The Psychology of Betting – by Andreas Kloft

There are many skills and plenty of knowledge required to be a good tipster. Some of the most well-known skills are technical and fundamental analysis, by that I mean the ability to understand the way of playing of each team or each player, predict how the teams are going to play, to know the players suspended or injured, as well as internal problems or club’s financial troubles and so on. It is also very relevant, to understand and to use some of the most important fundamental analysis statistics like measure of central tendency (mean arithmetic, mode, median,etc.) or measure of variation (range, variance, standard deviation,etc.) are amongst the most essential skills/knowledge every successful punter should possess. However, you must be aware that none of these skills or knowledge are more important than having the correct psychology or the ability to control our emotions and actions. Most punters  make stupid mistakes and lose a lot of money on their bets because of a lack of the discipline needed to control their minds. If you want to beat the bookmakers, you have to learn how to play with the psychological aspect as well. If you can’t do that, you will most likely lose money. Psychology of BettingThere are a lot articles and books about how to prepare your mind correctly and in all of them there is one common point; to set a plan or a strategy. It is obvious, that you should be absolutely sure that your methods are right and then you must follow it, I mean you will never ever doubt them no matter what happens. Once you begin to doubt your methods you are in big trouble. No matter what sort of losing sequence befalls you, you must never doubt the fundamental methods that you have learnt. By attempting to drastically change them you are heading for disaster. Therefore the first step is to create a plan or system with a positive mathematical expectation. If you don’t have a good plan, please do yourself a favour, don’t bet. I’m sure you have heard this saying… “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail!” This is absolutely true. I am sure that your asking, How can I create a betting plan? Well, I can not give that answer because it is obvious that each plan depends on the sport  you follow and each sport has their own complexities. But there is an important variable in each plan, the money management, where the Kelly criterion, from my point of view, is an optimal bank management. Finally, you must know that there will always be available to bet, it doesn’t matter if it is Christmas or summer vacation, usually there are a lot of events of each sport, for instance, in Rugby  there are a lot of games throughout the entire year, even over Christmas, two years ago they played on the 1st of January. Consequently, be very patient in developing your strategy because the market will always be waiting for you to bet. Once you have set up your plan and thoroughly studied and tested it with a large sample, follow it no matter what happens. This is how you can contain your emotions. You definitely do not need to look all the time at the laptop screen and follow how the bet is going. With a good strategy, you will be able to beat the bookmakers without any stress and emotion. Do not try to get smart and beat the market, just follow your plan. Unfortunately most amateurs do not have a trading plan, they bet just based on baseless news or gossips. Betting based on news or gossip is, again, a recipe for disaster. You simply cannot allow your emotions to get in your way. That’s why you must always have a betting plan and follow your plan through until you’re done with your system. If you justr remember one thing about the importance of betting psychology in this article, remember this… “Emotion is your worst enemy in this world! If you cannot control your emotion, you should not be able to bet any more”. In my case, I have my own plan with positive mathematical expectation in Rugby over a large sample and for this reason  since I joined Bet Advisor I have had eight months with profit in a row so far, but I am aware than sooner or later I will have a losing run like everyone. So when that time comes I will be ready to cope with it because the key is to be psychologically prepared to follow my system with discipline, patience and confidence. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="175"]Psychology of Betting Click here to see Andreas’ full statistics & results.[/caption]

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