Short Term or Long Term?
If you’re going to take a run at making a full time income from betting, or even if you just consider yourself a small time bettor who places his bets for the enjoyment factor, there’s still money to be made.
There are many aspects to betting. Whether you try to bet big on the theoretically safer bets, or whether you consider yourself someone who wants to find the extra value when betting, you still need to have a set view on your betting progress.
What does this mean?
There are two views you can adopt when it comes to placing your bets. You can either work with a short term view, or with a long term view. In this guide, we’ll cover what is meant by both of these terms, and hopefully help you adopt your standpoint.
‘Short term betting’ does what it says on the tin. It isn’t an approach that’s adopted by many serious bettors, and that probably tells you a lot you need to know about it. This approach consists of living in the moment and placing that big exciting bet because you want the thrill of a sizeable pay-out. Short term betting can also be done in a managed way. You could set yourself weekly and monthly goals to achieve, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The difference between a bettor who is sensible and a bettor who isn’t sensible however, will be what that bettor does next, and this is where the long term approach comes in. Working with short term goals can be good also, as the long term haul requires a lot of patience and forward thinking that not everyone has, but it still needs structure and discipline.
One of the major downsides of working with the short term view if you lack discipline is that it’s easy to keep adding bets on to losing bets and double your losses in the blink of an eye. If you didn’t get that short term buzz or the pay-out you set out for, sometimes there can be a strong desire to bet more, or even double up to chase your losses and get that win. It goes without saying that this can be a real recipe for disaster. The reason that happens so often, and what makes losing more likely, is the level of planning. If you’re looking at getting that money back in a bet or two, you are increasing your chances of a bigger loss.
Within the short and long term views, there are many components that contribute to them being successful or unsuccessful. Money management is probably the biggest factor, and it’s relevant to both my previous and next points. With forwarding planning and adopting the long term view if you’re a football bettor for example, you can look ahead on the calendar and identify that this is when Manchester United play, this is when the world cup group stages are and this is the Gold Cup, and proceed to research. Betting is all about looking at the games and finding a suitable market within that game. That’s something that is easy to do with the long term view, and I can promise there are far more people out there capable of picking winning bets than there are making money from betting.
With the short term view, the events you have to bet on are in your hands, and rather than assess games and pick what you think is the best market to bet on, you suddenly go searching for the next event to start. When you do this there’s a large chance that the event is not a suitable event to bet on, but you’ve already made the conscious decision that you are going to bet, so there is a good chance you could end up forcing a market to bet on. This is another downside of the short term view that can lead to added losses, because the aim becomes ‘recovering your losses’.
With the long term approach all of this is avoided. Why? Because you’re able to asses these types of situations before you get to them. Rather than looking at one week in which you’re losing and saying hey, I need to find some events to bet on now! You’re able to look past that for several weeks, maybe even longer, and say it is fine, stick to your plan, trust my picks and be confident you will profit.
The longer your long term approach stretches, the easier it becomes to be successful. You look a couple weeks ahead; you have plenty of different times and situations when you can rationally think about up-coming bets. If you look months ahead, you have time to constantly assess a team’s performance, which will help you make a much more informed decision.
About.com’s Allan Moody (Sports Gambling Guide) writes “there is a great deal of difference between being knowledgeable in the NFL and being knowledgeable in NFL betting” and it’s true. And it also highlights another key difference between the short and long term approach. Many sports fans are knowledgeable. We all have our levels of knowledge and area of expertise when it comes to certain sports. Some people love football so much there are some leagues where it is possible for them to name every team’s starting XI, but will that help them make money in the short term? Not necessarily.
The common knowledge of your average sports fan is what thrusts them in to sports betting in the first place, although that’s only the foundation for developing that knowledge and finding angles and ways in which you can adapt it to betting on that sport, which definitely requires the long term approach. To further expand on Allan’s point: It’s all good and well knowing Leighton Baines is the teams left back and you like him, but what’s more important is does Leighton Baines have the technical ability and pace to stop Theo Walcott today?
Rather than use your knowledge as a football fan for short term purposes, with the long term approach you’re able to sit down and set aside some time to look at your fixtures for the weekend. You could check the injury news, check team news (morale, match importance etc) and make more informed decisions. This takes time though, so an alternative is to get someone to do the leg work!
There is success to be found in both the short and long term (with structure), and there is a certain overlap, but the long term view is possible a financially safer strategy, while the risk of the short term is that more losing opportunities are provided.