos without properly testing them, and underestimating how quickly a football market can change when a goal is scored.
Correct Score markets were particularly unforgiving. In many other sports a major event suspends the market and gives you a moment to reassess. In Correct Score, one goal can completely destroy an open position.
I spent months making very little progress and losing money. It was frustrating, but it eventually forced me to simplify what I was doing.
The tennis breakthrough
Tennis was the market I had avoided
I'd loved tennis since I was young, but I'd always stayed away from trading it. The prices moved quickly and I didn't really understand how to manage that movement.
One afternoon somebody mentioned a match in a chat box: Zeballos against Isner on clay. I decided to keep it simple and trade £5 at a time, backing whoever I thought would win the next point and then getting out.
Enough success to make me think I'd understood it far sooner than I actually had.
I increased my stakes before I'd really learned what I was doing.
Gone in about ten minutes. A useful lesson in increasing stakes too quickly.
Going smaller made the difference
I went back to £5 stakes and concentrated on understanding what was happening rather than how much I could make. Once I did that, tennis started to make sense.
At one stage it was responsible for roughly 70% of my trading income. More importantly, the way I learned to think about price movement and probability in tennis influenced how I approached cricket, darts and eventually football as well.
What I learned
It's easy to read this page in a few minutes and lose sight of how long the process actually took. From those first attempts in 2007, it took about three years before I was making money consistently.
That started to happen around 2010. Even 16 years later, I'm still learning. Markets change, opportunities change and methods that worked well five years ago don't automatically keep working forever.
If there's one thing that mattered more than anything else, it was sticking with it long enough to improve.
A few things I'd pass on
Good luck out there.