Are you attempting to create your own successful betting strategy? Be prepared to overcome various obstacles that can impede your progress and decrease your chances of success.
While there is no easy answer to crafting a winning betting system, you can save yourself considerable time and money by avoiding the 10 most common betting strategy mistakes. In this article, I’ll delve into these common missteps and offer advice on how to steer clear of them, helping you to increase your chances of success in the world of betting.
Article Contents
1. Working Around a Tight Schedule
Are you limiting yourself to placing bets only when your schedule allows it? This is a common mistake made by many bettors that can hinder their potential profitability.
While it may seem practical to place all your bets at once, such as the night before a race day, this approach has several weaknesses:
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- Less opportunities. By betting within a short window of time, you’ll inevitably miss out on opportunities that arise on the lead up to an event. Value bets aren’t always there when it’s most convenient!
- Competition for odds. Betting at peak times, such as weekends, increases the likelihood of competition for well-priced odds, making it harder to seize opportunities. For example, many bettors encounter problems in obtaining the advised odds from their tipsters.
- Market trends are disregarded. If you only bet within one short window of time, you aren’t gathering continuous information from the markets, that will inform your decisions to adjust stakes, cash out, or lock a profit (in the case of sports trading). Being versatile is crucial for succeeding in many strategies — such as Swing Trading.
One way to work around time constraints is to automate your betting strategy using high-speed Betfair trading tools that make it easier to place and manage bets as opportunities appear.
Learn more about the importance of flexibility in sports betting.
2. Trying to Recover Losses
Many bettors fall into the trap of trying to recover their losses by placing more bets in the hopes of winning back what they lost. This is known as “chasing losses” and is a common mistake in betting strategy.
The rationale behind chasing losses is that if the bettor keeps betting, they will eventually win and make up for their losses. However, this strategy is flawed for several reasons:
- It can lead to emotional betting: Chasing losses can cause bettors to become emotional and make impulsive decisions. They may start to bet on games they know little about or take bigger risks than they normally would, hoping for a big payout.
- It can lead to larger losses: By chasing losses, bettors may end up betting more than they can afford to lose. If they continue to lose, the losses can compound, and they may find themselves in an even worse financial situation.
- It ignores the concept of variance: Betting on sports involves a degree of uncertainty, and even the most skilled bettors will experience losses. Chasing losses ignores the fact that losses are a normal part of the betting process and that a string of losses does not necessarily mean that a winning streak is on the horizon.
- It can lead to a lack of discipline: By chasing losses, bettors may lose sight of their overall betting strategy and goals. They may become so focused on recouping their losses that they neglect to consider factors such as bankroll management, betting value, and proper analysis of games.
Learn more about the concept of variance in sports betting.
3. Relying on a Staking Plan
It’s a common mistake for sports bettors to base a strategy around a staking plan rather than a sound bet selection method. Staking plans alone cannot make a losing strategy profitable.
Consider a series of equal-stake bets placed on Roulette in a casino, producing mixed results and overall loss. It’s important to note that if the player had raised the stakes on certain (winning) bets, it could have produced a profit. However, this does not alter the underlying fact that the player had no advantage to begin with. Therefore this theoretical staking plan only masks the fact that the strategy is not profitable. It will fail in the long run because of the house edge.
If your strategy doesn’t have a positive “+EV” edge, then staking plans won’t improve its long-term profitability. There’s no substitute for finding value in your bets.
I recommend verifying your selection method on an equal-stake basis before optimising your approach to bankroll management. If you’re conscious of preserving your bank then I’d look to apply a simple percentage of bank plan, or simply maintain low equal risk bets in order to ride out bad variance.
Learn more about staking plans in sports betting.
4. Making Broad Assumptions from Statistics
When creating a betting strategy, it’s prudent to analyse statistics. However, a common mistake is to oversimplify data and make assumptions based on averages.
To illustrate, let’s take the statistic that Premier League teams win 46.2% of their home league games.
If we have an upcoming match between Southampton and Manchester City, it would be inaccurate to assume that Southampton has a 46.2% chance of winning. In reality, Manchester City would be the clear favourite. Therefore, relying solely on the “Home Win” statistic as a basis for betting is unreliable, except for matches between evenly matched teams.
This is a straightforward example of how averages can be misused, but it’s easy to make significant errors when analysing less apparent criteria. The key is to evaluate each sporting event individually, taking into account all pertinent factors and avoiding a “one size fits all” approach. Remember that averages only represent the middle values, not the extremes.
Learn more about the limitations of statistics in football.
5. Failing to Respond to Changes
Value in betting is not constant, and what may have been a value bet in the past may not be so anymore. This can be a challenging concept for many bettors to grasp, and it has a significant impact on the profitability of various betting strategies.
For example, if a bettor determined that a price of 8.0 was a value bet five minutes ago, it does not necessarily mean that the same price would still be a value bet now.
The reason for this is that circumstances can change quickly. In the lead up to a football match, for example, news about injuries or team lineups can drastically alter the likelihood of certain outcomes. The true probabilities of outcomes will shift, and once the new information is learned, the odds adjust accordingly.
It is important to recognise the limitations of your betting strategy and ask yourself important questions like:
- How should I react to new information or changes in circumstances?
- What is the best time to place a bet considering the possibility of changes?
- What are my entry/exit rules, such as minimum and maximum odds?
- How can I avoid acting on speculation?
A winning betting strategy cannot guarantee perfect results with every selection because some factors are beyond your control (like weather conditions in horse racing). What matters most is that the overall value of your entire set of bets is positive, which is what makes it profitable.
Learn how changes in odds can impact your betting strategy.
6. Analysing an Insufficient Data Set
Analysing an insufficient data set is a common mistake made by many sports bettors.
When analysing betting strategies and results, it is crucial to have a significant amount of data to draw meaningful conclusions. Unfortunately, many bettors fall into the trap of “being selective” and relying on a small sample size, leading to inaccurate and unreliable conclusions.
For example, if a bettor places one football bet every week, it is possible to win ten consecutive bets. However, while achieving a 100% strike rate may feel like a significant achievement, those ten bets provide limited insight into the sustainability of the betting strategy used. This is because the outcomes of a small number of events may be influenced by a variety of factors such as chance, luck, and varaince. As such, it is difficult to determine whether the observed outcomes are a result of a profitable strategy or just random variation.
To develop a betting strategy that will consistently generate a profit, a more extensive dataset is required. A comprehensive dataset will provide more significant insights into the underlying factors that contribute to success or failure, allowing you to identify patterns and trends that can help you adjust and refine your strategy.
Reasonably speaking, most profitable strategies make in the region of 1-10%+ ROI long-term.
Learn more about the importance of analysing a large sample of betting data.
7. Overfitting Past Data
Although analysing a sufficiently large data set is essential to developing a successful betting strategy, it is not foolproof. It is possible to discover flimsy patterns in the data that appear to be significant but are merely coincidental. This is another common mistake made by sports bettors.
For instance, you may discover that Tottenham player Harry Kane “doesn’t score in August”. However, this pattern may be nothing more than a coincidence, and betting on it in the future is unlikely to generate profits.
This phenomenon is known as data over-fitting, and it is a significant risk when generating predictions from past data. Over-fitting occurs when a model is too complex and captures the noise or random fluctuations in the data rather than the underlying patterns. As a result, the model may fit the training data too well, but it performs poorly on new data.
To avoid over-fitting, it is crucial not to make your rules too strict or overly specific. Doing so will result in weak assumptions based on a peculiar subset of data. Instead, analyse a large set of subdata, ensuring that the number of simulated bets is substantial. It is also essential to scrutinise your rules and ask yourself if they make logical sense. Keeping an open mind while avoiding overly complex models will help you develop a successful betting strategy.
Learn ways of modelling football based on past data.
8. Focusing on Short-term Opportunities
Focusing solely on short-term strategies is a common mistake among sports bettors.
While some strategies, like matched betting or arbitrage betting, can offer quick profits, they are not sustainable in the long run. This is because bookmakers limit or ban players who use them consistently.
Similarly, following strategies that exploit little-known price inaccuracies — even at a winner’s welcome betting site — can also lead to limited success. Eventually, profitable niches are discovered and become oversaturated — or the markets adapt, closing off the opportunity entirely.
To achieve long-term success, bettors must adopt a more sustainable approach. It is advisable to diversify strategies by encompassing varied methodologies, sports, and markets. This approach reduces the risk of relying on one strategy and increases the chances of finding profitable opportunities over the long haul.
Discover ways of making money from sports betting.
9. Over-reliance on Form
An over-reliance on form can be a potential pitfall for betting strategies.
Many bettors, particularly those on social media platforms, tend to rely heavily on “fully researched” selections, with their analysis primarily centred around form statistics.
However, while form is undoubtedly an important factor to consider, it is often too simplistic and already factored into the market prices. This can result in bettors being unable to extract value from the odds and missing out on other vital factors such as team morale, player injuries, or the weather conditions that can influence the outcome of a game.
For long-term success in sports betting, bettors must adopt a more comprehensive approach that considers multiple factors, seeks out opportunities that the market may have missed, and avoids the temptation of relying solely on readily available data.
Learn why betting markets are so heard to beat.
10. All Simulation, No Live Testing
Bettors, especially sports traders, often make the mistake of relying on simulated results before running their strategies without ever live testing it first. However, there are often unforeseeable factors that will impact your bet execution.
Here are several problems you may encounter when converting a test strategy to real mode:
- Bankroll. You may not have sufficiently estimated how much money your open bets could tie up, or how large downturns could be during a losing run.
- Limits/Liquidity. Bookmakers have bet limits, and betting exchanges rely on liquidity from user activity. There’s no guarantee you can bet the amounts you had simulated.
- Competitors sussing you out. If you use a betting exchange, you operate within in a very competitive market. That means that everyone market participant motivated to suss out their competitors to gain an advantage over them. You might be forced to adapt your strategy.
- Smart bots. Some sports traders use trading bots to create false alarms, intent on provoking other traders to react. Your simulations can’t have precited every scenario.
- Market reactions. Placing bets can distort the weight of money, and force the market respond in new ways that you couldn’t have possibly planned for in test runs. Other bots and traders often respond to betting volumes — so you need to consider how you can be a little more discreet.
- Unmatched bets. While trading in real mode, the prices you want will often move quickly or the go the wrong way entirely, leaving you unmatched (or partially unmatched). These are conditions you can’t simulate in test mode.
- Voided bets & deductions. Some of the bets you place will be voided, or will have Rule 4 deductions applied (in the case of horse racing). Past occurrences of voided/deducted bets are often missing or inaccurate in historic data sets. Hence real money results can differ from your predictions.
To mitigate the above risks, start out slow and be prepared to adapt your strategy as needed. Remember that no matter how much data you collect or how well you simulate your results, nothing can replace running your betting strategy in real mode.
Learn more about the common challenges in sports trading.
A Starting Point for Your Betting Strategy
If you’re looking for advice on building effective betting strategies, check out the strategy page of this site. This section of Punter2Pro.com provides information about various aspects of sports betting, including tips for success, common mistakes to avoid, and information on different approaches to betting such as arbitrage, value betting, and sports trading. It also includes trials and experiments of different betting strategies, along with their results.
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