I've tried the "IPTV streams" to watch blacked out NHL games, and they are often terribly overloaded or just don't work at all. Not something I'd pay for.

Just search for the name of the sport and “bite” and you’ll find some sketchy successor of the original subreddits for pirated sports streams (“r/nflbite,” “r/nbabite,” etc.) Or find the latest streameast mirror which is usually the best.

Make sure your ad blocker is working. Then it’s just a matter of finding the best stream, extracting the playlist, and opening VLC.

I documented [0] some useful tricks for this technique and the comments also include more useful snippets and bookmarklets.

[0] https://gist.github.com/milesrichardson/4661c311199b98023701...