Intuition in sports betting: is it realistic to rely on ‘gut feelings’ for long-term profits?
Is it realistic to rely on intuition to win profits in sports betting? Is there any strategy that integrates the notion ‘trust your guts’ in sports gambling and still has pretty good chances of leading to sustainable and long term winnings? Well, these are two questions that too often trigger the minds of bettors who are caught right in the middle of intuitive betting and data-driven betting.
Intuition in sports betting
Every bettor in this world has experimented with intuition. It is literally impossible to find one punter who has never used his gut feeling to wager on a team to win a game or on a player to win a competition in some bkash betting site that offers a big selection of markets.
This is quite natural, because as people, bettors have feelings, perceptions, beliefs and opinions and it is extremely difficult to always set your emotions apart from your rational part of decision making.
Or simply put, it is nothing but easy to act either purely rationally or purely emotionally. The emotional aspect, especially, is very likely to interfere with the rational one.
Let’s go back to the intuition argument. Given that every bettor has used his intuition while wagering, then it could be a fair thing to say that intuition has played its part in profit making or in bet winnings (assuming of course that there are such winnings). And if intuition has something to do with winning, to what extent should punters rely on their gut feelings to make betting choices.
The Halo effect
Kind of confused? Well, let’s sort things out. Intuition can’t be ruled out or excluded from our betting decisions. That’s because intuition is built into our ‘system’ and even if we don’t realize it, we often make choices that are at least influenced to some level by our emotions and feelings.
There are a number of psychological mechanisms that explain this situation: the Halo effect, for example, can perfectly justify this.
The Halo effect says that people often pass the first judgment of something onto everything that has to do with this ‘something’. The first impression dominates all other perceptions and tends to prevail.
So, betting-wise, this means that punters will subconsciously evaluate the available data on a team’s possible performance in an upcoming big football match, based on what they have already thought of about the team.
Intuition is key here: the bettors will transfer the impression they have about the team on everything that is related to this team and will give greater value to the first impression, leaving behind any possible contradictory information.
Suppose that the bettor has very good feelings about this team, but the relevant data show that the team has less chances to win the game. The bettor does not see the data as factors that will make him abandon betting on the team.
Instead he takes a more positive stance towards the data and in the end he places the bet. Backing the team, now is largely due to the intuition -the gut feeling – that has been formed because a positive impression has overshadowed every other bit of information.
If the bet wins, it is a matter of intuition. If the bet losses, it is a matter of misleading data! It will rarely be the case where the bettor will recognize that his decision was not based on data (it was not driven by stats, data and records), but on his gut feeling, which noticeably influenced every other aspect of his evaluation of the available data. And this is the Halo effect!
That said, what is the role of intuition in betting?
Well, it’s hard to tell. If you rely solely on intuition then logic says that you have less probabilities for long-term profits. If you make solely data-driven choices, then logic says you have more chances of profit making in the long run.
But as we have shown above, data-driven choices are rarely pure rational choices – the element of intuition and gut feeling is always there and sometimes it spills over every aspect of bettors’ decision making.
