The psychology of success
It has been found in psychology research that people are more likely to underestimate their losses and overestimate their wins from gambling. Subconsciously, the mind allows us to forget or to rationalise failure, while emphasising winning. Essentially, bad luck is blamed for losses, while skill is accepted as the reason for winning bets.
Most people can see examples of this in their own betting. Imagine a time when you were unlucky. The team you bet on were well on top, but the opposition got a lucky last minute goal to equalise. Or the favourite was going great until it fell or was brought down 3 fences from home. These unlucky experiences are common to all gamblers. How often though do we accept that we "got lucky" with a bet? For most people we will also have experiences where we got away with it, but for nearly everyone, the number of times we claim to be unlucky will far outweigh the number of times we were lucky. Of course, by its very nature, luck is random, so over time we are as likely to be lucky with a bet as unlucky. Why then do we feel bad luck more than good luck?
The answer is that people have a general need to be in control of their situations. People rationalise things that happen in order to feel better about themselves and their lives. This is not a conscious decision, it is one that happens automatically inside us (the pyschological term is "cognitive dissonance", and explains a multitude of self justification actions).
The reason this is important is that it demonstrates how difficult it is for people to know over a period of time what types of betting they are successful at and what they are not. You not only have to keep a mental record, you also need to overcome subconscious psychological effects that will be unhelpfully clouding your judgement.
There is a solution to this however, and that is to keep honest, accurate records of all betting. Every bet you place should be recorded, along with as much information about the reasons you placed it. This will then allow you to keep an objective measure of which bets are successful and which are not, so that you can spot patterns of success and failure in your own betting.
Easy record keeping - result checker
Despite record keeping being the most important factor for anyone interested in betting, most people dont do it. The reason for this is that for most people it is time consuming, boring, and difficult. Fortunately, help is at hand.
Because we think that keeping accurate results if the most important thing for anyone interested in betting, we developed a tool specifically to do this.
Result Checker is a spreadsheet which has been customised to work specifically for betting on sports. We have set it up to have built in calculations of profits and returns. All you have to do is fill in the bet, the stake, the odds and the result, and Result Checker will do the rest for you.
At only £4.99, Result Checker is available to download for less than the price of a couple of beers. To create this from scratch would take even an excel whizz several hours work. We really think this is the best value betting tool available online and using it will save you a lot of money.
For more information about Result Checker click here.
To download Result Checker, click on one of the following links:
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