Profitable sports betting is boring. What’s Likely is automating the formula.

I was a pretty good long-distance runner back in the day. I trained like a maniac and gave it my all on race day.

I’ll never forget someone once saying to me, “Wow, you must really enjoy racing.”

Caught off guard, I responded, “I hate it!”

They looked confused. 

“If you enjoy racing, you’re not running hard enough,” I explained. 

Which was true. I didn’t enjoy racing. What I did enjoy was winning. I enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment when all that hard work paid off. I enjoyed hearing the PA announcer call my name. I enjoyed seeing my name in the paper the next day.

But during the race? Yeah, I felt like I was on death’s door. But without that crappy feeling, none of those good feelings would be possible.

Years later, in researching people who net six figures a year betting on sports, one thing I learned surprised me:

They’re bored.

They enjoy making money, sure. But the process that leads there is tedious. It’s finding soft markets that few others care about. It’s constant line shopping. It’s realizing that winning just a little bit more than you lose, consistently, over time, at scale, is the true path to success. 

While everyone else enjoys the thrill of throwing down a thousand or so on their favorite team to win the Super Bowl, these bettors — “sharps,” as they’re called — are doing something very different. They’re making smaller, diversified bets on tennis matches in Hong Kong. Soccer games in South America. Whether the Jets’ third-string running back will rush for >5.5 yards.

That contrast mirrors how my own relationship with sports, and with risk, evolved over time.

As a kid, I loved to watch sports. Football, bowling, horse racing, didn’t matter. If it was on TV, I watched it. I didn’t understand the nuances of the game. I just liked the spectacle.

As I got older, that changed. I became more discerning about the sports I watched, and more interested in strategies — why coaches made certain decisions at certain times, how small advantages accumulated, and why outcomes that felt surprising often weren’t.

Adulthood pushed that curiosity further. My consulting and marketing work required me to think constantly in probabilities and likelihoods — how consumers behave, how incentives shape decisions, and how choices get made when certainty doesn’t exist.

That way of thinking eventually led me to create What’s Likely.

What’s Likely was designed as a general decision-making tool — a way to think more clearly about choices in uncertain environments. Business decisions. Personal ones. Anywhere confidence is often mistaken for knowledge.

What’s Likely rests on a simple premise: that the future isn’t knowable, but there’s always one course of action that’s more likely to lead to success than others. 

Sports betting entered the picture on accident. Its legalization in Missouri wasn’t on my radar, nor was it something that particularly interested me.

But once it arrived, the overlap became hard to ignore. Sports offered a rare, bounded environment where uncertainty is unavoidable, outcomes resolve quickly, and results can’t be explained away with hindsight or narrative spin.

In other words, I hadn’t gone looking for sports betting. It found me.

And I just happened to have the right tool when it did.

The What’s Likely model integrates numerous inputs, each weighted by importance — including expert analysis, historical trends, weather, streaks, slumps, and 11 other secret herbs and spices I’m keeping to myself.

From there, it filters for minimum viability and surfaces about four to 10 daily bets it considers particularly high quality.

To be clear: the sports betting application of What’s Likely is still being tested carefully and deliberately. That caution isn’t about confidence in the framework itself.

At the time of this writing, the model is operating at a 54% win rate, with results trending toward the 57–59% range — the kind of margin that historically translates to double-digit ROI. More importantly, its performance continues to improve as inputs are refined, not as assumptions are loosened.

The real constraints aren’t philosophical. They’re practical. When too many people act on the same signal at the same time, markets respond. Sportsbooks notice. Lines move. Limits follow. At that point, the system starts eating itself.

That dynamic isn’t a flaw. It’s the cost of being right in an efficient market.

What matters more than where the system is applied is how it thinks.

What’s Likely was never built to be impressive on a landing page or easy to summarize in a paragraph. It was built to support disciplined decision-making when certainty disappears — to weigh tradeoffs, surface probabilities, and reduce the noise that confidence tends to create.

That discipline applies just as cleanly to deciding whether a job opportunity across the country is worth the disruption. To whether it’s time to hire now or wait. To recognizing whether the signals in a relationship point to a temporary rough patch or a structural problem.

Sports betting just happens to be a uniquely clean environment to see that discipline at work — because the feedback is immediate and the outcomes are unambiguous.

For now, that work remains deliberately limited. Not because interest isn’t there, but because restraint is part of the intelligence. Systems like this lose their value the moment they’re treated casually.

The only version of this that works is the one where access is earned quietly, used seriously, and kept small.

What’s Likely has never been about mass adoption. It’s about doing the work carefully, or not doing it at all. That philosophy becomes especially visible in sports betting, because that’s where many people get it wrong.

For most, betting is about one big game — your team, the biggest night, one oversized wager meant to turn belief into profit. It’s emotional, dramatic, and euphoric. 

It also happens to be an excellent way to lose money.

The bettors who are consistently profitable don’t bet that way. Their betting cards look more like stock portfolios. Five to 10 smaller wagers instead of one huge one. Different sports. Different markets. No single outcome carrying too much emotional or financial weight. Some contests in different continents that not many bettors have heard of or care about. 

That’s not an accident. It’s an understanding of variance.

Variance is the part of outcomes we don’t control — the missed free throw, the fluky goal, the bad bounce, the referee’s whistle. 

You can make a good decision and lose. You can make a bad decision and win. Over small samples, variance dominates. But, over time, it fades.

The goal isn’t to eliminate variance. That’s impossible. The goal is to overcome it.

That’s why disciplined bettors spread risk instead of concentrating it. Why they size wagers modestly. Why they’re comfortable being right only slightly more often than they’re wrong. A win rate in the mid-50% range doesn’t sound impressive — until you realize that, sustained over hundreds or thousands of wagers, it really adds up.

That’s the standard the sports betting application of What’s Likely is being trained against right now.

What’s Likely’s long-term objective isn’t a heater. It isn’t a miracle run. No “locks.” (They don’t exist.)

The goal is a modest, reasonable, repeatable edge: something that produces about 10%+ ROI over time.

What’s Likely isn’t a finished product. Nor should it be. 

And that’s the point. Models that stop evolving stop working.

When you stop pretending the future is knowable, you start making calmer, clearer decisions. You stop chasing certainty and start managing risk. You stop confusing confidence with clarity.

If you have the discipline to bet smartly and boringly, the worst-case scenario is low-cost, low-risk hobby.

The best-case scenario is a repeatable, long-term revenue stream.

President Xi, or some other world leader, could walk up to a microphone tomorrow and destabilize the world economy with a single statement. Markets would panic. Portfolios would swing.

But if LeBron still suits up that night, he’ll still score >22.5 points — or he won’t.

That doesn’t make sports betting “safe.” It makes it relatively insulated from the outside world .

Markets react to fear. Sports resolve to outcomes. When you stop confusing the two, you stop chasing certainty, and start understanding What’s Likely.

Jacob Brower is the founder and chief strategist of What’s Likely and has served as president of the Springfield-based consulting firm ABM Strategies since 2018. His work focuses on disciplined decision-making in uncertain environments. He can be reached at 417-720-2500.