How to Handle Failure in Betting

As a sports gambler, you probably spend plenty of time daydreaming about the huge wins you will one day make.  You might also dream about the day you can quit your day job and walk out of your office forever.  You might look forward to buying a big house and a sports car.  But before you can live it up, you have to learn how to live down your failures.  As hard as they are to think about, they will happen.  And if you are not ready to cope when they do, you will fail harder and more often.

Nobody does a perfect job betting.  And even if you did do a perfect job, and never made a mistake, you would still lose bets now and again.  There are no perfect betting systems.  All you can do is come up with the best possible edge and follow through on your betting plan to the best of your ability. 

How do you feel when you do lose a bet?  Common reactions include anger, fear, and even denial.  You might feel like you need to get revenge and “win it all back” if you are angry, which can prompt you to bet too much too fast on another bad wager.  If you are afraid, you may stop betting altogether, and miss great opportunities.  If you experience denial, you are putting yourself in the greatest danger of all by pretending nothing is wrong.  If you do that, you will just make the same mistakes again and again.  Most of us have met punters who do this, and who still convince themselves they are on the road to success.

While failure is potentially a step forward on that road, repeated identical failures are not.  When you fail, you actually have a great opportunity in front of you never to make the same mistake twice, but only if you learn from it and discover what you did wrong. 

Essentially, failure is nothing more than the state of not having succeeded yet.  Failure does not turn into ruin until you give up altogether or refuse to learn from your mistakes and make the same ones repeatedly.  If you repeat your mistakes again and again, you will eventually run out of money, and then you will be forced to give up. 

How do you leverage your failures and turn them into learning experiences that you lead you to success? 

• Keep a trading journal and a spreadsheet.
• Log everything you do as a bettor.
• Review your progress regularly and look for patterns.
• Ask for help online from other punters when necessary.
• Test changes to your system or trading approach.
• Continuously review your progress and run analytics to measure success quantitatively.
• Keep doing what works, and keep abandoning what doesn’t.

You can turn failure into success only if you take a structured approach to learning and improving your betting strategies.  It takes determination and hard work, but if you stick with it, you will eventually start achieving the success you have always dreamed about.