“Intuition” Bets And Their Downsides
From the start, it is necessary to point out that if you are an occasional bettor, placing a wager on a sports team in accordance to your intuition or gut feeling can be seen as fun and cannot be catalogued as risky. However, these are the only circumstances when it is acceptable to bet without being knowledgeable of the value. Things are completely different when it comes to frequently wagering large sums of money in order to turn a profit, aka professional betting. Unfortunately, the vast majority of bettors either fail to understand or simply ignore the value of the bet.
A parallel between football betting and the lottery
More often than not, selecting the numbers for the lottery ticket is arbitrary and players typically utilize their significant other’s birthday, the digits on their home’s number, the date of their wedding, so on and so forth. Without a doubt, the numbers you choose for the ticket are less important in terms of influencing your chance to win, compared to football betting. Sports bettors don’t pick the winning team randomly, but they display a tendency of placing bets based on their favorites. To put it simply, if you are a fan of a certain football team, say Real Madrid, then you will probably be tempted to bet on them irrespective of their actual chance of winning. And that’s not really a good idea.
The illusion
Letting your emotions get the best of you is a surefire way to lose a lot of money in the world of soccer betting. Keep in mind that no matter how much you want “your team” to win, it does not affect the outcome of the game. You might be tempted to argue that supporting a major team by constantly betting on it is lucrative in the long run or even that this method can be employed in accumulator bets to maximize earnings.
Unfortunately, none of that is true and accumulator bets are incredibly damaging for your betting budget. First of all, the number of winnings a team boasts has no influence on the outcome of a particular match. Secondly major teams with extremely high odds have limited payout profits (sometimes they pay only the bet) and lastly accumulator bets – bets that imply better payouts if for example 5 events in a row turn out as predicted by the bettor – are the cash cow of the bookmakers, as they have an occurrence probability of 1 in 25 season.
Another aspect to be mindful of is that bookmakers are very familiar with the reputation and fan base of the football team. Even if they cannot predict the final score correctly 100%, they can estimate with a certain degree of accuracy the number of people who will bet on each team in order to set the odds and payouts accordingly.
Correct betting or “value” bets
A value bet essentially constitutes a wager that is based on carefully examined statistics and that has a satisfactory payout compared to the risk. A formula that should give you a clue about a value back bet is:
1/odds < probability of the outcome. Only by determining the statistical probability can you hope to beat the innate house edge of the bookmakers!