What I Wish I Knew When I Started Sports Betting Part 2

As a newbie sports punter, you are going to make a lot of mistakes.  Some of those mistakes will cost you money, others may cost you confidence.  While making mistakes is a given, you may be able to avoid a lot of them outright if you have the right perspective and advice on your side.  What mistakes did I make when I started out?  Read on to find out, and be sure to also check out  What I Wish I Knew When I Started Sports Betting Part 1.

• Complicated bet types are not generally the road to success.  I think a lot of us make the mistake of thinking we can measure competence according to complexity.  You may feel pretty good about yourself if you manage to win a complex parlay bet, and you could pull in some impressive wins by doing so.  But the odds are so heavily tilted against your favour when you make complicated bets.  You probably will lose the vast majority of them, and plenty of cash along the way.  Sticking with simpler bets may not feel impressive, but you will feel much better about it when you finally start winning consistently!  Slow and steady is the road to true success.

• You will do best betting on what you know.  I initially wanted to bet on everything under the sun.  It was such an exciting new world, and with hundreds of types of bets available for dozens of sports, I wanted to try my hand at it all.  But I achieved the best results with the sports I was most familiar with, and you probably will too.  If you are an expert in football and know nothing about boxing, you will do a lot better wagering on football than you would on boxing.

• You can’t count on your feelings to guide your analysis.  While it helps to wager on sports you follow, you have to do so with caution.  It is easy to let your emotions get caught up in the game.  Sometimes it is hard to separate logical analysis from emotional belief.  Your intuition may play a role in making smart decisions, but your emotions will generally lead you astray.

• You have to learn to focus your efforts.  To get the best results from sports betting, you need to 1-stay focused on one or several sports and follow them closely, and 2-use just a few techniques that you know inside and out.  If you spread your efforts out all over the map, you will not become a real expert at anything.

• You cannot buy success.  One more thing that all newbies should know about sports betting is that you cannot buy success.  You can buy shortcuts, and sometimes those shortcuts (good picks or systems) will help you out, but eventually you will have to learn how to rely on your own intelligence and analysis to generate repeated wins.  With shortcuts, there is always some component of luck involved, and you want to rely on luck as little as possible. 

If I had known all of this when I was a beginning sports bettor, I would have made a lot of smarter decisions and ended up saving all kinds of time and money.  I hope that some of the lessons I learned will help you in your own journey toward betting success!