Betting Streaks and Standard Deviation
Losing betting streaks can kill you professionally. I sometimes wonder how many potentially good pros are out there who never made it because they did not understand the envelope of possibility regarding their strategy - or if you like - standard deviation. It is all too easy to give up too soon.
I read somewhere that you need to play in the region of 1000 hours of poker (online poker) to know for sure if you are a profitable poker player. Think about that for a minute. You could play an hour a day for close to three years and still not know if you are any good!
Streaks are horrible things. When I was living in the US, quite a famous NFL pro capper told me how a colleaque of his had hit something like 30 losses in a row in basketball. He was invited onto radio shows to tell listeners of his unfortunate losing run! Now remember he was probably playing the handicap line at odds of around 10/11 as much as any other market - that's odds on! Add to that the fact that he was a Vegas pro capper who knew his stuff. The chances of losing thirty in a row at shortish odds would have been at least millions, if not tens of millions to one...just goes to show that anything can happen in betting.
So think carefully before you put aside a miserly twenty point bank for betting on odds on favourites!
Still streaks should not bother you that much - they are a standard feature of betting. Assume for a moment you are a profitable bettor. You know that you will have winning bets and losing bets - but more winning bets. Assume for now that those bets are placed at even money or 1/1.
Imagine that you have a barrel filled with one thousand golf balls. Each ball represents a bet. There are 550 white coloured balls representing winning bets and 450 black coloured balls representing losing bets. You tip them out onto the ground and then begin to pick them up. You might well come across 5 black balls first of all, then a white ball, then another 3 or 4 black balls. You could be 9-1 down before you know it.
But hey, the winners are still out there - you just haven't reached them yet - you are not bad at what you do - in fact you know you are profitable - you have just hit a bad streak. Don't stop, because the thing that will kill you off as a bettor is giving up.
posted by Betting Exchange Trader
