Surviving “The Dip” as a Sports Bettor Part 1

If you happen to have a background in entrepreneurship, you may be familiar with a New York Times Bestseller by Seth Godin called The Dip.  You may wonder what that has to do with sports betting, but think about it for a moment.  If you are embarking on a quest to become a professional bettor, one of the sharps, then you are an entrepreneur building a business of your own.  That means that you may face many of the same challenges—and “The Dip” is certainly one of them.

“The Dip” refers to a decline in profitability measured against effort.  It is something that happens to most—maybe all—businesses sooner or later.  You can visualise it along a chart which measures time and energy along the x-axis and reward along the y-axis.  Ideally, you should see a steady upward climb along the y-axis as you move along the x-axis; time and energy should be rewarded proportionally. 

Oftentimes, in the beginning, they are.  When you first get started at a venture like sports betting, you enter a phase of rapid learning and growth.  After all, you are starting at zero, and you are building off of that.  That rapid progress may or may not involve a lot of monetary profit, but it certainly involves ample profit in the form of knowledge and skill.  This is why so many new punters feel optimistic when they get started.

Over time, though, that optimism may start to fade.  Looking at your chart, you may notice that your line is starting to plateau.  You are investing the same amount of time and energy, but you are no longer climbing.  Worse, you may even notice that are falling.  Your efforts actually may start to result in a negative payoff. 

That negative payoff can take many forms.  You may struggle again and again to hone a betting strategy, only to find it is not delivering or you just cannot seem to grasp it.  You may find yourself more and more confused often as you delve ever deeper into the betting world and challenge yourself with ever-more-difficult concepts.  Chances are good that you are also losing money along the way.  You may begin to wonder whether your efforts will ever pay off at all, or whether you are sinking into a mire from which you may never escape. 

This is the make-or-break point for most businesses, and that goes for most punters too.  In order to escape from this frustrating (and often expensive) quagmire, many bettors simply quit.  They may keep betting for entertainment, but they toss their ambitions of becoming professionals out the window.  Some may try again, but many never look back.  There is a reason so few people ever manage to get good enough to make a living at this. 

Is it possible to survive this profitability dip and break through to the other side, where your curve can resume its upward climb?  It is, but it isn’t easy, and the “dip” may continue for quite some time before you are able to press on.  I will talk more about what you can do to recover—and times when you may want to actually think about quitting—in the next installments on Surviving the Dip as a Sports Bettor, Part 2 ; Part 3 and Part 4.