Flora

Knowing yourself means understanding how you’re likely to behave under various circumstances. Over the time, researchers in psychology have developed a clearer

traps is to become aware of them, the forms they take, and which you are most likely to fall into.

Here are five common issues:

• Over-confidence. Psychologists discovered that people consistently overrate their abilities, knowledge, and skill—especially in areas outside of their expertise. Gamblers must seek and weigh quality feedback and stay within their circle of competence. After a win people tend to over-play, so pay attention to your reactions and stick to your predetermined plan.

• Anchoring and adjusting. In making a decision, we often give disproportionate weight to the first information we receive, hence anchoring our subsequent thoughts. You can downplay this risk by seeking information from a variety of sources and talking to various people.

• Improper framing. The decisions of bettors are affected by how a problem, or set of circumstances, is presented. Even the same problem framed in different, and

objectively equal, ways can cause people to make different choices. Framing, too, plays a central role in assessing probabilities. It is not the same if you see

opportunities or threats after a series of losses that you had in your betting.

• Irrational escalation of a commitment. Players tend to make choices that justify past decisions, even when circumstances change. To avoid this trap, they must only

consider future costs and benefits. You must keep in mind that you don’t have nothing to prove. If you play to win and not for pleasure only, your job is to make money and not to be right. The game is not a personal quest against the betting or against some sportsbook.

• Confirmation trap. Gamblers tend to seek out information that supports their existing point of view while avoiding information that contradicts their opinion. That’s why you are better if you have somebody to talk to.

You must also understand how you tend to react under stress. People with different

personality profiles behave in dissimilar ways when stressed. Here again, self-awareness and some basic techniques to offset suboptimal behavior go a long way. It is very important that you keep your discipline even after a series of losses and get on with your system. If you do, you ruin the chances of the probabilities upon which your system is built.The gambler's fallacy and concept of availability error are key for gamblers. Best players in the sports betting arena or in gambling in general have an understanding of these concepts built into their betting strategies.

The Gambler's Fallacy

One of the easiest mistakes you could make in betting is thinking that past bets influence future ones. This common mistake is sometimes called the gambler's fallacy, and it often leads people to bet more money and to bet more often than they otherwise would. For

instance, many people know how to figure that there is only one in sixteen chances that a fair coin will come up heads four times in a row. But if the coin has already come up heads three times in a row, then the chances that it will do so for the fourth time are the same as they would be if it had never been tossed before-one in two. However, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that this coin has only one in sixteen chance of coming up heads. It seems that the coin should make the average of past tosses come out right. But in reality, the coin does not remember past tosses and feels no obligation to even out the number of heads and

tails that have come up before. As we make more and more coin tosses, the ratio of heads to the total number of tosses will approach to one half, but this does not mean that there will be exactly (or even close to) the same number of heads as tails, nor does this mean that in the course of a few tosses things will come up even anywhere near. This is true, also with respect to the streaks that teams have over the year. Because a team has lost the latest three games it doesn’t mean that there is a bigger chance than normal to win the fourth game. So, don’t put your bets on a team that is in a losing or winning streak thinking that it has a bigger chance than normal. However, the psychological factor plays a big role in sports, but remember to weigh any situation according to the current circumstances.

Misunderstanding this fact, many gamblers aspire to believe they have more information than they really have, and can cause them to be more willing to over-play than they otherwise would.

Availability Error

The second major mistake people make, and which increases their tendency to over-play, is called availability error by psychologists. This is the common tendency we all have to focus only on good, unusual, or easily remembered experiences, forgetting the bad, common, or less available ones. For instance, hearing that someone has won at the casino sticks in our mind more than hearing that someone has lost the same casino. We remember winners more than losers, and mistakenly think that the chances match our memory. This explains why people put more money into bets when they are part of a group, where they can hear and see signs that others are winning, rather than when they play individually, where they have no recent memory of someone's winning. And people consistently do this, despite the fact that the odds are just as bad for the group as for the individual. Memories of winners are simply more available for the large groups than the individuals that play alone.

We may also think that if we know or heard of a winner it must not be very hard to play successfully. Many people have a story about how their cousin or their brother’s boss won onceon some great bet. But there are several things that are left behind from such stories. Most important is the fact that someone lost thousands of dollars before and after making that great win. Many great wins (so called) are, in fact, only small wins that barely cover the cost of playing, and which serve to lure people to continue betting and losing more money. The sports books take advantage of our tendency toward availability error and exploit our memory of the one great win while encouraging us to forget the many losses.

Moreover, when we hear a story about our brother's boss' win, we tend to assume that because we have heard of this person and have some link to him or her, even far-off, and winning must be more likely than we had thought. But we never hear the story of our colleague’s brother who lost twenty thousand dollars to the sportsbooks gambling on tips with no

strategy. And if we wanted to hear all the stories of the times that our relatives' acquaintances' friends or our friends' acquaintance's relatives lost money while playing, we would have no time for anything else. Clearly, by such a network of associations you can hear information of essentially every other person in the entire world.

Some people use drugs and alcohol for excitement, while there are players that will risk money only for getting that rush of adrenaline. However, the majority of players use the betting money properly, meaning they don’t bet money that has different destinations. Doing this, they are able to concentrate on the betting more accurately and they don’t need to think what will happen if they lose. A small number of players bring bad attitudes into the game and those attitudes prevent them to play appropriately.

Betting Habits

Some players will bet only on sure matches out of an extreme aversion towards risk and consequently they don’t lose much, but they don’t win much either. At the other end of the stick are the bettors that play on multiple games in the hope they will get the jackpot. They play on high stakes games and rarely one of them wins. They are compulsive players and usually they make money, but for the sportsbooks.

Money Management

How players keep account of their wins or losses tells very much why they are in the game: to win or for the pleasure. If they are for the win they should know at all times what their

balance is in the game and this is necessary information also to be able to rate their systems and to operate the appropriate changes.

Money as the Drug of Choice

Some players prefer the low risk game and this is an image of all they do in their life. They are very careful with the bets and they don’t do it for the excitement. They don’t like the change and probably they are the same in the day to day life. The style of playing is a reflection of the personality and beliefs of the player.

Moral Money Attitudes

On one extreme, there are players who put value on their money and they usually do pretty well. They don’t like to spend money. They are not betting for recreation. They are there to make more money so they can show how successful they are. The other extreme is players who seem ashamed to win. “Money is the root of all evil” is the essence of their attitude. They bet very cautiously and agonize over losing. They will not feel great whether they win or lose. In short, they use betting money to feel tainted. In their private lives they’ll be miserly with money. Having money is their source of safety and spending seems to take away their sense of power.