Everything You Need to Know About the Optimism Bias in Betting

As a rule, optimism is a rather positive part of our life because it helps ordinary people withstand serious problems and not be depressed. With this, optimism can be dangerous because a lot of people tend to think that they are better than average, and the overoptimism can imply a negative impact on your betting. That is why the given article is going to present the most important information on optimism and its role in the betting industry.

The Optimism Bias Explained

In everyday life, the optimism bias makes people believe that they are less likely to be affected by negative events than others are. To tell the truth, this phenomenon finds its application in a number of different life spheres, which influences seriously the way people live. The best example of the given bias is a common opinion of numerous smokers that they are less likely to suffer from lung cancer when compared to other smokers even if they are under completely the same conditions. The same situation can be observed when we speak of gambling or alcohol addiction.

As it has already been mentioned, the optimism bias has some influence within the betting industry, and there are four elements representing the main components of the optimism bias. To be more exact, they are as follows:

• Unpredictable Nature of Sports;
• Cognitive Biases;
• Information about Self vs Target; and
• Your Mood.

The Optimism Bias and Unpredictable Nature of Sports

Anyway, optimism represents a very attractive and effective advantage of feeling good. According to the information provided above, it is optimism that helps people suppress problems and negative emotions that appear rather frequently. Because of this, all the people tend to look for the information that will confirm their optimistic attitude towards anything they think of. For instance, it is possible to find this approach when a gambler intends to place a wager and makes all the necessary analysis for it. In this case, the most popular variant is to look for arguments that will support the decision. However, the opposite strategy is said to be much more profitable. Looking for arguments that contradict the decision will help gamblers more reasonably take a decision concerning the event under consideration.

The optimism bias is intensified by the feeling that everything is under control. Driving is the best example to illustrate this situation. People believe there is an extremely small chance of an accident happening when they are behind the wheel. However, everyone must understand that even the best drivers in the world depend on other drivers who cannot have such excellent driving skills. So, even obeying the traffic law perfectly does not guarantee that the driver will not witness an accident.

The same is with betting because a lot of gamblers tend to think that they control the situation completely. The real state of affairs, however, is much different from that thought. The final outcome of any sports event is extremely random and it is impossible to be completely confident that this team will obviously win or lose. There are a lot of aspects that can significantly influence the course of events. To enumerate a few of them, they are red cards, injuries, referees’ wrong decisions, and many others. Each of the phenomena can change a final outcome dramatically. With this in mind, you should always remember that it is impossible to control the sports event. As soon as you understand this, you will make the first step towards overcoming the optimism bias.

Connection Between the Optimism Bias and other Cognitive Biases

A piece of bad news is that the optimism bias is not the only psychological danger present in the betting industry; there are a lot of others that fuel the first one. The representativeness heuristic is one of them, and this phenomenon means that people tend to notice the general stereotypes only ignoring actual important details when making comparisons. Yes, this is more economical for our brain, but it is impossible to arrive at a correct conclusion with the help of this approach.

In terms of betting, this bias can cost you a lot of money. One of the generally accepted stereotypes is represented by frequent wins of a home team, especially when an obvious favorite plays at home. Nevertheless, basing a betting strategy on this opinion solely is a serious mistake. The right variant here is to make all the necessary analysis in order to properly analyze both teams’ winning probability.

Information about Self vs Target

It is not a surprise that people know much more about themselves than they do about others. The main explanation of this is the fact that it is not possible to obtain unlimited access to the desired information. Moreover, it is a common tendency of numerous people to believe that the information they do not have does not exist at all. The given approach makes all the people underestimate risk, which can be quite dangerous.

As for the betting industry, this limited knowledge also has some consequences. For instance, almost every beginner gambler enters the betting market with a deep knowledge of only one or several teams from a single league or tournament without analyzing the others. Such an awry distribution of information leads immediately to some losses.

To explain, the losses are inevitable because the gamblers pay attention to only one side of the competition and ignore the other one. In this case, even the perfect knowledge of a favorite team’s weaknesses and strengths cannot help you make correct predictions every time.

The Mood

Finally, all the gamblers should understand that their mood has a very strong impact on their betting and their gambling decisions. It is not a surprise that a good mood makes the whole world shine brighter. In the betting industry, however, a winning streak can have also dangerous consequences. To explain, a number of several wins in a raw can make you be in a good mood and believe in your perfect predicting skills. As a result, you overestimate your actual winning chances. Such impulses must be ignored if you want to become a professional and successful punter.

Summary

Although the optimism has a positive connotation, it does imply certain problems when we speak of betting. That is why it is extremely important to be aware of this phenomenon and be always ready to withstand it properly.