You’re Still Losing Even When You’re Winning
At sports betting, your main goal is always to go for spread bets
and beat the bookies. Bettors usually do this by handicapping with a practical
long-term target of getting 55% winners. Once this skill is mastered, one would
then assume that you must devote all of your time doing sports betting because
this is the key to winning huge money and becoming extremely wealthy. Getting
55% winners is considered an exclusive skill.
However, 55% winners doesn’t guarantee wins a hundred percent of
the time. There will still be instances of losing that can challenge a player’s
emotions and discipline. The worst part that you have probably not realized yet
is that even though you’re with 55% winners, you will still find yourself in an
overall losing streak on most games. You might take this as quite a shock, but
there is truth in this. And we can explain this phenomenon with this simple
answer: Juice.
In the data below, you can see the long-term percentage trend of
55% wins from handicapping. The data shows a player’s top 4 bets in a day’s
average.
Wins
|
Losses
|
Percentage
|
4
|
0
|
9.15%
|
3
|
1
|
29.95%
|
2
|
2
|
36.75%
|
1
|
3
|
20.05%
|
0
|
4
|
4.10%
|
What this data shows is that on an average, the player has 9.15%
chance of winning in all the 4 picks, whereas there’s 20.05% occurrence that he
will win in 1 bet and lose in all the 3, so on and so forth.
Hence, if we analyze the data in greater detail, it will show us
that there’s around 60.9% chance that a bettor on 55% winner is actually losing
money. Easily you can see that losing happens on that 4.10% and 20.05% rows,
but the reason why the 36.75% row where winning and losing is tied 2 for 2 is
included in the losing percentage is that this does not contribute to your
juice. So what happens is that you will end up with less money compared to your
starting amount.
In essence, even for an exceptional spread bettor, when he does
his top 4 bets, there is 60% occurrence of losing. If you want to remain on top
of your game then you have to be emotionally and mentally prepared for this
fact. If you do not accept this because whenever you are in a losing streak
then your emotions will get the best of you and all that you’d want to do is
make up for all your losses. This will be very damaging to your betting habits,
not to mention to your money.
Avoid Chasing Your Losses
Chasing off your losses is never healthy, however minor you may
treat it. In our example, the 55% bettor for instance gets a shaky trend with
0-4 or 1-3 losses over wins. He will probably try betting on 5 instead of the
usual top 4 plays. He may not realize the harm in this at first but he is
forgetting that he is only a 55% bettor within top 4 picks. Thus, his betting
percentage relatively deceases as he moves to top 5 picks. He puts himself in
an even unfriendly situation.
All in all, each bettor must master their emotions and discipline
whenever they engage in any game, particularly handicapping, because this is
key driver to succeeding in the long run.
