Don’t Trust your Gut
Gamblers frequently bet on a feeling or gut instinct. Unfortunately your gut is far more irrational than you might think, utilizing ready made rules of thumb – known in psychology as heuristics – which can be unsuitable tools for successful betting.
There is a very good reason we rely on heuristics – evolution. Our distant ancestors when faced with complex life-threatening problems didn’t have time to weigh up the situation, so developed quick-fire methods. Those that worked were passed down through generations, and we are still relying on them, often when we shouldn’t.
Todd’s Take: First things first; if you’re not making this a regular stop on your daily journey to understand sports betting, you’re selling yourself short. Pinnacle has taken the forward thinking approach towards sports wagering turning it into a thinking man’s game, offering insightful articles about not only their bookmaking philosophies but other relevant industry topics daily.
The article here discusses a lot of the concepts we accept as gambling doctrine, specifically the notion of trusting your gut over what the numbers tell you. Concepts like anchoring, availability bias, and gambler’s fallacy all negatively impact our ability to process betting information because our brains are conditioned to remember what they want. We selectively recall certain aspects of games we’ve watched even though those moments probably aren’t indicative of the full body of work. More often these tendencies aren’t consistent with becoming a long term profitable sports bettor. One of the sharpest sports investors I interact with daily makes it a point to tell me if he ever trusted his gut he’d have been on the fast track to the poor house years ago.
Your major takeaway in all of this is to recognize your own per-disposed biases. By becoming self aware you force yourself to make shrewd choices based on figures and tangible data rather than the abstract. Numbers never lie in sports betting but our evolutionary heuristics do in so much that even the conditioned sports bettor can be misled by his/her own trusted instincts if he/she’s not careful
