Baseball Betting Advice: What To Do When Losing
By Loot, Major League Baseball Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
When betting on baseball, losing is a part of the game that you will inevitably face. Even the best teams in the league have bad weeks, so why would you be immune to it? The somewhat interesting part of it is that the losing isn’t the important thing many times. It’s what you do and how you act in the face of adversity.
Obviously, melting down even a little bit is what takes a manageable problem and turns it into a massive issue that results in your account balance reading goose-eggs. When under siege, do you collect yourself and improve your play or do you become flustered and therefore an even worse bettor? How this question is answered will largely determine whether or not you can be successful in baseball wagering.
Well, let’s take a gigantic leap of faith and assume we have that part of the game mastered. Now what do we do with this problem of losing? We may just need to tweak some fundamental points. We might just be looking at it wrong. We got locked into a way of doing things and are stubborn in the face of not doing well. First of all, we should never hesitate to ditch something if it’s no longer working. We may have been working a certain angle with a lot of success, but then it dried up, yet we continued betting it.
That might be the problem--looking at something only one way. Our bets may almost always fall into a certain category. And deep down, we know it. We just might be reluctant to admit it. To admit a failing component in our betting is to condemn the way we think--not an easy admission for most to make. It’s pretty human to get carried away with our beliefs. In baseball wagering, that lack of flexibility can be deadly. It’s just difficult, being that in every other walk of life--we don’t generally budge on our convictions.
When it comes to our ability to pick winners, we need to be realistic. Admitting we have a hole in our repertoire is not easy, but a necessary undertaking which all the top cappers take part. One possibility is that you need to clear the air and take off some time. When you’re doing something, it’s easy to fall into ruts, when not given the time for proper reflection. It’s hard to really think it through when in the midst of doing it. When losing, maybe you need to refresh your browser and take a breather.
For some, that is the psychological equivalent of quitting. That doesn’t sit well with most guys, hence the tendency to try to play through it. Sometimes, that’s not the worst idea. A lot of losing streaks are just random clusters of events that are not telltale signs that there is anything inherently wrong with your handicapping. Other times, however, a period of time to retool is the desired course of action.
But it’s still important to determine what constitutes a need to retool and when you should just ride out the storm. A lot of baseball teams win the World Series despite having really bad stretches of games. If during those bad periods, they started hastily making trades and switching everything around, they would never have become champions.
If your expectations are to always win, that might be the problem. A cagey baseball manager knows how to ride out a bad patch. You should too, as a betting man. This is a game of failure. The best hitters don’t get a hit 65 or 70% of the time. Managers get fired after winning 75 games in this league. A pitcher is great if he wins 18 of his 33 starts. That failure can’t help but drizzle down to our results.
Big picture: this is a losing game. We need to be like the great pitchers and managers in this business. Even a 300-game winner is going to lose over 200 games. Jim Leyland’s career winning percentage is a touch over .500. Joe Torre is at .538. Sparky Anderson is at .545. That right there should help convey to us what success in this sport looks like. It’s about winning a little more than you lose. If you can do that as a manager, you will have a job for a long time. If a betting man can accomplish the same thing, he’s on his way to being successful.
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