Mental training is the core of becoming a professional bettor, mainly because you learn to understand how your emotions and experience in betting influence the outcome of your bet.
This book is more than a series of poems: it’s also an obligatory plan for developing your rational sports betting abilities – the kind that enables you to push past the emotion of these waves, and build a strategy on solid rational ground.
They Pay Attention
Professional bettors are sensitive to things that might make a difference in the outcome of a sporting event, such as officiating and its influence on what shows up on a scoreboard; performance of players and teams, and their tendencies, often not apparent from the raw numbers; and Bettors also tend to follow expert analysts, commentators and journalists, among others, for colour commentary and opinions.
Moreover, bettors should also be conscious of the dangers of allowing feelings or biases to influence their judgment of the betting odds, such that their personal likes or dislikes for and against certain teams can reduce potential profit.
They don’t lose their cash because they view their losses as all part of their learning process. They don’t try to make up for a bad day by betting more than their bankroll allows. They record every result, and they review those results periodically to make sure the strategy is still producing positive expected value.
They Are Emotional
Whether you are a recreational or professional sports bettor, one of the challenges in gambling is emotional involvement that clouds how well you maintain your game – both losses and wins generate frustration and exhilaration that lead to poor picks from excitement or disappointment that clouds decision-making – while an effective sports bettor makes their bets independent of their emotions.
For the truly successful gambler, the trick is to keep emotionally at distance from each wager, to remind oneself that each bet is independent from the next and that bad ones are attributable to the ‘luck of the draw’ beyond one’s control.
Professional bettors are entrepreneurs who need to be undistracted from their business and who wish to live an emotionally stable life. Both these things require discipline and stability of the emotions, demanding consistency and avoiding ‘emotional shorthand’ over the course of a long career.
They Are Unemotional
Pro bettors don’t show when losing, especially when losing is blatant, because emotion can flare up and cause them to gamble recklessly and destroy their bread-and-butter: so mate, keep it in your pants and your heart, let rationality rule you, emotion has no place in making a bet, this isn’t about betting your heart out at the turn of a red-star card but about doing your research, trust your game mate, don’t bet on mates or even your family, let alone your football team, because you are a fan of your football team.
Sports betting is a tricky trade, too easy to fall down the rabbit hole and lose perspective on your goals and bigger picture. A key hurdle on your path to professional success with gambling is not losing your mind in each-way accumulators that lack long-term, rational considerations. Let the experts do their job and keep your betting restricted. It’s also worth picking up a few pointers for how the mind works – books such as Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman help to demonstrate some of the concepts, while there are plenty of resilient strategies for emotion control while engaging with sports betting.
They Work Hard
What separates professional gamblers from casual bettors is the work ethic. Gambler X gambles for a living on sports in Las Vegas. He asks that I not use his real name since he doesn’t want bookmakers to know he is talking to a reporter.
Professional bettors aim at a division of labour between a work life and a leisure life that allows them to structure their day in order to allocate enough time to betting related activities, other commitments, avoid distractions, isolate an uninterrupted workplace, take a break every few hours in order to refresh their mind, make sure a clear decision process is taking place and decisions don’t emotion driven; finally, take small breaks once in while in their work day to ‘switch-off’ and keep a fresh mind thus research and betting strategy drive a bettor’s decisions rather than emotion.