Betting psychology

When we talk about sports betting psychology, usually we focus on the basics: you need to develop discipline in order to commit yourself to success, and you need to keep a level head so your emotions don’t overwhelm you when you place your wagers on your preferred uk betting site.  But sometimes it pays off to delve a little deeper into specific concepts from psychology and how they might be involved with your betting decisions.

In my previous articles in the series  Do You Really Ever “Start Over” in Sports Betting Part 1 and Part 2, I have been talking about the disastrous situation where you are betting profitably for a while, and then everything appears to fall to pieces.  You work really hard to come up with a great betting system, and then it crumbles.  You lose bet after bet and do not understand why.&nb

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about one of the most despair-inducing experiences you can have while betting on sports.  What experience is that?  It is the moment when all of your hard work seems to crumble right in front of your eyes, when the profitable system you fought so hard to build stops generating results.

Imagine that you have been wagering on sports for a couple of years now.  You started out casually, just betting with friends on football matches, and you noticed that you had a bit of a knack for it, so you decided to get serious and start betting online.  You ended up putting a lot of time and research into things, and you studied up and learned a few sports betting systems.  Eventually you got one working pretty well—it took well over a year of effort before you built up the expertise you needed to star

Most people get into sports betting casually.  Maybe money changed hands while you were watching a football game with your friends, and you decided you would start placing bets with bookies the next time around.  Eventually perhaps you decided to take your betting career online. 

Whether you are serious about betting for a living or not, you probably want to make as much money as you can betting on sports, right?  How have you been making your betting decisions?  Do you go with your gut?  Do you make a prediction based on your knowledge of a sport, but without doing a lot of concrete research before a match?  Do you pick the team you hope will win?  Do you use someone else’s betting strategy or picks?

Do you dream of betting on sports for a living?  If so, this is the perfect time of the year to start thinking about how you can make improvements which will help you to turn that dream into a tangible goal.  One of the most important steps you can take if you haven’t already is coming up with a plan to manage your money.

Why is a money management plan so vital? 

How did you do betting this year?  Did you make money?  Lose money?  Do a bit (or a lot) of both?  How did you react to your wins and losses?  Did they compel you to put more money on the table and maybe lose more of it too? 

Whatever your mistakes or regrets from last year, a new year is fast approaching, and you have a clean slate on which to build.  This can be the year that you stop betting emotionally.  Emotional betting comes in numerous different forms:

Previously, I have written a bit about the phenomenon of “going on tilt” in gambling.  Going on tilt is what happens when you lose control over your emotions and start betting wildly and sabotaging your own success.  Oftentimes it is hard to notice you are going on tilt at all, until it is too late and you have lost a ton of money.  This is why it is so important to learn to recognize the signs you are going on tilt. 

Did you ever finish up a really bad day at the online casino tables where you lost emotional control, only to have someone say to you later that night, “You have a problem.  You’re an addict, and you need to quit?”