This is a subject that has been incredibly well covered over the years and there is huge amounts of content/research out there relating to it. It affects every walk of life though and is incredibly important to understand if you want to be successful, especially at gambling.
One of the great joys I have about watching my young children grow up is how uncluttered their minds are. They are a blank canvas. They have no biases. No pre conceived ideas. They do not judge by skin colour, race, sexual orientation or disability. It is a beautiful thing to watch and it is a pretty damning reflection on society that this ever changes. They simply judge those around them by the behaviours they encounter. The love and affection they are shown. The fun, humour, silliness. Friendships created.
However, things change rapidly as we grow older and we are hugely influenced by the environment we are both brought up in and then interact with. We are subconsciously creating biases in our minds that are difficult to shake off throughout life.
Within betting I always think one of your number one aims has to be to try and have as few biases as possible. They are called biases for a reason. They are influencing your decision process. There are so many different types of biases but lets look at a few I encounter.
One bias I see all the time is outcome bias. I see people judge the quality of a bet placed simply by the outcome of that bet. I could give you an incredible bet with a huge edge but if it loses, you will think I am useless. Vice versa, a terrible bet will still win a lot. Its why you have to concentrate on the processes that lead to the selection of a bet. The outcome is pretty much immaterial if the processes are correct. The outcomes will take care of themselves over a period of time. Outcome bias can be tough to overcome though. Perhaps slightly counter intuitively, I find it happens to be more of an issue when on a good run, rather than a bad run. It can be easy to think your processes and methodology are better than you think because you are running well and getting better outcomes than you should be.
You have recency bias. You give too much weight to recent results. Lets say you have created five different models to bet on various sports. If the most recent one struggles you may doubt yourself even if the first four were a huge success. It may simply be variance. It can be difficult to know but very easy to doubt yourself.
One of my favourite biases is survivorship bias. You see it all the time with very successful people. A billionaire will be asked what they have done to get to where they are. It might be getting up for yoga at 4am everyday. Reading 7 books a week. Leaving school early. None of these things are going to help you become a billionaire per se. What you are not seeing is all the people who may have done these things who didn’t become billionaires. We are blinded by the success of the very few. Rather than the bigger picture.
You have so many other biases like confirmation bias, gamblers fallacy, hot hand fallacy, hindsight bias, sunk cost fallacy, Dunning-Kruger bias etc. There are so many out there, that are all slightly different. It shows what a massively important area of betting it is.
When I first started betting the one bias I always used to have was looking for a team or player to come back and achieve success. In golf it might be to find a player who can overcome that 2/3 shot deficit. Or in football backing the bigger teams who conceded goals early on. You are naïve but it was also a definite bias towards looking for those situations. It’s where as you get more experienced in the game and price up markets yourself, you realise how flawed those biases were. You have to have no pre conceptions about what you are going to be placing bets on. A completely open mind. Its very difficult to change your mind once you have biases. You end up just confirming those biases.
I see biases relating to something as simple as prices. You see people put off by the shorter prices just because they are short. Nothing to do with whether they are value or not. As a result you tend to find the shorter prices are often where the value lies. I see people have biases when prices move. In theory if a price drifts then you should be having more money on it. If it shortens less on it. People tend to take the opposite view and have more on when it shortens. They have biases about how markets move and why selections and prices are moving.
I see it all the time when people have biases against certain golfers because they think they are chokers despite the sample size being ludicrously small. Or regard a player as a poor putter because they have a bad putting day. The list is endless.
You can use some biases to your advantage but as a general rule you want to avoid them if you can. They are so prevalent though in so many of the decisions you see get made and you make yourself. You need to be able to identify the biases you have and ensure they don’t influence your decision making. It’s where the more automated the systems you use are (models), the less likely biases will be a factor.
You have to try and get back to that child like innocence where you have as few biases as possible.
ProPunting 