Bets may have been Won or Lost but the most important stage is the final one. Without some kind of Review of each of the previous stages it is impossible to know what you did right or what you did wrong. Did you make a mistake, or were you just unlucky? Many don’t bother with this stage, but if you want to be a more Professional Bettor you need to be always looking to improve your performance because that’s what the rest of the market is doing. To stagnate in this game is to die.
For an individual event (often a collection of related bets) I will go back and have a look at my first 4 stages with the full benefit of hindsight. Maybe I missed an important piece of information in the Research stage. I did this recently when I panned the Adelaide Strikers after they had lost a lot of experienced players, but I missed a crucial piece of information – A new coach. A Schoolboy Error! Dizzy Gillespie has been a top tier coach in the UK and an Australian Cricket Legend. He got the best out of his young players and they won the Big Bash comp this year after I picked them to finish last!
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Getting your Analysis wrong is a very common thing to show up in a Review. In the NRL there have been countless times I’ve expected a big performance from a particular player or team and they have flopped badly. Its important here to not beat yourself up too badly if you get the Analysis wrong because it will happen a lot, but ask yourself WHY you got it wrong. Were you too reliant on continuing good form and suffered “Recency Bias” or did you bet on a reversal of form and suffered the “Gamblers Fallacy”. Either can be costly and easy mistakes to make but there are plenty of others. If you suffer a Bias it is important to be self-aware of it.
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Perhaps your Strategy was off. In your Analysis you might have correctly identified that a team might struggle without a key playmaker who is injured. Yet instead of backing the opposing team with a Handicap bet you might have been better off just backing the Match Point Unders because the opposing team might be just as bad. Or it could have just been a problem with Execution if you weren’t able to get your bets on at the stakes you wanted. Maybe the price moved and you didn’t adjust stakes or maybe an extra bet snuck in late and you were guilty of Overbetting. Or maybe the line moved and that 1 point you gave away on the Handicap made the difference between winning and losing. All of these are examples of Execution issues that a good Review will uncover.
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A good Review is not just about the Stages of your bets, but also your overall performance. If you step back and look at your betting from a more holistic angle it can help uncover your strengths and weaknesses. I look at the financial outcome of my betting every week and then I reconcile all my betting accounts and do an additional broad Review every month. I have bad weeks all the time but I have 16 months of consecutive profit so changes in luck do tend to average out. The Review can also be therapeutic if I’ve had a bad period I do my Review and get closure on it so that I can start the next period fresh and with a clean slate.
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It can also help to categorise your betting activity by the Sports or Event Types when you Review. You might find you are losing or gaining an edge and either need to put more work into developing new edges, or raise/drop your stakes in a category to match your recent performance. Sometimes it is even worth breaking things down by betting market type. Some types of betting markets can change over time. It could be pricing, liquidity, the number of runners or even settlement rules.
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