One thing I've noticed in betting communities is that many people judge success only by profit. If someone is winning, they assume they're making great decisions. If they're losing, they assume the strategy is bad.

But I've also seen experienced bettors talk much more about consistently beating the closing line than about short-term results.

The idea is that a bettor can make***d decisions and still lose over a small sample because of variance, while someone else can make poor bets and still show a profit for a while.

I recently found this explanation, which discusses common misconceptions about winning bettors and why bookmakers may evaluate accounts based on more than just profitability.

So I'm interested in hearing different opinions.

If you had to choose one metric to evaluate a bettor, what would it be—overall profit, ROI, closing line value, or something else?