This
guide will not tell you how to win or what to bet on. Many other areas of this
site attempt those things. The ideas may certainly help some to lose less or
even stop losing – or even stop gambling altogether. No bad thing in
some cases. So what follows is not the key to winning a fortune, but maybe the
key to stop losing one.
We just want to make you think a bit about gambling, and
maybe to understand what kind of gambler you are or want to become – or want to
stop being.
Being a “Successful Gambler” will mean many things to
different people, but I am sure the first two steps to becoming one are these:
knowing yourself and knowing your adversary.
This is hardly the place to debate the morality of gambling,
which some religions forbid. By
existing at all, this site is of course declaring itself in favour of gambling
– but only of responsible gambling, and it would be irresponsible of us
to promise that we can help ALL visitors to win, although we have helped many
to do so – in both the short term and the long term.
Bad gamblers usually have their head in the clouds, so let’s
bring everyone down to earth by talking about the Gas Bill. Because, before you
place any bet, you need to pass the Gas Bill multiple choice test. Which
of these is true for you?
1) I have paid the Gas
Bill and have money I can afford to lose.
2) I can either pay
the Gas Bill or I can have a bet.
3) In order to pay
the Gas Bill I need a winning bet.
Only if you can in all honesty pick (1) should you do any
gambling at all. If
(2) is the answer, you should clearly wait before having a punt and if your
answer is (3) you may need help and of the many options you might have in that
situation, gambling is certainly the most idiotic and a possible short cut to
deep and damaging despair. The only lasting antidote in such cases is to get
real – about yourself and those creating the situations in which you can have a
bet. Gambling should always be seen as an expense and you should never gamble
more than you can afford to lose
There are types of gambling that are for me self-evidently
wrong or stupid. The first is easily dealt with. The person who puts his own
well-being or, worse, that of his family and friends at risk is deeply in the
wrong. Gambling can be very addictive and it’s often the most stupid forms of
it that are most addictive. Let’s look at some no-no’s.
The “glamour” is helped by making real money invisible as
quickly possible. The lack of clocks and daylight helps to keep things feeling
unreal – as does the occasional free drink and free food. Sensible gambling
and drinking NEVER mix. Forget stories about daredevil wins, or “The Man
who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo”, then forget the gorgeous stacks of chips
and/or chicks and think only of how the odds are stacked against you – and
how some of the chicks might be stacked so you forget how the odds are stacked
against you. The best way to make money out of a casino is to own one.
Come on. In your hearts of hearts you know they are set up
to make sure that those running them win in the long term and so their players
must generally lose in the long term. The same applies to any kind of SLOT
MACHINES and ONE-ARM BANDITS of any description anywhere –
absolutely anything governed by software. By law in UK, operators have to pay
back a certain percentage in prizes, but for sure you can bet that it is never
101%! I have met two people who regularly got the better of machines; one
finished second on Mastermind - you need that kind of memory; the other
worked on the software for the machines - you need that kind of expertise.
My local bookie has a bank of these machines and at the end
of each working day he will remove on average £1,000 in cash from them.
Nice non-work if you can get it. They are brilliantly designed to be hypnotic,
and of course they feed you with little wins quite frequently because they
themselves feed off the adrenaline rush that’s triggered. Why do people do it?
Why do they let themselves be so easily manipulated?
And remember that if you play poker on-line, you could be
playing against guys who have set up computers to play many different sites
simultaneously in ways to cream off around 3% in the long term.
There is nothing new about Novelty Bets. How about punters
regularly winning from them? Now that would be a novelty, that would be
special. These are often designed to lead people into betting on what they want
to happen when sensible gambling means betting on something that is more
likely to happen than other people think. What you can be sure of is that
before the bet is offered, the bookies’ considerable computing power has been
concentrated on assessing the real probability of something happening. The odds
he will then offer will then only be a fraction of the true odds.
In the 2006 World Cup, a large proportion of the favourites
won the games. Yet the bookies still reported big profits. How come? Because
they cleaned up on their novelties, specials and all the subsidiary bets they
draped around the games.
If you own or run a football club,
or your best mates do and you/they appoint a Manager, by all means back him to
be the next Manager before the decision is generally known. This is not
gambling at all, of course, but insider trading. If you do that, maybe your conscience is in need of some insider
training. Equally, if you are an outsider, then going to the betting exchanges
and laying each successive favourite for any football manager’s job will almost
certainly make you money in the long term. But if you are simply betting on
whoever the tabloids happen to be linking with the job, or on someone because
he’s an ex-player without any knowledge of whether the Board making the
decision happen to want him or of whether he wants the job, or on someone who
just happens to have managed lots of other clubs – in other words when you
don’t have a clue as to what is really going on, but quite fancy boasting about
getting right to your mates, well, try forgetting it.
Twenty
years ago, if a Second Division Manager lost his job and you wanted to put a
fiver on his replacement, most bookies would have looked at you as though were
mad and would not have framed a price. Now, however, the price lists hit the
wires seconds after a sacking or resignation is announced. They must have them
pre-prepared: ten years ago Ron Atkinson appeared on all of them, then it was
Dave Bassett and now until recently it was Martin O'Neill.
Look closely at the lists and they always contain names of men the clubs would never want or can't afford, or men under contract, or men who wouldn't dream of going to that club. Yet presumably some people bet on them simply because they are on the list and are thus by definition "candidates" even before anyone has asked them if they want the job.
What the bookies have cottoned on to is the
need that all punters have to be proved right and the fact that football
journalists these days deal more in speculating or saying what they think
should happen than in reporting what has happened. With transfer windows this has
only got worse. So the bookies line their wallets with money punted by
thousands of people who do not have a clue about what is really going on but
simply hitch their star to the latest bandwagon. All the bookies have to do is
engineer their prices according to trends set by people who are completely
ignorant. Unless you really are an insider, you will only win from these
markets if you make a lucky guess. In your hearts of hearts though, are you
really out to make money or are you more anxious to seem "in the
know" with your mates? It's a macho thing isn't it - a way of saying
"I know more about football than you do!" Get it wrong and you just
keep quiet.*
Sections Bets invite bettors to get the result of one, two
or even three games from each of a number of sections. The prices are no better
than in the basic Long List of games. Quite simply, don’t let the bookmaker
dictate which games you have to bet on or the total games in your bet. Stick
to the Long List and keep the total games and games you bet on under your own
control. And remember that if you do nothing but string odds-on homes
together in big accumulators – say six, seven or more – in the long term you
will lose. Our Analysis sections contain proof of how bad the odds offered
against home favourites are. Finally, scorecasts are a form of bet where
you bet on both the first goal-scorer and the Correct Score in a game. The odds
offered seem big – but they are not nearly big enough. Rest assured, at
every bookies’ Christmas Party, glasses are raised to whoever invented this
bet. See “Know Your Enemy” below.
WHO ARE YOU?
Many people, even those who gamble
frequently, tend to split gamblers into just two types – “mug punters” and
“shrewdies”. How about there being EIGHT – and different types even
within each of those. Many people in fact fall into several categories of
course, in some cases on the same day. It’s worth thinking about though because one of the most potent weapons in the bookies' armoury these
days is psychology. If someone asks you, "Why do you gamble?" the
knee-jerk reaction is to say, "I want to make money!" yet if you ask
yourself the same question in private, the answer might not be so simple. A
senior Ladbrokes Executive, now retired, always used to claim that what really
drives people to gamble is not money but pride. It’s the desire to be proved
right or to believe that in some small way, by guessing something correctly,
you can convince yourself that you have got that difficult monster The Future
under some kind of control. Here are those eight groups. Into which
group do you fall most frequently?
KNOW YOUR ENEMY!
Even
if the above has not helped you with self-recognition, I hope that it has at
least convinced you that self-recognition is important. Just as important is to
be able to spot exactly how bookies set out to manipulate their customers.
Let's
go back to the Scorecast, a way of combining first goal-scorer plus Correct
Score, a related contingency bet unheard of ten years ago. This appeals very
basically to the punter's greed simply because of the size of the prices. The
fact is that ANY of the odds quoted in this market are rank bad value in that
the probability of the event is much less than the odds suggest. Perhaps
one or two punters doing this may suspect they're being fleeced. They are
right.
Quite
how they are being worked on is interesting though. The most striking feature
of the teletext screens, shop posters or web pages carrying these odds is the
sheer quantity of prices on show - nearly all big ones, too. It's like a
giant box of chocs and the impression created is that maybe ALL the possible
options are on display.
In
fact of course, only a tiny fraction of the possible
permutations are on offer. Discounting goalkeepers but including
substitutes, there 26 possible scorers in a game and if we allow each side up
to six goals and ignore 5-5 or 6-6 (though they have happened), 34 most likely possible
scores. So the full set of possibilities is 884 (and theoretically over 1,000).
So
when you dazzled by a display of, say, 30 juicy prices, just remember you are
only being shown around 3% of the possible outcomes. About one quarter of all
UK games are draws and 1 in 9 end 0-0 and that result ensures the bookie is
like a croupier sweeping the chips off a roulette table because 0 has come up.
Draws
are not the only scorecast skinner either: games where the side scoring first
eventually loses mean the bookie keeps the whole pile. With international
scorecasts too, the layout of the prices is devised so it appeals to punters
who bet on what they WANT to happen: ROONEY - ENGLAND 2-0: 16/1.
Keep a good eye out then for the Hidden Persuaders - and monitor
their dialogue with your inner self.*
*I first put a small amount of this material in the
2002/3 Racing and Football Outlook Football Annual.