Betting for a living is portrayed as a romanticized moment. It’s like a time to make big decisions and the excitement of winning a bet that can change your life. However, the reality is nothing like that. Bettors need to work hard, learn fast and follow discipline to succeed. Patience is also an important characteristic of any serious bettor, and this article will explain why.
Understanding the mental side of betting is just as important as getting the right kind of information and betting with the right bookmaker. Everyone bets for different reasons, but regardless of the motivation. If you want to keep making money, it helps to follow certain rules.
Why Bettors Need Patience
Patience is the ability to accept or endure delays, difficulties or pain without anger or anxiety and is often cited as a key element to profiting from betting. While it is obviously important to be able to calculate expectations and beat the closing odds. However, in an environment subject to randomness and luck, bettors also need patience.
In the case of betting, it is the expectation that a coin toss will come up or down in a limited sample size. Of course, tossing a coin will always produce an even result at some point in time. Similarly, if the bettor’s advantage outweighs the bookmaker’s profit, the effects of randomness and luck (at a certain point in time) will cancel out. This expectation can be achieved by simply being patient and avoiding sample size limits.
Understanding the Impact of Cognitive Error
Bettors may know the common pitfalls that the average person falls into, understand bettor fallacies, and know that profits can be made if they wait long enough. However, certain cognitive errors may affect this logical reasoning.
There are many articles in betting resources that analyze the impact of cognitive errors on the betting decision process. Whether it is a hot or cold betting error or an hindsight error. Patience is one of the many ways to help prevent bettors from deviating from rational judgment.
Patience and Rationality
If we believe in rational choice theory, we make every decision based on the assumption of maximizing profit and minimizing loss. However, this is not always the case when betting.
Serious bettors know the importance of value (better odds), no matter how small the difference. They know that sometimes it takes a little work to find the better odds. With patience, they can get more out of the better odds.
Speaking of rationality, it is also important to understand that anxiety can increase irrational behavior. If a person is patient, they can reduce irrational behavior, which helps them make rational decisions.
Is technology making us impatient?
Outside of the world of betting, advances in technology have made it easier for people to acquire goods and satisfy needs. People want immediate enjoyment when betting. Moreover, bettors can now bet in an endless number of ways without much effort, and more importantly, betting without sufficient thought.
Take control and wait patiently
Simply put, bettors need to be patient and “in control”. If you have a positive expectation but still lose. You need to understand that this is only one loss in a large sample of profitable bets.
The point of betting is to get an edge over the bookmaker. Finding a positive expectation and understanding the profit so that you know what you are betting on costs. You need the patience to wait for the expected outcome. Betting is not a lottery and you can’t become a millionaire overnight.