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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Fundraising Through Advantage Sports Betting: A Guide ($500/Hour in Select States), published by Sam Anschell on January 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Anyone physically located in one of twelve US states currently has a unique opportunity to earn roughly $500/hour for up to 17 hours by taking advantage of new user promotions at online sports betting sites. In this post I'll list the qualifiers to participate, then explain the process and math that allows for this opportunity, and finish with my personal experience with this process. I am sharing this in good faith that EAs who participate will donate whatever they earn beyond a reasonable value of their time to effective causes. This opportunity is unlikely to exist in two years as I suspect a critical mass of people will utilize this process and sports betting sites will modify their new user bonuses. For this reason, I ask that readers please not publicize this opportunity to the general public before the EAs who want to participate have gotten a chance to. If this option of earning to give can have more impact than your alternatives, I encourage you to give this post a read despite its length. I am not affiliated with the software recommended in this post. And as a hook and anecdotal success story: I traveled to Colorado with two friends earlier this month and the three of us collectively made over $50,000 across 106 bets in five days through this process (though our expected returns were roughly half that.) If you have questions or ideas about how to use this concept to do good, I'd love to chat! My Calendly - A Summary of the Opportunity In 2018 the US supreme court ruled that states could permit legal online sports betting at their own discretion. Since then, sports betting operators (such as DraftKings and Fanduel) have been racing one another for share of the US sports betting market. In an effort to build brand loyalty and recognition, operators (also called sports books) are offering generous new user bonuses. When a user opts in to one of these bonuses, the operator loses money on a bettor's first wager (using the bonus) but recoups its loss from bettors who choose to continue betting after the bonus has been used. If a bettor places exactly one bet with every operator that offers a profitable new user bonus, the bettor can make roughly $500/hour. The more operators you have to bet with, the more hours you can spend churning through bonuses at that high hourly rate. The risk of loss from bad luck can be combatted in two ways. First, by placing enough unique and uncorrelated bets, the law of averages will allow your actual results to revert toward your expected results. Second, you can bet on both sides of the same game using two different sports books so that the result of the game is meaningless to your bottom line. Since 2018, 20 states have approved gaming licenses for sports betting operators and twelve states have approved licenses for more than five operators (with fewer than five operators, your opportunity is limited.) In descending order of the number of licensed operators, the list of states with at least five legal online sports betting sites is as follows: New Jersey, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Virginia, Iowa, Tennessee, Arizona, Illinois, West Virginia, New York. You must be physically located in one of these states to participate - using a VPN to bypass the operators' geolocation barrier is illegal. However, you do not need to live in these states (I am a Washington state resident who visited Colorado just to participate). If you do travel to a state to participate, make sure you'll be there for at least six days (bonus funds can take up to 72 hours to post, and your withdrawals may be delayed if the operator requests additional verification.) Finally, operators...