Our beginner’s betting guides focused on why people lose at betting, then the fundamentals of a winning betting strategy. Long term betting requires discipline and self-evaluation, which is what we cover in this article.
If you intend to be a professional sports bettor, you have to really commit yourself to it and treat sports betting like you would any other enterprise. If you opened a bar, you would certainly keep books, track your profits, acquisitions and think of new strategies to attract customers. In a similar way, you will have to track and analyze all aspects of your betting career in order to optimize your process and the end results.
Treating sports betting like a proper business can be a challenge because it comes naturally to us to view betting as a form of entertainment and actually looking at it from a serious perspective takes some real adjusting and a complete change of mindset.
1. Keeping Separate Bankroll And Records
If you intend to bet sports professionally, you would be well advised to keep the betting bankroll completely separate from the rest of your money. Using a completely separate bankroll makes tracking winnings and losses much easier and psychologically makes it easier to place bets according to your plan.
If you fail to separate the expenses money from your sports betting bankroll, it can lead to you being too stressed about the outcomes of your bets and to improper tracking of winnings and losses.
Whether you are keeping a separate bankroll or not, it is always a good idea to keep a very detailed sheet with all your bets and their outcomes. The sheet is necessary for the detailed end of the month analysis and the analysis of individual bets, all of which are an integral part of the sports betting process.
2. Data Analysis: Developing Your Strategy
In order to start betting sports, you will need to come up with a strategy and stick to it. However, this does not mean the strategy you choose should not be updated and developed over time. In fact, since the markets are constantly undergoing change, it is nearly impossible to be a long term winner if you do not adjust your strategy accordingly every now and then.
Such strategy re-developments have to be done in accordance with the data you collect, which is why keeping a detailed track of your bets is absolutely crucial to being a winner. A detailed sheet with all the bets, their results and as much fine detail as possible will help you decide if a market or a league is still profitable to bet after some time and make other similar adjustments to your general strategy.
Once every month or two, you should take a full day to just analyze your previous bets. Take out your sheet, find all the bets you made and analyze them to the finest possible detail. What is it that made your winning bets winners? Why did you lose some bets? Did you get unlucky in many spots or were you making poor decisions that led to the losing bets?
3. Analyzing Your Poor Decisions
No matter how good you are at sports betting, there will be times when a poor decision will lead to a losing bet. This is completely normal and fine, but it is important that when you are analyzing your results, you realize where it is you made a bad decision, try to understand why you made it and take a lesson from it for your future bets.
There can be many reasons why a bettor would make a bad investment and these can often be related to pure greed and vanity. It is not uncommon that those of us who make a living betting sports want to show off to our friends or other punters and bets that are not really winners are often made just to prove a point. Additionally, most sports bettors can get greedy at times, but it is crucial not to let either of these reasons influence our betting pattern.
Even worse than vanity and greed can be boredom, that sometimes leads us into betting when there are simply no good bets to be placed. In such cases, you will often see professional bettors placing money on trivial bets that are simply not good investments and this is clearly not something we should be doing.
Bookmakers also try to influence us with their advertising and promotions, but it is the job of every respectable bettor to actually assess each promotion, price boost, and bonus and make an informed decision on whether to take it, instead of simply jumping into anything the bookies throw at him.
Overall speaking, more important than realizing why it is you are winning bets is why it is you are losing bets. Losses happen in sports betting as a result of variance and bad luck, but we must do our best to eliminate any losses that come from other factors that we could have influenced.
Final Word: You Are Betting For A Living
Always remember this! While there may have been a time in your life when you were betting for fun and pleasure, sports betting is now becoming your business and your primary or secondary source of income. Do not let your emotions, greed, boredom or any external factors get the better of you. Always keep the goal in mind and think strategically of your next decision. No matter how many bets in a row you have lost, do not deviate from what you know to be a winning strategy.
Deviation from your strategy can quickly lead back to you betting randomly and trying to pick out winners which is not what you want to do at all. It is all about finding value, so keep making good value bets, record your bets, your wins and your losses and the long term results will show you it was all well worth it.
