Exploring Two Common Types of Sports Bettors: Which One Has More Chances to Long-term Profits?

Are you into sports betting? Exploring Two Common Types of Sports Bettors: Which One Has More Chances to Long-term Profits?

All bettors, whether they see sports betting more as an entertaining activity or they adopt a more sophisticated approach to wagering, want one thing: to beat the house. And all bettors in their effort to do so, gradually develop their own style, decision-making process, strategy, and ultimately their own betting game. But is their style and game the appropriate one for bringing the desired results?

Exploring Two Common Types of Sports Bettors

To help you understand whether you are on the right track to getting better chances at beating the house, whether we are talking about traditional sportsbooks or the best online betting sites in Malaysia, we will look at two broad types of bettors, who are considered to be advanced and more pros than the pure recreational punters.

These two types reflect actually the most frequent approaches to sports betting: one that is seemingly effective, but in the end, it does not lead to profits, and one that is consistent with advancing and improving one’s probabilities of winning.

1. The “Too Much Theory But Little Practice” Type

This type of bettor is the one where people are right in theory, but most frequently wrong in practice. Most punters who belong to this type don't even know that they can be classified as “theoretical” bettors.

And this is what makes it quite risky. The bettors think that they are doing everything right, thinking that they are just unlucky when they lose. But what they really fail to understand is that they are just lucky when they win.

These bettors typically follow the correct process in decision-making. They try to collect information and analyze it in order to gain an advantage over the bookies. They will do a lot of reading, gauge social media and gather as much data to help them make an informed and data-driven pick.

But where they fail is the essence of what is collected. They tend to prefer quantity over quality and so they end up with many useless bits of information, which in the end add nothing to their betting game. They are more concerned with following the right process and less with how this process will advance their strategy.

And these bettors, while trying to become more professional, end up experiencing losing streaks or they are not able to sustain winnings in the long run. That is because they tend to stick to a shallow analysis, strictly aligned to the ‘textbook’ process without considering how to bring these processes to their benefit.

Thinking that this is enough to beat bookies and other serious players with expertise and experience is obviously showing ignorance on the subject and inevitably leads to losses.

2. The Type That Uses the Market to Their Advantage

A common misconception is that one needs an extremely good knowledge of a sport in order to be able to make a profit by betting on it. There are many stories that confirm the opposite. There are a lot of people who have managed to make money by betting on markets completely unknown to them.

The view that knowledge of a sport is a prerequisite for winning by betting on it often divides gamblers. This is because the way some people bet requires knowledge of the sport, while others rely on the market to get the information they need.

These players use the market to their advantage. They trust that bookmakers set and compile accurate odds and they use them to develop their bets without trying to compete with them. They do this knowing the enormous amounts of money the bookmakers spend on research, information sources, and staff for odds-making.

So, what they do is choose a bookmaker that is accurate in the odds they put out and compare their prices to those of the rest of the market, looking for errors. Or sometimes they look within the same betting site looking for other markets related to the main one, hoping for mismanagement or miscalculation by the bookmakers themselves.

Take for example an NBA game, where the line for points scored in the second quarter does not match the total points scored in the game. For something like this, you don't necessarily need knowledge about the teams or the players.

The only information needed is accurate initial odds and some additional data (e.g. the distribution of points per period in the NBA) to show whether the odds for the period score are corresponding to these. If there is a mismatch between the odds and the baseline, then there is also room for a value bet.

Conclusion

Clearly if one is to be on the right side of betting, then he needs to become the second type of bettor. It is only through developing betting skills and being able to recognize the value that will make bettors advance their game.