In the previous part to this article, I discussed how even educated people can be duped with regards to how sequences level out and over what time period this can happen. These ideas have become known as the gamblers fallacy and it can be seen in sports betting as well. One such area is horse racing where a sequence of winners or losers can and does influence a large percentage of the betting public.
If the favourite hasn’t won for say four races at a given meeting then the tendency is for punters to believe in their own mind that the favourite is due. This has even been proven with a study that was done in 1985 by Mary Metzger from the University of Maryland in which she proved that racetrack punters were in fact influenced by the results of previous races.
The sample was taken over 12,000 races and showed that if favourites won consecutively that the betting public on the whole tended to avoid them. An interesting betting strategy must then be deduced from this with regards to gambling and this is that the odds for certain horses should shorten or lengthen based on the amount of action that is taken on them or lack of action whichever the case may be.
There are numerous factors at work here and one of those factors is the mathematical term known as variance. This is a term that is not even known by the gambling public at large let along properly understood. It is often used in poker and even experienced and knowledgeable poker players who are educated in variance still do not properly understand its effects in poker.
This is why players are duped into not understanding adequate sample sizes and is another reason as to why gambling is such a difficult area in which to make money for the vast number of people. Last year I conducted a series of experiments in online poker to show that a player could in fact make a good living wage from playing low-stakes poker with a starting bankroll of no more than $500.
I did this by playing multiple tables at NL50 and achieving an earn rate of $25/hour over 70,000 hands of play. I think that a more disciplined performance could have added at least $10/hour to that earn rate as I did spew an awful lot of money but even $25/hour equates to over $4000/month which is above and beyond a lot of people’s current incomes.
I know that the earn rate could be improved, I was playing between 6-8 tables but a bigger monitor or playing more tables on another site could have led to this figure reaching $50/hour. That is $8000/month which is a staggering figure for stakes so low. But I achieved this by tapping into the average player psychology and philosophy at that level. In any form of gambling then if you can tap into the mass psyche then this will set up potential profits.
