Bookmakers make billions so tell me why do you have the feeling that you can beat the bookie? Why do you think you can do better, when facts speak a clear language? Let’s set benchmarks to know the starting point. There are hundreds of highly skilled employees by most of the big brands out there and guess what. They work 40+ hours per week to get the numbers right.
How much time do you spend with your betting?
Do you expect to beat the highly paid and skilled professionals by taking shortcuts such as “buying fixed match information”? You might learn your lesson the hard way. What other options do you have? Yes… you can follow your heart. You can be a Liverpool or Barcelona or any other team fan and support your team by betting on them – just like the majority of punters. There are dozens of approaches to betting you can call incorrect, let me name just a few more. I bet on this team, because I never heard of the other one. I like Spanish La Liga so I will bet on Real Madrid. This team deserves to win now. One day this chain of losses must come to an end…
There are many distortions when it comes to decision making, so what is the correct approach? The answer is simple yet quite hard. Do it like the bookmakers! Sit down, take some pen and paper and dig deep into the data. Analyze leagues, teams, players from every possible angle. If you spend less than 20 minutes analyzing a fixture you want to bet on, you are slacking on the job and deserve to be punished. What is the punishment? You lose your money!
This sounds like a hard job. Any help? For the initial selection of fixtures use mathematical football predictions but that is not it. There is the AI that selects the fixtures with a value, but just like by all the bookies, human check is more than necessary. Use the mathematical football predictions just like a filter, or hint that saves you time. Do the analysis anyway and try to select less than 50% of the fixtures. The ones that make sense and you should be happy with the results. Is that it? Of course not, since there are more factors.
The betting mindset
The right mindset when it comes to betting is a combination of the following factors. Knowledge, psychology and keeping it simple. We evaluate each of these categories right now.
Basic probability
Imagine you were asked to fly a spaceship. What would be the most likely result of this experience? Most likely a crash. Betting may not have as a consequence a fatality like when flying the spaceship, but when betting without knowing how, failure is inevitable. You have to know at least something about the theory of probability. The theory of betting is easily explained with a coin toss. Imagine you have a coin. There is a 50% chance of landing a tail and 50% chance of landing a head. Converted into odds, you get 2.00 and 2.00. What do the bookies do? They take the odds and push them down to 1.9 for each side of the coin. Do you get the metaphor?
In this environment, there is no way a punter can win in the long run and you can call it pure gambling. The theory of probability will get you sooner or later. According to spincastle, betting in the described case is no different than playing slots or roulette. There is no system or strategy that can help you out and loss is the only option. Moving further from this pessimistic scenario, there is a hope. A football match is not a coin toss and the probability of the match outcome is not a law. You can always be better at predicting the outcome than the bookmakers.
Psychology of betting
Having the knowledge what do you do next? You can go out and use it, unless you fall prey to your emotions. Yes, emotions are the element why most of the punters pick “bad deals” on their tickets. Just think how many times you bet on a top dog, your favorite team or how many times you simply said “now i feel it in my bones”. But tell me… how many times did you put your emotions away and did it the right way? Let me give you a clue. If you spent less than 20 minutes with the analysis before placing a bet, then you didn’t use the knowledge but rather your emotions.
Betting strategy
Too much has been said about betting strategy and sometimes it feels like this is a tool for professionals and has to be complicated. You might have a feeling that you have to be advanced in science to be able to come up with a valid betting strategy. Basically I am only mentioning this feature, because of the fake aura of betting strategy. Simply forget about it! Identify a value, start out with pennies and if you see that your betting konto is getting bigger, slowly increase the stakes. Simple as that.