Quote Originally Posted by DanceTeacher:
You have amazing intuition about your choices mate. Congratulation on your win tonight, and thanks for your insight.
I see you're an occasionally, with a lot discipline bettor. I believe your main sport you betting on is basketball. Just wanted to ask if you don't mind: how many plays you usually have in a season?
thank you in advance
I like that you pointed out the word discipline. Discipline is a necessity in all facets of life. As a child, all aspects of your character, your passions, your emotions, are subjected to parental discipline. Through adolescence, you utilize discipline to commit yourself to your studies, while your juvenile delinquent friends, wreak havoc through your community, stealing street signs, knocking over garbage cans and kicking small puppies. When dating, we use discipline to prevent ourselves form knocking up every drunk broad who smiles at us from a barstool. Now as adults, we are disciplined enough to pay our bills/mortgage/rent by rolling our fat asses out of bed every day to work at a job we most likely hate with people we probably despise.
Along the way we engage in endeavors to satisfy our need for competition/entertainment. As children, we wore our favorite player's jersey setting up shrines around our TV sets in hopes of a win (i remember doing this every Sunday when the Houston Oilers game was on TV locally...the hell if it worked in 1993 when I saw a fucking 35-3 lead wither away in a playoff game to the hands of FRANK FUCKING REICH).
As grown men, we remain on our hands and knees watching our sure fire favorites go down in flames against the spread as our bankrolls spill out of our accounts like fucking oil out the Exxon Valdez. Soon enough, at the end of each Sunday, your the damn sea otter on the shore covered with oil looking for someone to put you out of your misery.
Those gambling endeavors/passions, must be mitigated with proper bankroll management and a moderate number of picks based on expertise, reason, and thin-slicing. What is thin-slicing? It is a term brought into the mainstream by author Malcolm Gladwell in his non-fiction book Blink. In a nutshell, it means 'thinking without thinking.'
You already have a wealth of knowledge in your unconscious about two teams, the spreads, and previous performances. Unfortunately, this is an era of information overload and it is instantaneously at our fingertips. We attempt to pick games factoring in direct matchups, previous weeks wins/losses, historical trends, future scheduling, weather, coaches, stadiums, field condition, turf or grass, fan apathy/support, comments in the media, internal turmoil/solidarity, injuries, referees, possible fixes etc. etc. etc....
Is ALL of this relevant? A definitive NO is order when answering that question. By thin slicing, we are using only the relevant information already embedded in our unconscious, to make a snap decision on a play.
There is a downfall. Our personal biases, prejudices, likes and dislikes, creep into ALL our decisions, including our capping. BUT we have an advantage. We can research our initial snap decision to verify if it is devoid of bias. Once this is affirmed, we make the pick with our most precious resource....our motherfukin
, then let the chips fall where they may. This can never be perfected, but can be self-managed to result in a high degree of accuracy through discipline...ONCE it's tapped into.
In short, I probably only pick 25-30 NBA games a year and less than 10 NFL games a year and no baseball. Betting baseball is terrible with huge negative moneylines. Hate it. When I look at a slate of games on a given night, I analyze each game through thin slicing and the game with the strongest intuitive reaction is the game I will delve into further. It's almost always one of the locals (NJ or NY teams for or against) or a team I've been following for a few weeks (in this case Washington). I believe there are only a few key spots in a season of hundreds of games where you can make a real profit. I would love to have action on every single game just as much as the next guy, but it was only when I started ELIMINATING picks from the slate and concentrating on ONE GAME, perhaps over a week or even several, to bet on, that I started making any good money. Don't care much about units, only trying to help the average joe, make some money with a solid pick in an era of unemployment where 1 out of every 10 potential workers is sitting at home in his/her barney rubble pajamas.
Now I will stop writing because this post is violating the principle of information overload i just preached against. Hope this answered your question.
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