# Wages of wins: could an amateur make money from match outcome predictions?

## TL;DR

This paper investigates whether amateur models for sports match outcome predictions can be profitable in betting, analyzing three major US sports leagues and highlighting that accuracy does not guarantee high payout.

## Contribution

It demonstrates the practical potential and pitfalls of using predictive models for sports betting profitability across different leagues.

## Key findings

- High prediction accuracy does not always lead to high payouts.
- Different models predict different match-ups correctly, affecting betting strategies.
- Profitability depends on match-up types and model accuracy.

## Abstract

Evaluating the accuracies of models for match outcome predictions is nice and well but in the end the real proof is in the money to be made by betting. To evaluate the question whether the models developed by us could be used easily to make money via sports betting, we evaluate three cases: NCAAB post-season, NBA season, and NFL season, and find that it is possible yet not without its pitfalls. In particular, we illustrate that high accuracy does not automatically equal high pay-out, by looking at the type of match-ups that are predicted correctly by different models.