Fear of Missing Out in Football Betting

An interesting discussion took place over on the Bet Dynamo VIP Facebook group during the week. If you’re a Bet Dynamo subscriber you can join the group here. If you’re not a subscriber then you should give it some serious thought, we have some special offers at the moment and we’re building a great community who are happy to share tips, pointers and advice. Anyway, during the week one member wrote about an issue we’ve touched on before; betting for the sake of it, although they titled it ‘FOMO: Fear of Missing Out’. So let’s talk a little about this when it comes to betting on football.

During the week Championship leaders West Bromwich Albion were at home to Stoke City. For most punters it had a West Brom win written all over it, they were at home, their main challengers Leeds United had lost away to QPR on Saturday and Stoke are pretty dire on the road. Some caution would have been advised though, the West Brom price of 2.05 was indicating that it wasn’t exactly going to be a walkover for them, their results of late hadn’t been good, they’ve been on a run of five without a win, drawing four and losing one. However, at home to Stoke City on a Monday night you’d expect them to win. We’re sure you’re chiming in, ‘yes, but can they do it against Stoke on a wet Tuesday night?’ as the cliche goes. Well, as it turned out, no they could, well, not on a Monday night anyway.

Reading the Betting Stats

We had put up a post on some of our Facebook pages about this match, you can see it here, and we posted this image with it, taken from our Bet Dynamo Insights Pages. Our post said

‘There’s a healthy dose of green on the stats for tonight’s Championship match between West Brom and Stoke. What are your predictions for tonight’s match?’

The stats that we showed in the picture (of course more could be seen for the match on the Insights page) indicated that goals were on the menu and given home advantage and Stoke’s bad away form, West Brom were going to win.

Well, they didn’t, they ended up losing 0-1, thanks to an early Stoke goal courtesy of Tyrese Campbell and although West Brom had their chances their wasteful shooting meant they couldn’t get back into the game.

Over on our Facebook VIP page, the poster spoke about having a gut feeling about this game and even though she did try and trade the game she felt from the beginning she shouldn’t have. This is a conundrum for sports bettors and traders everywhere and while we’re supposed to take emotions out of betting, having a gut feeling is a little different.

Betting for the Sake of it

We’re spoken about betting objectively before and removing your emotions from your bets, but, well, the best way to show this is with examples. You don’t like Sunderland, you never have and you never will and that’s understandable (we’re joking) but when you see them playing you want them to lose, that’s emotion. Having a feeling that someone’s going to score in a 0-0 match where there’s 75 minutes on the clock and there’s been nine shots on goal so far in a match between Sunderland and Lincoln, that’s a gut feeling. Learning the difference isn’t easy and takes time and plenty of experience.

But back to the Fear of Missing Out/Staking for the sake of it. The West Brom vs Stoke match brought in massive liquidity (money) for a typical match involving these two teams. Why? Because it was played on a Monday night when there was very little high level football being played in Europe. There was one Serie A and one Serie B match as well, it was very slim pickings, there was a French Cup match, but is that even worth mentioning?

This meant that the betting public were simply itching for some action and since people think they know the Championship it’s tempting to put a bet on a match involving two teams that were Premier League teams until not too long ago. This is the Fear of Missing Out. Here’s an opportunity to make a bet. I’ll take a chance on it. And then Stoke score after nine minutes and it’s all gone belly up. Unless, of course, you had bet on Stoke and looking back on the market data today, you were very much in the minority so well done to you. But seriously, let occasions like this be a lesson, you don’t have to bet just because the stats look good or because there’s a hyped-up match being shown on TV.

There are literally 100s of football matches every day being played around the world and 1000s on weekends. Take your time, remain disciplined, look for value and only bet when you’re absolutely confident in your pick. Yes, keep emotions out, yes Keith that means you, we know you hate Leeds, we get it, you’re annoying us, but we get it, but listen to your gut, because, believe it or not, thanks to recent research, that’s actually your head telling you to pay attention.