Anxiety of Sports Betting

I got a DM the other day from a winning bettor. They are about 1.5 years into advantage betting and having good results - but they have a problem they can't shake.

I would call it anxiety.

Here is their situation:

• Betting 18 months with 1 losing month

• Using a combination of OddsJam & Oddsjam like products

• "Changes methodology a few times a month

• Taken a few stabs at originating and hasn't stuck
  

They asked me "How did you just build trust that what you bet is a good bet and you wont fall on your face broke?"

As someone who is treated for anxiety in my regular life - I felt this. Anxiety is basically extrapolating every situation to "....and then I die in a gutter"

In sports betting it's "....and then I will go broke betting a losing strategy...and then die in a gutter"

I have always said the hardest part of being a full-time AP is the existential dread around never being sure what your exact edge is and how long it will last.

This anxiety is so strong that even successful bettors will be driven to building and touting some betting product (sign up to GP Picks+ and smash that like button!)

So how do you quiet it? How do you build a level of confidence in your betting that lets you enjoy the day to day of life?

For me - it's a combination of three things.

1. Stack Results

Confidence = evidence

Math sometimes has a sneaky way of explaining psychology. When you are doing a statistical study, you are going to have more confidence in your findings when you have a larger sample size.

Same goes for life.

I haven't had a lot of success with summoning confidence on a whim. Part of my brain doesn't trust it when I say "I am great at this".

But what tends to work is building such a massive stack of evidence that my brain can't logically tell me I suck. (It still tries).

Golf example incoming

There is an effect priced by the market when it comes to the final day of golf tournaments. If someone is leading the tournament who hasn't won (or doesn't have a lot of experience playing with/ near the lead), the market really downgrades them. And if someone is leading/ near the lead who has a lot of experience in these situations (Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, 2024 Xander) - they get a bump.

The Korn Ferry Tour player can look himself in the mirror and say "you are confident, you can do this, etc..." until the cows come home. But Scottie Scheffler doesn't need to - he knows he can do it because he's done it 7 times this year already.

The person that messaged me indicated they had won 17/18 months they had been betting seriously though! That's an awesome set of results that should inspire confidence - so what is happening?

It could have something to do with #2....

2. Know where your alpha comes from

If you can't explain your edge to a 5th grader, it's not a great edge.

Not true for 100% of cases - but it's directionally correct.

To take the example to the extreme - you see Aaron Rodgers fall and break his arm at Starbucks Sunday morning. You, Aaron and the barista are the only three people there.

You now bet whoever is playing the Jets, the under on the total, the under on Garret Wilson receiving yards etc...

In that example - are you lacking confidence in these bets? Hopefully not. And could you explain to anyone why these are good bets? Of course. Your edge is obvious. You have material information that the market isn't accounting for.

(BTW you can still lose all of your bets in this situation - which is why, even with a smash spot like that, some people won't capitalize.)

So - what do we know about our friend from the example?

He is using OJ and a few other pieces of software to generate bets. The process is external instead of internal.

As someone who sells a piece of software that identifies profitable bets you can trust me when I say this - as it’s not in my best financial interest:

The confidence ceiling when you control the process is higher than the confidence ceiling when you outsource the process.

What does that mean? Say you DM'd me and said:

"Hey - I have like an hour a day max that I can spend on betting, and I usually just click around a few sites until I find a bet I like. Should I sign up for GP Picks+"

I would say - probably. In that circumstance, you should have more confidence in my process than your process (at that moment in time).

But now let's say you said:

"Hey GP, I model sport X and scrape the market to compare to my model. I win at 6% ROI and wanted to bet other sports. Should I get GP Picks+?"

Probably not. But what's more important is that in this situation you will always be more confident in your own process than you can be in mine, or OddsJam etc... You built it, you control it, you know where it's potential weaknesses are.

With any betting product, the problem is you can't iterate the process yourself. You don't know exactly how it was made, you don't see the backend, and you don't feel in control (the main psychological problem).

I think the reason OddsJam has done so well in the space is they solved this problem the best that they could. They have users post graphs of their results and then become affiliates - so people signing up have confidence in the methodology.

You can only be so confident when using a third party to generate alpha. It still is the right choice for many as they may have time/ experience constraints. But the top professionals move past this stage into internalizing their process.

And yet...I have my own process that has years of good results and I still have doubts. To quell these - I turn to number 3.

3. There will never be an exact formula to winning

The biggest issue I see for smaller unit bettors who win is that they want a list of steps they can follow exactly to win.

Another recent conversation I had with someone (launching a product has greatly increased my conversations per day) was along these lines.

They sent me an example of an NFL prop the bot spit out early in the week. The play had negative CLV and they asked if the bot could tell if something was a fake or if I had a way to tell myself. (If I had a bot that could do this - I would be writing this letter from my yacht).

I said - plays earlier in the week in football are more likely to be a fake than later in the week, but you can never know. Faking markets is a cat and mouse game - so anyone playing that will probably be adjusting their strategy w/ the market.

So they said "okay so I shouldn't bet NFL early in the week"

And I said, no that's also not necessarily true. Even if there is a higher % of fakes, the moves and value can be bigger. If you stopped taking bets (for a reason other than account health) then you are passing up value.

I couldn't give this person what they wanted - which was to remove any uncertainty and subjectivity from betting.

If you saw behind the scenes into our betting group, you would probably be surprised at the amount of hand waving and subjectivity that goes on. I think there is this idea that you just run a model and then bet it. But in reality - the model just helps automate your process. It's still a subjective process that's mapped into code. You will make tweaks and judgement calls all the time.

Once I accepted there was no magic formula, it helped me embrace the messy reality of winning sports betting. If you are searching for a magic formula - you will be searching forever and you will forget to make money.

Thanks everyone for reading and I hope you all make some money this weekend! As a reminder - the huge September giveaway for GP Picks+ ends in 10 days!

The promotion is to reward early users who help make the product even better for the users that come later.

What is the promotion?

If you buy any of the yearly plans, you get for free:

• The Six-Figure Sports Betting Masterclass (10+ hours of video content on what you need to know to go from $0 to $100k+ in betting & sold for $297 on it’s own)

• My excel bet tracker (handles bonus bets properly)

• A sheet that will give you the implied stroke projections from DataGolf

• Intro to Modeling mini-class

Plus you get the bill footed by the sportsbooks when you bet the GP Picks+ feed all year.

If that sounds like a good deal to you, get started here: https://www.goldenpants.com/gp-picks

Talk to you next week,
John