We've all heard the advices and warnings of the other, more experienced better about common rookie bettor mistakes.
It is not always possible to learn from other's experience though, I had to lose my initial bank in full just to begin thinking about the mistakes I was making...
I'm still new to the betting world and, as you can surely guess, still can't get a profit from it. However, I've already learnt some of the mistakes I should NEVER make.
Just as I did , you must have already read or heard these advices in some other articles, but, as you can't always learn from other people's experience, I had to lose bank myself in order to figure out what I was doing wrong.
I bring you 5 of the mistakes I made:
1) Taking too much time to recognize and accept a loss
When things start to deviate from what we expected, for example, there's a goal at the start of a match where we bet on a Under 2,5. The match is still wide open with both teams creating a large number of goal opportunities...
And then, instead of recognizing the situation and closing our bet with a small loss, we insist in waiting a bit longer, hoping that the 2 goals that are missing don't come and we still be able to profit come end match.
But then... another goal goes in. Now the loss is big and quite harder to swallow...
At that moment we have a chance to save at least a small part of our investment, our stubbornness says otherwise though and we still linger on an impossible dream (no more goals being scored) until... another goal!
Everything is gone, except the regret. That will last a bit.
2) Blindly trusting pre-live prognosis
Theory has a tendency to not follow reality. As good as a prognosis might be, with excellent team analysis, a great match scenario and full of important statistics, it is still only a prognosis.
When the ball starts rolling the hard reality comes in, and sometimes our eyes cannot recognize it because they are too set on the path proposed by the prognosis on which we put our faith.
3) Betting on too many matches
It took me a long time to recognize true "value bets". The major part of the sporting events available to bet on do not bring with them huge opportunities to profit, this happens because odds tend to closely represent their associated probabilities without very large margins for us to explore.
There are cases however, where the confidence placed by the market on the favourite team is not justified. For instance: when a big team is playing against a weaker, but motivated, team using their reserves.
These kinds of events justify the risk of a bet, the times where the odds are clearly misalined with reality.
4) Not knowing how to win
It is common to find people that don't know how to lose. They “tilt”, they fall into the pits of emotional unbalance and then create traumas and sorrows from which they take a long time to recover.
There are also those who do not know how to win. Either because of some auto-sabotage or just excess greed, when the time to win comes around, the decision of safely securing the profit becomes exceedingly difficult.
“I'll just win a little more” and “I'll bet on this match too” - these are omens of the losses to come.
5) Going “all-in”
Risking our full bank on a single bet. The old temptation of taking the "shortcut" to grow faster.
This is a tactic as valid as a "Russian roulette": what prize could be big enough to justify shooting a bullet into our own head?
Those who suffer with these kinds of impulses should just play the lottery, at least there the prize is large enough to justify the risk we will be taking.
Photos in Sapo Desporto
With the full moral authority of someone who has fallen prey to all of the above mistakes, the author of this article writes with the hope that you (as well as himself) will be warned about these very real situations.
Hopefully I can avoid the same mistakes and can, in the future, at least write about totally different ones!
Acenavarro
