---
title: 'How Much Money Do You Need to Start Arbitrage / Positive EV Betting?'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=IUqYg5IfXks'
video_id: 'IUqYg5IfXks'
date: 2026-07-05
duration_sec: 0
---

# How Much Money Do You Need to Start Arbitrage / Positive EV Betting?

> Source: [How Much Money Do You Need to Start Arbitrage / Positive EV Betting?](https://youtube.com/watch?v=IUqYg5IfXks)

## Summary



## Transcript

arbitrage and plus ev betting this is a question i get asked very commonly and like most things on this channel i can explain the answer to this question mathematically but i have to break it to you first arbitrage and plus ev betting
can be a little bit of a grind it's not as simple as putting a few dollars on a 10 leg multi that your friend says is a guaranteed and hoping that it goes and wins i'm not going to beat around the bush so i'll
just give you guys the answer straight away theoretically you can start off with as little as 100 or even a 50 bankroll if you just want to learn in arbitrage or plus ev betting i actually recommend you just start off with a very
small amount however practically i'll recommend you start off with at least one thousand dollars or if possible two thousand dollars as you're starting bankroll which is actually what i recommend for my sports betting course
necessary i'll explain in detail the logic behind this number in a little bit but the main idea of it is to try to just maximize the expected value or return in net profits that you can
potentially make let's see how we can learn with a small starting bank roll first you might actually have no idea what a bet even is or how to place a bet so instead of sizing up right away let's start off small
and because you probably don't know what you are doing start off with like just kind of things will happen if you make a mistake such as you bet on the wrong market or bet on the opposite outcome instead then there's no biggie the
dollar worst case scenario let's say you make 50 of these mistakes in a row which really shouldn't happen but even with that you've only really lost just 50 so let's take a look at an arbitrage
opportunity and see how much money we can make with just spending a single dollar to demonstrate i'm using odds jam which is a great arbitrage and plus ev calculator software for those in the united states which gets the odds
straight from all the different bookies out there and finds the arbitrage and positive expected value opportunities i can confidently recommend odds jam to anyone who is residing in the us and is keen to start off with their betting
journeys to get 25 off your first month you can either use the link in the description down below or in the card somewhere up here and enter in the code shane25 to be able to get 25 off for your first month so this is an example
of an arbitrage on their site so let's take a look at this example on pirates it's a baseball band game with an it's a baseball band game with an arbitrage opportunity on zak thompson um
number of strikeouts can be over 3.5 or under 3.5 we can cover all the outcomes in this match so let's see if we put one dollar on each of them so if we bet one dollar on over 3.5 on
so if we bet one dollar on over 3.5 on the first bookmaker with the odds of 116 the first bookmaker with the odds of 116 then if it wins and we make 2.16 back outcome to get the arbitrage opportunity we would bet a dollar and three cents
it's being recommended and if that wins we make 2016 cents but lose the dollar so either way we've deployed two dollars and three cents 16 cents back so we get an overall profit of 13 cents
and that is a 6.08 um um profit on turnover as shown here profit on turnover as shown here in this percent icon
now let's say we could do ten dollars instead of the one dollar that we had initially while we're not making only 13 cents now we're making a dollar 31 with a total stake of 10 times what we had before
if we put 100 then we make a 13 guaranteed profit if we put 200 then we make a guaranteed profit of 26. if we put 500 we get a guaranteed profit of 65. we will need to deploy 1014
and so on so we can see the more we're betting the to make and we can see for new york these are there some are very good five percent or six
percent but generally they're around close to one point nine percent or sometimes a bit higher than two percent and new ones will come in each day some of these might the bookies might change their pricing and disappear but you can
generally find a lot of these opportunities for at least two percent so this is a great way to wrap your head around the mathematics and play around with things with just a small dollar amount of cash now personally i wouldn't
recommend putting more than 500 ever on a single bet bookies can play very dirty if your bet is too big they could potentially not let your bet go through and say it's pending or just cancel your bet or even worse they could even
to cost you a lot more in potential profits in the long run so you don't going to be making less than the electricity actually takes to run your computer but you don't want to be betting too much either so around 100 to
maybe 500 is probably the sweet spot if you're able to find a few of these opportunities each day which is very likely then your 2 000 in bankroll is more than sufficient to cover all of it now we can see the percentage edge for
arbitrage is generally not that high if we have an edge of 2 on average and we deploy our entire 2k each day then our expected profit or in this case it's we're still only going to be making forty dollars of profit each day two
it's two percent each day not two percent per year like most savings accounts out there but still what if we want to make more we could go with the plus ev method but it does become a little bit more complicated as there's a
calculations that become involved luckily there is something called the kelly criterion which helps us to calculate exactly how much we should be betting on every positive ev opportunity that we find it calculates the
percentage of our bankroll to bet based on maximizing the expected returns we minimizing the risk that we will end up being bankrupt if we bet too much of our bankroll each time luckily this is also built into odds jam so let's go through
an example so the first thing i have to do is set my bankroll so if i go to my do is set my bankroll so if i go to my profile if i go to bet settings i will see a starting bankroll let's say i have two thousand dollars and i just keep it
simple and set my kelly multiplier to one so now instead of the arbitrage section we can go to betting tools and go to the we can go to betting tools and go to the positive ev tab
expected return or edge we have is a lot higher now we're no longer making about two percent on average we can get opportunities all the way up to nineteen percent and there's a plenty of opportunities above five percent and
around ten percent so let's take a look at this calculator i have my kelly multiplier set to one and this is the bet that is positive expected value with a nineteen point seven percent edge
seven percent edge it's recommending me to bet 145.89 or 7.29 percent of my bankroll this means if i'm betting 145.89 are 145.89 times 19.7 percent
which is close to about 30 dollars for this positive ev bet if i go to this one i can see it's recommending me to bet less because the opportunity is not as good and the odds are higher so it's only recommending me
to bet 114 dollars and 80 cents and therefore my expected return on this one is 114 times 11.49 or around 12 dollars it also has a neat feature of just
straight up adding this to the pet tracker if you want to do the bet which you can track over here on your bet tracker bets tab so the key takeaway is if my betting bankroll was less then each time i would be needing to bet less
to minimize the risk of a significant damage to my bankroll and so because i'm in the long run now let's say we deploy our 2k bankroll each day this time on positive ev opportunities which has an edge of generally let's say seven
percent then our expected profit is two thousand times seven and that gives us a expected return um not guaranteed this time of one hundred and forty dollars per day this is a lot
better now and as we make more money say we make 500 in our first week then we can update our bankroll to 2500 and this will allow us to slowly size up our bets
one thousand dollars two thousand dollars is just the amount you will need to get your expected potential profits up to the amount where you can justify spending the roughly one hour or so each
day finding and placing these bets another reason i recommend two thousand dollars is that to arbitrage successfully or even find positive ev appear on the same bookie you will need to have multiple bookie accounts open
can jump on an opportunity when it arises which means you can't just have a bookie and that's it very commonly bookies might attempt new customers or even existing customers with deposit match offers like this one here from
ladbrokes so if you only have 50 you're not going to be able to capture the offer in its entirety and you'll be missing out on an extra 50 of free money odds jam has a detailed list of all the bookies offering these special deposit
matches in the united states so you can just make some free money right away check out odds jam in the link in the description below or in the card that should appear somewhere here and you can get 25 off your first month by entering
in shane 25 in check out if you enjoyed this video then make sure to give it a this channel to not miss out on my other sports betting content and money making tips that i have lined up for you guys as always take care and i'll see you
as always take care and i'll see you guys in the next video