Re: Ways That Sports Gambling is Superior to Poker
Sports betting and poker are different, that's all.
Poker is cool because it's always there and takes no prep (apart from the lifetime of prep in learning how to play, of course). Grab a day roll, head out the door, play, earn.
Sports betting takes advance work (if you're handicapping, not if you're numbers grinding I suppose, except that you'd have to set up accounts and agents). I have to start prepping for football in August; if I take a week off midseason it could take me days to get caught up; if I take several weeks off, forget about it. Yet I'm writing this because I've spontaneously decided to take a day off poker; I can't do that in sports betting, I couldn't just not work on a Monday during football season, for example.
The challenges of playing higher stakes in sports or poker are interesting, too.
In poker, the higher stakes games are fewer. There are only a handful of places in the world with consistent 10/20 NL or higher games (even Vegas just barely makes the list; it's really only that suckass Bellagio 10/20, dependably). And the big games are tougher. Your win rate will quickly drop, in relative terms, as you move up in stakes. For me, the difference in my win rates between 2/5, 5/10 low cap, 5/10 high cap, and 10/20 are so small they might not even be real (well, that's exaggerated; it's still better to play higher stakes, but only marginally so).
In sports, the difficulties in betting more are in getting down. The edge on a bet doesn't change, the game doesn't get tougher, like in poker. But getting down gets harder, and the low hanging fruit disappears (no SIA, no 5Dimes reduced juice, no Bookmaker points rebate thing, and so on, so in that respect the game does get tougher as you bet more). Sports betting isn't devoid of scaling problems. You see an off number in Vegas and want to bet $100 on it, no prob; see that same off number and want to hit it for 5k, good luck.
Further, sports betting has low-limit scaling problems, in this respect:
Given a 2.4k BR and a 1/2 NL game, for example, I could reasonably expect to earn a working class living ($2,400/mo). I wouldn't be happy about it, but I wouldn't go hungry or homeless. If I had the energy for it, I could crank out hours and build my BR up quickly, cards breaking even.
I couldn't expect to earn 2.4k a month off a 2.4k BR in sports betting, much less grow the BR. If I was reduced to a 2.4k BR in sports, I'd get a job (not that there are jobs I could get).
IOW, the edges in poker, at the common stakes games, are much, much bigger.
It's also possible that sports betting will get so efficient that no player to earn off it. That can't really happen in poker, it isn't a game that can be solved (not live poker; I won't weigh in on whether online poker can be roboticised to the point of unplayability).
Also, in poker, the house doesn't care which of us wins. In sports, if a house gets outplayed, it closes down or goes broke or boots. If either the players or the house gets too good at sports, bad things happen. Behave properly and you can always earn in poker; behave properly and sports books might still tell you to GTFO.
And I haven't even mentioned that poker is social, sports betting solitary. I don't mind solitude, but many of the real numbers-grinding sports bettors (or online poker players) are flat out anti-social, don't kid yourself, and that's a lousy life, don't kid yourself again. If you like people, if you think all kinds of people are interesting, if you want to live a life with all kinds of people in it, choose live poker. If you want to sit alone in a room staring at a computer monitor for hours on end, grind sports or online poker.
