For an inexperienced bettor, the idea is that you just want to win bets. There is little thought or planning put into the bets that they place, so all that matters is whether they win or not. As a result, bets that win are seen are as good bets and those that lose are considered to be bad bets, but this isn’t always fair.
More experienced punters know that outcomes are influenced by lots of variables and random factors and often all the research in the world can’t predict some outcomes, like a league 2 team beating a Premier League team in an FA Cup match – it can happen but it is rare. As a result, the only sensible thing to do is to come up with a system that allows for variables.
To put it another way, the sensible bettor spends time investigating the wagers that they’re planning to place, yet they can still end up losing. That doesn’t mean that it was a bad bet to place, just as an inexperienced bettor will win the likes of an accumulator bet every now and then but that doesn’t mean that they are good bets.
Ultimately those that do research and look for value in markets are more likely to do better in the long run than those that don’t. People can place good bets and go on a bad run and people can place bad bets and go on a good run but over a period of time the person who thinks more about their bets and the chances of winning vs what the bookie is offering will generally do a lot better. Those that avoid bad value (such as accas, bet builders and complex markets) and look for weak odds are also more likely to find longer term value.
The best thing to do is to look at how much money you can afford to lose, weigh up the best bets to place and stick to your strategy even when you end up losing the bests that you’ve placed after researching them.
What Is Good & Bad Betting?
It is important to establish what good and bad betting actually is. After all, if we’re going to talk about bad bets being winning bets then it is important to understand what makes a wager good and what makes one bad. Good bets are ones that look for value, seeking out opportunities when the bookmakers have priced them too highly. They are wagers that are placed on weak lines from the bookies, allowing you to be reasonably confident that you’re likely to make a profit if the research that you’ve done is correct and sensible.
Good bets involve doing research, looking into each team or competitor taking part in an event and discovering if there is anything that the bookmakers might have missed. Has the star player on one of the teams been tweeting about having a bad night’s sleep, for example? That might mean that they’re not as sharp as they would usually be, which might well influence the outcome of a football match. Equally, a jockey talking about how they’ve had a stomach bug might be helpful to know as they might come in under weight.
Bad bets, meanwhile, are those that are done on instinct. Instead of researching the participants in a sporting even, a bad bettor merely goes off their gut feeling on how something is likely to turn out. These bets are just as likely to be losers as winners, with the result based not on any sort of evidence but on sheer fortune. Sensible punters know that placing a bet like that is a sure-fire way to lose more bets than they’ll win, which is never a sensible approach to betting if you’re hoping to make a profit from your wagers.
A good bet can be placed on a selection with longer odds, let’s say you are backing a horse at 20/1 but your research suggests this is more like a 10/1 horse then this is still a good bet. The bet is not going to win every time, here you would expect it to win only 1 in 10 times, but if you are always betting with this logic it means when these bets do win you get more value and you can lose most of your bets but still end up winning in the long term. The point being that placing sensible bets that you have thought about and sticking to that logic will not guarantee you win but will make it more likely you may win in the longer term. Successful bettors often lose more bets than they win but can end up winning overall.
Even Bad Bets Can Win
What confuses the matter when it comes to a discussion of good bets and bad bets is the fact that even bad bets can be winners. This can trick those placing them into thinking that what they need to do is carry on following their instinct. It is a bit like someone picking the Grand National winner based on the name of the horse or the colour of the outfit that the jockey is wearing. Every now and then, such a way of picking a horse will prove to be a winning strategy, but eventually that sort of luck will run out and you’ll lose bets that have been placed on faulty methodology.
We have all been there, placing a bed randomly and being delighted when it comes in. That is great and you should absolutely add the winnings to your bankroll, but the one thing that you shouldn’t do is to assume that the methodology uses for placing the bet, which will always be entirely random, is a good way of placing bets in the future. Something that is based purely on randomness and fortune is not something that can be repeated regularly, meaning that it is a bad bet that just happens to have been a winner.
You can place a ‘bad bet’ if you are in it mainly for the entertainment rather than making money. Many people bet to enhance their enjoyment of something, often on instinct, there is nothing wrong with that. It comes down to why you are betting and what you want to get out of it. If you want to win overall you need to be sensible with your wagers, take time to research them and look for value, comparing odds between sites and sticking to your methodology. If you are someone that always backs the same player to score first for your team, for example, you are not likely to win long term but if that helps you enjoy the matches you watch more then there is nothing wrong with that.
Follow a Strategy
The best thing that any bettor can do is to come up with a strategy for their bets that is based on something that can be repeated. If you look at the recent form of two football clubs, say, and place your bet based on that then that is something that you can do again at another time. Of course you might lose such a bet sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that your strategy was incorrect or that you need to go back to the drawing board in terms of your approach. Instead, you need to stick with it and see how things pan out.
The perfect example here can be found in the casino game of blackjack. There is a thing called Basic Strategy, which uses mathematical formula to identify the correct move to make when playing the card game based on the hand that you’ve been dealt and the card that the dealer has turned over. Basic Strategy improves the House Edge in favour of the player by quite a significant margin. That doesn’t mean that the dealer will never win, but that they’ll win less often against players using Basic Strategy all of the time.
There will be some punters not using Basic Strategy who will win their hands. That is great for them, but over a prolonged period of time they will lose more hands than they win. Similarly, those that don’t have any sort of betting strategy in place will lose more bets than they win over time, which means that the occasional wins that they get are pointless in the long-term. On the other hand, people with a strategy will lose bets, but they’ll lose fewer than those just betting blindly and will be incorrect to abandon their strategy at the first sign of trouble.