If you’ve been involved with sports betting for a number of years or just getting started, I’m sure you’ve seen companies advertise their betting services in your local newspaper, online, or even on TV. Many of these ads offer guaranteed games or claim win rates of 80% or higher. If you see these kinds of services, you should run in my personal opinion. I don’t care what anyone says, nobody wins 80% – 90% of their games.

Does that mean you can’t make money betting on sports? In short, the answer is No, it is definitely possible to make substantial profits from sports betting, but you have to be realistic. If you have the proper discipline, manage your bankroll and follow a winning sports betting system, creating substantial passive income from sports betting can be a reality. Knowing the magic # is the key.

So what’s the magic #? The answer is 52.4%. Using the most popular sports to bet on, such as the NFL and NBA, a normal bet would be to bet against the spread at odds of 11/10, meaning you would have to bet $110 to get back $100. What this means is that you would only need to win 52.4% of your bets to break even. While achieving 80% more winners is virtually impossible in the long run, the good news is that anything above 52 .4% will be profitable. While earning 55% doesn’t sound all that exciting, you can experience some really substantial benefits every month.

Let’s use a 55% win rate and bet on 2 games each day for this example. This is what the results would look like after a month:

Win rate 55%

# of bets 60 games (2 per day X 30 days)

#Win 33

# losses 27

Less 10% Vig* 2.7

Total earnings: 3.3

*Vig is the % that online bookmakers keep for accepting your bets. usually 10%

So what does this mean? Well, with these numbers, a $100 bettor would make $330 after the month and a $1,000 bettor would make $3,300. Not bad for a few minutes of work each day, but let’s see what this means in ROI (Return on Investment) percentage.

What I personally use and recommend is that if you are going to bet flat or bet the same size every game then you should not use more than 5% of your total bankroll. So if you have a total of $1,000, then you have to bet $50 per game. Sticking with the same numbers as the previous example of +3.3 games, that would actually be a profit of $165 and a return of 16.5% on your money in just 1 month. Combining that over a full 12 months translates to a return on your money of over 600 percent. I don’t know about you, but these are some amazing returns. Compare this to other investments like stocks or banks and you can clearly see that sports betting is a viable option even using a conservative example. Now imagine a win rate of 56% or even 60%.