We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Clearly though if you are a bookie then the more players you have and the larger amounts your players bet per wager will greatly increase the amount of money you will make each week and each year. Bookies with 100 plus players can easily make 100k a week, or in yearly terms over $5 million dollars a year. But once again if you have very small bettors or not a lot of bettors then the amount of money a bookie will.
This article was published in collaboration with Vice.
Sports gambling is a serious form of entertainment in prison. I’d guess maybe 30 percent of inmates bet on sports, at least where I was in the late 1990s, at Wyoming State Penitentiary. That’s where I learned the hustle, working as a ‘writer’ who collects betting slips and delivers them back to a bookie. I’d make 20 or 25 percent off the top, or $1.25 cents off a $5 bet, no matter whether the better or the bookie won.
It’s a great job because there’s no exposure. It was the actual bookie who had to sneak into the education wing of the place, where the copy machines were located, and find a way to distract the staff and make copies of the cards listing the odds for all the day’s games. Then he’d have to count and store all the winnings.
In 2001, I was transferred to a federal prison. In addition to my five years for burglary, the feds had indicted me on conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, and gave me just under 17 years. When I got to the federal facility in Yazoo City, Miss., I saw the action was ten times what it had been at the state level. So I became a bookie myself. Basketball was the most profitable because it happened every day, but individual football games could bring in a lot of money. I took in $7,000 worth of bets on one NFL Sunday. Generally, my goal was to make a profit of 25 percent.
I’d call family members or friends to get the lines — lists from Las Vegas of who is favored to win and by how much — that bookies use to set the odds. After a few years, the federal prisons brought in CorrLinks, a basic emailing system, and I could have people send me the lines that way.
In the Mississippi prison, nobody used actual cash; it was all stamps and mackerel. Fish was good because you could buy hundreds of dollars worth at a time from the commissary, whereas you were only allowed to buy one $10 book of stamps. At the end of the day, a bookie would have tons of little pouches of mackerel worth between $1.15 and $1.35. He could use them as currency on its own, or sell them for a buck each to weight-lifters who wanted to bulk up on protein.
I had up to 14 writers working under me. White guys and black guys who could go get bets from their racial groups. I also had a few writers who dealt with everybody — race never goes away in prison, but sports betting was often an exception.
Eventually, I was transferred to a prison in Coleman, Florida. A partner and I went into business together, and I made even more money down there. Some of the bookies didn’t know what they were doing: they wouldn’t know how to do the calculations and would be paying above odds. So we would bet against them and make a killing.
I got to the point where I easily made $16,000 each month.
One of the biggest hauls came during the 2010 Super Bowl, when the New Orleans Saints played the Indianapolis Colts. The Colts were favored to win, but my partner was a Saints fan, so we set up the odds against what Vegas was recommending, which generally you shouldn’t do. Everyone who wanted to Colts to win bet against us, but the Saints won. We made close to ten grand that night. Of course, there were also times we had a bad night and lost all our money.
We spent nights counting our stamps, but needed a way to hide them. There were Now and Later candies for sale at the commissary, in those six-inch packages. We’d buy them, take out the candy, trim the stamp books into squares, fold them up, tuck them into the packages, and seal them back up. One package could hold a hundred books of stamps.
We lived well, never calling home for money. We spent maybe $1,500 a month on food, cigarettes, and gambling. Instead of going to the chow hall three times a day, I could prepare a meal in my cell with food from the commissary. I could also pay people to steal special food from the chow hall: shrimp, steaks, roast beef. I’d buy cartons of cigarettes that others had smuggled in and sell them and make a profit. If I liked the shoes a guy was wearing as he walked off the bus, I could buy them from him.
When I was released, in 2014, my probation officer told me she didn’t want me to be involved in gambling, and forced me to shut it all down. That, unfortunately, was the end of my run.
How Much do Bookies Make Per Year?Bookies accept wagers on sporting events and even though each bet can vary considerably, the end result is that bookies make money when their player’s wagers lose. How much money bookies actually make per year can vary substantially, but depends predominately on how much each of their players bet on each game and how many overall players they have betting with them each week.
Profitable PPH Business
Clearly though if you are a bookie then the more players you have and the larger amounts your players bet per wager will greatly increase the amount of money you will make each week and each year. Bookies with 100 plus players can easily make 100k a week, or in yearly terms over $5 million dollars a year. But once again if you have very small bettors or not a lot of bettors then the amount of money a bookie will make will be much lower.
Is It Worth Being A Bookie Show
Punishment For Being A Bookie
But even if you are a small time bookie it doesn’t mean you can’t make a lot of money. So let’s just give some examples so you can actually see how easy it is to make money from booking action. Let’s just say you only have one player and he is a super small bettor that only bets $50 a game. If he only makes 10 bets a week and wins 5 and loses 5 bets he will still end up losing the 10% juice on each wager so even if he splits he will still end up losing money for the week. If he wagers $50 a game he will end up losing a total of $50 on those 10 wagers for the week, and over the years’ time that would be the equivalent of losing $2600 a year.
Now that is the smallest and most inconsequential type of better around because anyone that knows a gambler knows it’s an addiction and people like this don’t bet these small amounts and so infrequently. So instead these guys may start small but over time they will increase their betting volumes and frequency which just means they will end up losing more money over time. Also, bettors don’t go 50/50 on their wagers, they always loss on average anywhere from 60% to 70% of their wagers. So this means that even if a player loses 60% of his wagers that means he loses 6 out of 10 wagers which on 10 wagers of $50 each with the juice will mean he will lose $130 a week and $6,760 a year. So now if you have 10 of these super small basic bettors that still means you can be easily making at least $67,600 a year.
So that was just a simple basic example of a player that barely bets each week, but you can clearly see that if you have players that are slightly larger bettors that bet a bit more times each week then you can make so much more money. So let’s just say that you have a player that bets $100 a game and he bets 20 times a week and losses 60% of his games on average. That means he will win 8 times out of 20 bets and plus the juice this will mean he will lose $520 a week or $27,040 a year, and then if you have a total of 10 players just like him then you will be making on average $270,400 a year. Sure these are simple averages and players are not going to lose every single week, but they also are not going to lose only $520 a week when they do lose, because when bettors start to lose then they just start betting bigger and betting more games in order to chase the balance into the positive. However, this only makes it worse for the player and they just end up losing even more money.
So as you can see it does not take a lot of players or a lot of wagers for bookies to make money, however the more players and the more wagers they make each week, then the more money you will end up making as the bookie.