Are You Over-Betting?

How many bets do you place in a month?  In a week?  In a day?  Do you feel impatient when you are not betting?  Do you actively search for opportunities to bet even when you feel like you are in a dry season?  Do you take wagers you would normally ignore if more opportunities were available to take better bets? 

If so, you might be over-betting. 

Over-betting happens when you:

• Take bets because you are bored or impatient.  There are going to be times when you don’t find a lot of great wagers that fit within your betting strategy.  Those times can feel very tedious, and you may even feel like you are wasting time waiting.  But let the best bets come to you.  Don’t compromise on quality just because you are bored.

• Place wagers because you are upset about a loss or want to “get it all back.”  This emotional type of over-betting is known as going “on tilt” in the casino, and it is a good description for what can sometimes happen to upset sports punters as well.

• Try to meet some kind of imaginary betting quota.  Maybe you have done the math and figured out you need 5 wins a month at X amount of money in order to become a full-time punter and stay one.  In your desperate attempts to meet your betting quota, you start compromising on the wagers you place.  Of course, that results in lost bets, and then you just end up losing money.  While it is reasonable to try to set some goals in terms of number of bets, you must accept that you cannot force opportunities to form.

• Place more wagers than you can handle at any given time.  Some people get addicted to the thrill of betting and get excited about every opportunity they spot.  They open a ton of bets at one time, even though that is more action than they can possibly follow or keep up with.  As a result, they get sloppy and end up losing some or even all of those wagers.

• Bet too much.  If your risk exposure is more than you can handle on a single bet or on all of your wagers combined, you are overdoing it.

Over-betting is something you might get away with for a short time, but after a while, you will start feeling the effects.  Not only will you begin losing more wagers, but you will also start losing sight of your own betting strategies.  Since you are so used to compromise, you will forget what a really great betting opportunity looks like.  This will reduce your effectiveness as a sports bettor over time. 

So the lesson here is not to compromise on the quality of your bets!  Only take the ones you really feel confident about, and only as many as you can handle at any given time.  There are going to be times when this feels slow, but it really is the best way (and the only way) to stay profitable over time.