Decisions to Make About Sports Betting
In gambling, as in many other fields that use a statistical baseline, there’s a risk of deciding on a strategy with a small-sample bias. I switched between strategies without looking too much on how many bets I’d done and how representative they were. For what it’s worth, the average amount of bets I did replicating the exact same criteria within a specific strategy were 17 bets. Usually I incorporated or excluded a factor of the equation to see if the result improved.
Gambling has many attractive aspects; one of the most powerful for research is that it provides an environment where the decision-maker has a fast feedback on his decision. You bet on today’s games and by midnight you’ll have feedback on how good your betting was. Although everyone receives feedback, each gambler will decide to use that feedback or not; this is, to gamble with your gut or to use the feedback to build a systematic approach to improve how to make gambling decisions. The latter was my focus during the 2019–2020 NBA season.
“We think, each of us, that we’re much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it’s the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we’ve already made the decision.”
How does this relate to sports betting? Well, imagine you’re looking to bet on the winner of a football game between the Green Bay Packers and the Carolina Panthers. The “correct” way to make your selection would be to first gather all the relevant information regarding the two teams. Then you’d have to analyze that information, and come to an objective conclusion about the likely outcome.
This seems straightforward enough, but don’t be surprised to find that your conclusion isn’t objective. There’s a strong possibility that all your analysis will be influenced by any initial bias you may have. Your brain will automatically make an instinctive judgement about which team is likely to win the game, and you’ll sub-consciously look for ways to support that judgement in your analysis. So you’ll end up effectively betting based on a hunch, despite trying to do everything right.
Betting on football requires applying different strategies; it is like a trial and error test, so if you want to bet on the el classico and you don't know necessary information such as results of the last five games, the position of each one in the table, average goals for and against, manager's tactic, home or visitor status, as well as the situation of the dressing room (injured, penalized), to name a few, you won't have much to argue the forecast from. Getting an advantage to increase the chances of success when making bets has always been impressive. In reality, nothing works infallibly in this regard since sports, like gambling, have a component of luck that leaves the final result to chance. However, the information about historical results allows calculating the chances of success in these bets to a certain degree.
Many people think that you have to be an expert in statistics to carry out these analyzes. Still, it is not so at all; what is essential is that you know the game already with that. If it is tough for you to understand the numbers, you can listen to the analyzes before the game where they explain in detail all the information—one such platform that does this is casino
