What Is a Professional Handicapper

Do you use or are you a professional handicapper?

Key Points

– Professional sports handicappers come in a number of shapes and sizes. 

– In addition to betting on sports, professional handicappers usually sell their picks. 

What Is a Professional Handicapper?

The term handicapper, or capper for short, can be used to apply to most anyone who studies wagers and bets on sports. There is a distinction though between the amateur handicapper and the professional handicapper.

Anyone who does some research on games and events and bets on sports could qualify as an amateur handicapper. They would not, however, fit into the category of professional.

The professional handicapper is one that earns a living by betting on sports. In order to do so, it takes a great deal of research and a solid foundation of the numbers to become successful. 

Most handicappers not only bet on sports for a living, they also make some of their income from selling their betting picks to bettors. The right one will help you find summer betting value.

Different Types of Cappers

In the world of professional sports handicapping, there are essentially two types of handicappers. There are those that are generalists and those who are specialists. Our last article focused on ranking top rated handicappers. Go check it out.

The specialist is the one that only bets on the NFL or football in general. The specialist may also have more than one sport, but focuses only on a few. Some specialists will wager the four major North American sports leagues – NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL – for example.

Generalists will follow the sports calendar and bet on anything they can find that has value. They will bet on golf, tennis, soccer, etc. 

Some specialists might even dial it down so far that they only bet on MLB First Five Innings. Or, maybe they only bet on ACC college football. There may be some that focus only on certain bet types – moneyline NHL bets, for example.

It’s up to the handicapper himself. Some will find betting on all sports fits their goals. Others will stay focused on certain bets that have brought them the most success.

Becoming a Professional Handicapper

It’s a long, hard process to become a professional sports gambler. It starts with raising the funds necessary.

Like any business, you need capital. You need a bankroll to begin betting and you have to factor in a winning percentage of maybe 53 to 55 percent. The best in the business have winning percentages around 55 percent, maybe as high as 60. 

Consider the following example to be a lower level professional handicapper. You will place $2 million worth of bets for a single year. Assuming -110 odds for all bets, you win 54 percent of the time.

$2,000,000 x 0.54 = $1,080,000 in winnings

$2,000,000 x 0.46 = $920,000 in losses

$920,000 x 0.10   =   $92,000 in juice

Resulting profit    =   $68,000

As a professional bettor, you would search for better odds and better value. For purposes of the example though, we stick to -110 odds to prove a point. 

Bettors need to find serious value and/or find ways to win more bets if you are going to hack it as a professional sports capper

The typical bettor wagering $10 and $20 on games winning at even 55 percent is not going to make even $50,000 in a year. It takes a great deal of time and effort to study the numbers and how they work to have success as a pro capper.

Selling Your Picks

As mentioned, most professional handicappers will also sell some or all of their picks to those willing to pay for them. Again, the best of these guys will win 55 to 60 percent of the time. Very few will consistently win 65+% of their bets from year to year. If you find one, follow them!

Are you winning 55% or more of your bets? You need to start selling picks. Visit cappersoftwaresolutions.com to talk to someone about getting started selling your picks. They are creating next generation software that will help handicappers sell their picks.

There are those that have gone on ridiculous winning streaks. It’s not unheard of for a professional handicapper to go through an entire sports season without a losing week. 

Streaks are even more of a thing for cappers that specialize in certain sports or in certain types of bets. A handicapper may specialize in baseball and within baseball he may prefer the First Five Innings moneyline or run line bet. Again, it wouldn’t be a stretch to find a capper who has won over 60 percent in a given time frame.

Pro cappers will sell the picks they may make in a variety of ways. They may sell daily picks, weekly picks, or even an entire month’s worth of picks. Prices vary, but bettors must be sure that investing in a handicapper makes financial sense. Factor in the cost of a handicapper to make sure the numbers work. Those betting $5, $10, or $20 a game are probably not the best candidates to hire a professional handicapper.

The work that cappers do is tedious and it takes a solid degree of knowledge of betting and the numbers in order to have repeated success. Those skills and knowledge are built into the price of hiring a pro.