While the chances of making a profit while betting are low, it doesn’t stop people from trying. Think of the UK football team, Leicester City. In 2016, they began the season with 5,000 to 1 odds of winning the English Premier League. The likelihood of this happening is about the same odds that Vegas gives on Elvis Presley being found alive. When they surprised everyone by winning the league, some punters, who likely had backed the team early in the season as a joke, won big. The chance of this large payout, even though it is rare, is what drives people to continue placing wagers.
Why It So Hard To Beat Bookies
Beating bookies at their own game is incredibly hard to do because betting takes time and energy to increase your waging skills. In the book The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math are Taking the Luck out of Gambling by mathematician Adam Kucharski, he writes that there is only one thing that is certain in betting and that is that the house always wins. The odds will always be in their favor.
One of the significant problems that people run into when betting is understanding the impact that psychology can have on betting decisions and the possible outcomes. Psychology and biases can impact what you are betting on, how much you bet, and when you bet. Being aware of the psychological impact is vital if you want to make a profit.
While betting, you might fall into the trap of confirmation basis. By looking at the lucky few winners, like those who bet early on Leicester City, you might be focusing on the idea that you can win, and win big when you are gambling. It causes you to pay attention to the ideas that fit into your perceptions and ignore information that doesn’t agree with it. This might be why you hear about the ones who win big, and not the people who lose it all.
Betting is so attractive to people because it gives them the dream of getting rich quick and solving all their financial problems. People begin to get desperate as they bet more and more, and continue to lose. Bookies love this type of people because they stop thinking logical, and instead they might flashback to their winning streak they had a few hours ago, and then they want to keep betting to get that money back. To avoid getting into a betting hole, here are a few betting strategies you should follow.
Betting Strategy Tips To Beat Bookies
Know The Sport
To make the most money in betting, you have a couple of options. One option is to be prepared to spend a lot of time doing it. You should always know the game or sport that you are betting on. To have a real chance of beating the bookies, you have to understand the nuances of the games and the players.
When betting on popular sports that the rest of the country follows, you might not find as good of odds, but if you like a more obscure team or a less popular sport like volleyball, you might have a better chance of knowing more than the people setting the odds. If that is the case, you can keep an eye on the odds that the bookkeepers are making and eventually, they will make a mistake. They might set the odds based on a high league position and make them the favorites to win, even though there were recent injuries to star players. People won’t be as knowledgable about that, so you have a better chance of winning.
Accumulators
Accumulators are one way for gamblers to win big off of a relatively small stake. If you start with £10 and want to make money, then you should predict a couple of outcomes correctly on just one bet. You can build a huge accumulator with twenty or more teams, and this might seem like it will lead to huge payouts. But even if those twenty teams are sure things, the chances of something go wrong with at least one of them are pretty high. If just one team draws or loses, that means you will lose your bet. Therefore, it is never a good idea to try and build up too much of an accumulator.
You also shouldn’t try and cushion your accumulator with a clear odds-on bet. If you make ten wagers with odds of 5/2, you won’t be winning that much money unless you are betting a huge stake from the start. This decision can be risky because if you lose, you will lose a big pot of money.
Use Logic, Not Emotions
Even if you know the sport very well, it is easy to get caught up in the emotions of the sport and bet with your heart, instead of your head. As we all have our preferred teams, it can be a tempting choice to go all in on the team that we have been watching all season. However, this “strategy” is exactly what bookies are waiting for you to do.
While you do know your own team and players well, you might not have been watching the competition as closely. Because the matches involve the two teams, you shouldn’t make a bet based solely on your faith on the players. However, there are ways around this where you can bet on your players to win. If you have a striker who seems to score consistently, you can also place a wager that they will score sometime during the game. Therefore, if your team loses, you might still be able to make some money based on this type of bet.
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