Losing in sports betting: How to win back again?

Accept That You Will Lose in Betting, Move On And Stick With The Plan.

When three-time Stanley Cup champion Joel Quenneville takes over as coach of a team, he actually looks forward to their first losing streak. 

Quenneville, currently head coach of the NHL’s Florida Panthers, believes that it’s easy to win. But you learn the most about a person when they are losing. Character is revealed in the way people react when life deals them a bad hand.

Do they give up? Will they wallow in their misery? Do they alter their approach and start doing irrational things to try to change their run of poor fortune? Or do they put their nose to the grindstone, stay positive, keep working and stick with the program?

It’s the latter group that will eventually emerge on the other side of this difficult time a better person and ahead of the game. And it’s the same in sports betting.

Just as the top sports teams develop a culture from within and stay with their process through thick and thin, recognizing that the plan they’ve implemented will win out in the long run, sports bettors must also develop similar character traits, because the reality is that you are going to lose. A lot.

Almost as frequently as you’ll win, as a matter of fact.

Losing Is Part Of Betting

The 1927 New York Yankees are generally considered to be the greatest team in the history of Major League Baseball. They swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series but en route to that Fall Classic triumph, the Bronx Bombers went 110-44 during the American League regular season.

That’s right. The finest baseball team ever assembled endured 44 losses, suffering defeat in 28.57 percent of all their games. But that’s nothing compared to the level of losing even the world’s elite sports bettors will rack up over the course of a wagering campaign.

On average, it’s estimated that the elite of the sports betting world win between 53-55 percent of their bets. Studies have shown that on average, the overall winning percentage among regular sports bettors runs at around 48 percent. 

The House Always Wins

There is a built in advantage for every sportsbook on each bet offered. For instance, let’s look at point spread wagering on the NFL. Generally, sportsbooks offer payout odds of -110 on a point spread bet. The negative odds mean that to win $100, you’ll need to bet $110 on the game. 

This is called the vig, and it’s basically a tax that all sportsbooks skim off the top of every wager placed. So right from the get-go, you’re operating at a disadvantage. You’ve got to bet $11 to win $10.

Estimates are that you will need to hit on 52.4 percent of all of your bets just to break even over the course of a season. That means if you wagered on 21 sporting events during a specific month, you’d need to rack up 11 winners in order to merely tread water. Once you are winning 12 out of 21 bets, then you are taking money from the house. That’s when you are winning. 

If you are able to hit on as many as 55 percent of all your wagers, suddenly, wealth will be coming your way. The return on such a success rate in sports betting would more lucrative than if you garnered a 10 percent return on $10,000 invested in a blue chip stock on Wall Street.

But the chances of you hitting on 55 percent of your wagers is remote, to put it bluntly. Think about that. It’s almost impossible to bet on sports and only lose 45 percent of the time. And if you manage to lose just 45 percent of the time, you’ll be looked upon as a sports betting superstar.

It’s Hard To Learn To Lose in Betting: Reasons 

Whatever your choice of gambling might be – sports betting, casinos, the stock market – you will need to learn the methods to endure perhaps the toughest lesson that life has to teach us – how to deal with loss.

Sports betting is a lot like basketball – it’s a game of runs. Those who ultimately succeed in either pursuit do so because they are able to master a method to weather the negative runs.

If you buy a stock at $5 per share and it drops to $3 a share within a month of your purchase, are you going to sell? Let’s say you purchased 100 shares. The means if you sell at $3 a share, you’ll be losing $200.

Yet people will do this, unable to ride out the negative run and wait for the next upturn in fortune. Going into full panic mode is losing badly.

Sports betting, like the stock market, is a speculative industry. And in any speculative industry, there are going to be huge swings in outcomes. When things go south, when the bets just aren’t cashing for you, like a champion surfer, you have to endure the rough seas just as smoothly as you would ride on top of the world when you catch a winning wave.

Don’t panic. Don’t give up. Whatever you do, don’t throw money at the problem. Betting twice as much on Tuesday because you suffered a huge loss on Monday will most likely leave you broke by Wednesday.

Sports betting is a pursuit that requires knowledge of your subject, the dedication to put the time in to continue to learn, and most of all, the intestinal fortitude to survive the rough times that are sure to come.

An Educated Consumer Is The Best Sports Bettor

The smartest, most successful people in the world get that way and stay that way because they never think they’ve got it all figured out. To them, every day is a chance to learn something new, to unearth a path to doing things better than before.

If you take this approach to sports betting, winning will come to you more often than not. But you have to be willing to invest the time needed to find the best bet each day. 

Suppose there were two gas stations across the road from each other. The station on the right is selling its gas at 25 cents a gallon more than the station on the left. Are you going to avoid the aggravation of the left turn and buy gas at the more expensive outlet? Of course not. You’re going to go for the money saving option.

Now, suppose you want to bet on a Pittsburgh Steelers-Arizona Cardinals NFL game. The sportsbook you regularly deal with is offering the Steelers as -3.5-point favorites. But a rival sportsbook that you haven’t previously wagered with has the Steelers at -3. 

Sure, it’s only a half point but that half point could be the difference between a winning and losing wager. You always take the advantage, and that little extra effort it took to line shop and find the better bet will benefit your bankroll.

Betting is exciting, it’s an adrenaline rush but winning betting is all about doing your due diligence, putting in the time and effort to locate the best bets each day.

They won’t all turn out to be winners. But if you don’t let the losing get you down and you stick with the suggestions above, then you can end up a winner by learning the right way to lose.