Control your Betting Bias

Recently we wrote about our mate Frank who hates Leeds United, a hatred that started with his Dad’s animosity for the Whites since the days of Johnny Giles. But Frank says he’ll never bet on Leeds United, well, now that he knows a little about value betting he might, you can also read about Value Betting here: Value Bets.

Look, let’s all face facts, we’re all biased in our own ways. Mancs don’t like Scousers, Cardiff doesn’t like Swansea, half of Glasgow hates the other half, you get us. But in football betting, well, any sports betting you need to learn to control your emotions and betting biases. Today we want to talk about why you shouldn’t rely on your emotions when betting.

Many times bets lose because you’ve chosen a bet based on answers to the wrong questions, this makes us over estimate how likely certain outcomes may happen. For example, you may look at possession stats from previous matches and deduce that Team A has been winning because they’re had at least 65% possession in their last 3 home games. However, they might be coming up against a team that has won their last 4 matches when having less than 40% possession, but you’ve missed this stat because your betting bias has told you already to go for Team A without paying proper attention to Team B’s chances.

We’ve funny animals us humans, we like to have an opinion on pretty much everything. Ask your brother later what he thinks of Jesse Lingard and five minutes later ask your Mum about why she buys brand X bread and she’ll have a reason, as will your brother on Jesse Lingard.

The problem with our betting biases and our betting choices is that we often focus on the wrong aspects or wrong stats to inform our bets. We see that Manchester City have won the last five Premier League matches in a row and think they’ll smash Chelsea away next Sunday, so we stick a fiver on them to win.

The thing is though, they’re playing Barcelona in the Champions League on Wednesday and manager Pep Guardiola has publicly said he’s going to rest Kevin de Bruyne, Sergio Aguero, David Silva and Gabriel Jesus because the Cityzens are 0-2 down from the first leg. Away to Chelsea without four of their best players, does backing them at 1.80 seem like good value now? No, certainly not, you need to learn to dig deeper into why you’re choosing certain bets.

The more you learn about your behaviour while betting the sooner you’ll be able to identify weaknesses and correct them. Here’s another example, let’s say Spurs are drawing 1-1 with Crystal Palace at home. Spurs are piling on the pressure, there’s 75 minutes gone and in the second half they’ve had 75% possession and are about to take their 5th corner of the second period. Spurs to Score Next has just hit Evens (2.0) so you put a fiver on it thinking it’s a good bet. However, the corner is cleared and Palace race up the field where Andros Townsend finds the back of the net against his former team. You’ve just thrown away a fiver because if you’d done some more research you’d have seen that Roy Hodgson’s team have scored the most counter attack goals following a corner clearance.

It comes down to something very basic, the more you know the further you’ll go. Arm yourself with knowledge and don’t make a final decision on a bet until you’re happy that you’re making an unbiased, objective choice. This is one of the reasons our software is so good (Insights) there are no emotions or biases in what we do, we just look at the stats and compare two teams going head to head to give a good indication of what may happen in a match.

To see even further stats just click on the match and you’ll be able to drill down even further into the stats of both teams to make better, more informed decisions.