Professor David Beaudoin, now a millionaire, retired from the University of Laval at the age of 43. After getting rich at the expense of online casinos, he offers his sports betting “tricks” for free on his YouTube channel.
If you had placed an amount of money on each of the bets that David Beaudoin recommended to his channel’s subscribers last year, you would have more than 14 times that amount in your pocket today.
This “Quebec Moneyball,” a graduate student in statistics and a numbers enthusiast, has developed a unique model to predict the results of games in major sports such as football, baseball and hockey. “For example, if my model tells me that this team has a 57% chance of winning tonight, I compare it with the odds from the various sports betting sites and know whether it is a good bet or not,” explains this 43-year-old Father, who says he does it mostly for pleasure and intellectual interest in the matter.
Photo provided by David Beaudoin
He rose to prominence in 2017 when he was a professor at the University of Laval. He and a colleague published an article that showed National Hockey League coaches pulling their goalies far too late at the end of a game (to keep an extra player on the ice). His conclusions were notably published in the New York Post.
“Then the general managers and their assistants called me, including current Tampa Bay Lightning GM Julien Brisebois, who was working for the Canadian at the time. He didn’t agree with me, but he appreciated my arguments and found them interesting.” Nowadays, he notes, teams have adapted and retired their goalkeepers earlier at the end of the game.
He makes fun of casinos
David Beaudoin’s curiosity began to pay off in 1999 when his uncle pointed out to him that online casinos were now available on the Internet. “There I discovered something that changed my life. At that time, the odds (editor’s note: probability of a team winning) in the casinos were so different that arbitration was possible,” he says.
For example, by being able to bet on two teams competing against each other at the same time. The man named Professor MJ on YouTube explains that he was able to bet $500 on the Canadians against the Boston Bruins on one site and also $800 on the Bruins on another site that offered different odds. “You probably would have lost one, but you made at least $35 in profit, for example. Repeat this ten times a day and it will start making money!” he says.
Provided by: David Beaudoin
His biggest coup came in 2008 at the expense of the casinos that offer Black Jack online. Instead of dealing virtual cards on the screen, casinos filmed real dealers giving you a card when you clicked a button. “I realized that a particular casino was using very large cards so that they could be clearly seen on the screen. However, some dealers had difficulty shuffling these cards. “I said to myself, ‘In my opinion, these cards are not well shuffled,’ so I started taking notes,” he says.
David Beaudoin was quickly able to recognize frequently recurring sequences of cards. “When I saw a 2 of spades followed by a 3 of diamonds, I would look at my notes to find out whether the previous trick had happened before and, if so, what the next card was… Some dealers weren’t really no good “As I shuffled, I knew which five or six cards would come next,” he says.
This allowed him to earn around $800,000. Some evenings he could make $100,000 in two and a half hours. “I held back too! I lost my hands doing it on purpose. I had just won eight hands in a row for $5,000, I told myself that was too lazy, so I lost one every now and then…”
Now a YouTuber
Today, casinos and sports betting have adapted and arbitrage has become nearly impossible. But that doesn’t stop David Beaudoin from being successful and achieving a good batting average with his “secret mathematical formula” that he shares with Internet users.
He started his YouTube channel (Professor MJ) with a bang in 2019 by placing a big bet on football to gain attention. “The Buffalo Bills were a very average team for 18 years, but I felt like they were on the verge of being good. The odds offered a good return if the Bills won at least 6 games during the season [sur 16]. I was pretty confident they would win more. So I made a video explaining all my reasons for making this bet.
He even traveled to New Jersey to place thousands of dollars worth of bets, filming and documenting everything. “After ten games, the Bills had already won seven games,” says the man who is now dedicating himself full time to his new project.
An exploding industry
According to research firm Statista, the size of the online sports betting market is $242 billion. The Bet365 company dominates the market with an estimated value of $3.37 billion.
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