Who Earns a Living of Betting?

I know a few, 1- Young guy, full time online poker playing 6+ games at a time and uses software to assist, based in Australia, bought his house outright a few years ago. 2- Retired guy who bets on local club matches, has encyclopedic knowledge of local clubs and is banned from placing bets by bookie chains. Pays people to go place his bets. Also plays poker. 3- Used to manually arbitrage Betfair but it took a lot of effort, was worth a few hundred euro per month as a hobby. Betfair has an API so might be worth looking at to see if you can find a gap.

Not myself, but I know someone who was making a living from sports betting a few years back. It's not that different from "gambling" in the stock market. The same principles apply. You need some kind of egde, which often is 1. Data or 2. Market Access, less often the statistical model. Better data beats better models, and modeling is commoditized these days. Also, you need a pretty decent bankroll so that you can handle the volatility.

It's an interesting space, but don't expect to be profitable without investing 1-2 years of your time into building good models, infrastructure and data access. This already assumes you have that kind of freedom/capital and are able to stick with it through tough times. Also, edges can be fleeting, so it's a constant race against time and other players to find new opportunities. A bit similar to online poker. It was possible to be highly profitable with online poker 5-10 years ago, but over the last few years it has become very hard to impossible to beat the odds, so a lot of poker people have moved on to gambling on other things, sports betting included.

I worked with someone who did in the late 2000-2010 and and then for a company that did (supporting circa 100 employees).

I can't say too much as I was on the dev side of things not the stats modelling. But at a minimum you'd need a good statistical model, high quality data and a way to get great odds on your bets. If you can make the money using just Betfair (etc.) that is better because bookies are going to ban you if you are making smart bets so it's chicken/egg. You also need a big bankroll, for that inevitable stream of bad luck. And lots of little bets are of course better than small number of big bets that could wipe you out. I'm mostly here to say yes it's possible and can be very lucrative.

No corona experience.

No experience myself but you might be interested in this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/algobetting/

I had been betting professionally for 11 years. Started a product owner job at a bookmaker this january. Already considering going pro again.

Things were harder during corona but not impossible.