Like the stock market, sports betting is a global marketplace and many are making enough money to take it up as their full time job. However, the majority of sports bets are placed by amateurs, who do not have a predefined betting strategy and end up losing more money than they make.
Just like stockbrokers need skill and experience to make the right decisions at the right time, professional sports bettors do the same by implementing their own betting strategy guidelines, and strictly following their strategy whenever they place a wager on their favourite betting sites
Let’s dive right in and uncover some top tips that could see you moving from an amateur who loses money, to a professional winning a fortune.
1. Focus on the odds
If you ask a professional sports bettor who he personally think will win, they may give a different answer to the team that they placed their wager on. This is because they are focusing on the right odds, as this looks to generate long term gains.
Professional sports bettors make money by looking out for outcomes that are undervalued by bookmakers. This may mean betting on the underdog, or betting on the favourite. But either way, if you want to make long term gains, the odds should define your bet.
2. Leave emotions out of it
A large number of people bet for emotional or personal reasons, rather than an objective assessment of the most likely outcome.
Often people may bet for their favourite sports star or their home country, for example. Bookmakers respond to this and this can lead to odds changing to reflect popularity, rather than the real chance of an outcome.
When you place a bet, you must make sure to be careful on betting on an outcome where you are emotionally invested. You either need to be able to think rationally and look at the most likely outcome, or perhaps just leave these games out of your betting strategy completely and focus on the ones where you are sure to bet with your head, and not with your heart.
3. Accept your losses
No matter how skilled you become and how much money you make, there will undoubtedly be plenty of games where you will lose. What makes professional sports bettors so skilled is that they move on from their losses, and don’t let it affect their betting strategies in the future.
The feeling of losing money is widely described as ‘sunk cost fallacy’. This can lead to people behaving irrationally, which can cause them to lose even more money as they let their past loss influence their future decisions. This is bad news for sports betting.
If you are serious about improving your sports betting skills, you need to focus on the winning strategies that you accumulate, and not your losses.
To make it big in the sports betting world, consistency is key. You should always make sure that betting decisions are based on facts, rather than emotions. If you think that your judgement may be compromised, just call it a day and go back to your betting strategy another day. After all, sports betting is here for the long run.
