You may have been sold on the dream that any Average Joe with a love and knowledge for sports can excel in sports betting. The reality, however, is much different. I can hear you shouting at me, “But I’ve bet on sports before and made money from it!”

How can you be sure that you’re actually making money off of your bets?  Are you keeping track of your cashflow? Managing your bankroll? Most online casino gamblers aren’t.

The Reality of Sports Betting

The truth is that 99% of people lose money when sports betting regardless of how in-depth they thought their knowledge to be. The lucky 1%?

These people only have a slight chance of not losing their money compared to the flat 50% of flipping a coin.

What Not To Do

Losses are guaranteed regardless of what game you’re playing. If there wasn’t the chance of losing, all oddsmakers would be out of a job. But even if losses are inevitable, there are ways for you to mitigate them and minimize the money you eventually lose.

Eyeballing the Board

Ever met someone who takes one look at a betting board and immediately knows what team they’re going to bet on? Don’t be that person.

Eyeballing the board isn’t a viable strategy when you’re betting your hard-earned cash. Betting on a hunch or using your intuition isn’t a sound strategy. Honestly,  there are better ways for you to throw your money away. Unfortunately, this is the most common way people bet.

Analyzing Without Quantifying

On the opposite side of the spectrum are people who bet by studying stats, but don’t do much else with what they’ve studied.

l people have their own internal biases when it comes to betting. Whether it be betting for a favored team (regardless of how poorly they’ve been doing), the underdog (again, disregarding how poorly they’ve been doing), or favoring specific stats over others.

These internal biases can make you ignore stats that are otherwise very important when it comes to the specific matches you’re betting on and vice-versa

Playing the Trends

Don’t be the person who sees a betting trend posted on Twitter by a tout and immediately decides to join the same ship. A tout, in case you didn’t already know, could be compared to a kind of shill, where they sell picks and “expert picking advice” in exchange for cash upfront.

Social media touts love trends. Why? Because it makes their advice look credible. Credibility means more people willingly falling for their money schemes. But if you actually researched the backgrounds of these trends, you’ll see they have arbitrary start and endpoints, along with stale or obsolete data.

Betting Systems

Sportsbetting systems, like their casino counterparts, don’t work. If casino games could be easily beaten by a certain method of betting, then there wouldn’t be any casino games.

Take the Martingale System for example. This kind of betting is defined by betting on a specific team and a proposed outcome. You continue to bet on that team, and every time you lose, you double your bet. You continue this until you win, or most commonly, you lose everything in your bankroll.