College Football Betting Advice: Keep Your Cool
By Loot, NCAA Football Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
If you were a general at war, you would plan out your battle strategy. You wouldn’t just say damn the torpedos and blindly plow into the fight. When you bet on college football, you plan your picks. You weigh pros and cons and come up with a calculated estimation of what will happen. You pick the games where you feel you have an edge and forego all the other games. Why? Because betting on them would be gambling just for gambling’s sake.
So it’s surprising how some bettors go through all this, only to wind up playing blackjack or slot machines at the end of the day. It’s like you went from being a thoughtful general to a raging lunatic. Why spend all the time being analytical and calculating if you will inevitably end up slugging it out in the casino?
There are many types of gamblers who essentially fall into two categories. Some people bet on things where they have choices. The result of the bet is directly tied to the decisions they make or do not make. Then there is the other form of gambling where your bets are up to the mercy of the gambling gods. You have no decisions to make or the ones you do make are rote choices that require zero insight or real thought.
We all need to decide where we fall in this equation and it’s an either/or equation. A guy who likes to gamble on video poker and blackjack can occasionally dabble in college football betting without causing harm to his gambling profile. But it doesn’t work the other way. If you are a football bettor, try to restrict your gambling to that area. It just doesn’t make any sense to put effort into picking college football games, only to have your bottom-line determined by a roll of the dice at some later point.
Social Concerns
Dealing with people can be a challenge when we’re in the throes of a college football Saturday. Some people can be a little testy when they gamble. So if you find yourself getting a little irritated with different people while watching your games, you’re quite normal. But we need to develop a thick skin because people will push our buttons. Usually, it’s far from deliberate. No one is walking around worrying about your college football bets besides you. Plus--it’s Saturday. Friends will be trying to get a hold of you. Family members will require attention. And it’s all part of the game.
You might end up on the phone with your boss while an interception runback kills your bet in the last minute of the game. See how hard it is to continue that conversation without seeming noticeably affected. Your mom might call to tell you not to forget to come pick up some cream of celery soup right as the running back on the team you backed turned the ball over in the end zone. Then you have those friends who will text “Go Trojans” to you right after USC scored to cover the spread against a team you had on your ticket. You might be tempted to text him an obscenity, but he is just trying to be chummy. He remembers going with you to USC games when you guys were teens, so don’t be mean. Every fiber in your body will be telling you to do otherwise, but be nice.
Keep betting on college football fun. This should be at least somewhat pleasurable for you or you shouldn’t be doing it. A lot of times, it stops being fun and you won’t even acknowledge it. You are just stressed out perhaps, finding it hard to juggle all the different things in life--vocationally, familial, socially, and all the other obligations in life.
If you can’t bet on college football without turning into a degenerate derelict--this might not be for you. If you try to seal yourself off from the world on Saturdays, white-knuckling it all day in a cloud of cigarette smoke, that’s not how it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be fun, not drudgery. And if you don’t have the time to properly handicap the games you planned on breaking down, don’t sweat it. Just do what you can and never allow betting on college football to mess up other aspects on your life.
Tip: I personally, cannot sit in a sportsbook full of screaming squares. It drives me absolutely nuts! I'd like to take this opportunity to recommend online betting to you. It saves time, you can do it from home, work or at your daughter's dance recital, etc. It'll save you gas from driving to the book and save you time getting in and out. It's also cheaper! That's right, it costs less! Vegas books sock you -110 odds. You only have to lay -105 at 5Dimes!
