Profile of a Sports trader: the first of many?
In a profile from last April, BBC News calls Matthew Benham, founder of Smartodds, a “new breed of white-collar gambler.” I would call him a sports trader.
Matthew Benham, managing director of Smartodds, had placed just a handful of bets in his life before he became a professional gambler last year. He was a City trader for eight years before setting up his company, which bets exclusively on football.
The 36-year-old employs 13 full-time staff, mainly made up of mathematicians and statisticians. He also has 25 part-time employees around the world who collate data on their country’s league. Once the analysis is done, he and just one other colleague decide what bets to place.
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Politics graduate Paul Motty, 32, worked in the betting industry after school but left in 1997 to go to university because there were few prospects and full-time punting was too difficult. But after the explosion of internet betting sites he became a full-time gambler last year.
“The internet has changed the whole industry,” he says. “The key to being a good gambler is research. It used to take days hunched over the papers to research a bet, now it takes minutes. “Gambling is losing its seedy image. It is a massive global industry and doing it professionally is now a viable career. Effectively, it is just stock broking.”
He knows more and more people who are taking it up professionally and they are mainly young. “Younger people are computer literate and use internet sites. For us gambling doesn’t have the same stigma, it is a job and we set ourselves strict limits,” he says.
