As you gain more experience as a bettor you will have a natural instinct to make certain decisions, this may be due to emotions or because of past experiences.
Trusting your gut can be very reliable in most real-life scenarios and is essential in daily life, humans have evolved to develop this natural sense for a reason.
But when it comes to the betting markets, it can be a bit more complicated when deciding on whether you should go with your gut, even after you’ve done all the research possible to find out if a bet is worth the risk, so if your gut feeling is kicking in, here are the Pros and Cons
Pros and Cons of relying on gut instinct to make betting decisions
- Betting is not just about figures and analytics, there are a various amount of factors that can lead to a certain outcome in a match, emotionally and statistical and there isn’t always rhyme or reason. Sometimes your instinct is able to tie all those reasons together and predict an outcome.
- Trusting your gut instinct can lead to poor results, it could be argued as guessing. You’re never guaranteed an outcome when it comes to betting. But your instinct alone shouldn’t be something you rely on as you may not know enough information than you think you do
Betting should be a case of analysis, but opinion counts and shouldn’t be ruled out completely.
As a new bettor, you may still be exploring through mental challenges and habits that make a successful bettor. One trap that is easy to fall into is staying in your comfort zone and this is often lead by a gut feeling.
It’s very easy to back your favourite teams and home teams, backing the over betting market and feeling safe with your bets. There are scenarios where you may research that your home team may lose a match only for you to follow your gut instinct that leads you to believe your home team will get lucky this year and break the pattern of losses.
It’s also easy to look back and see every time your gut instinct was right, giving you overextended confidence that you will always win and should always follow your gut. It’s more likely that you will remember the good moments where you won and not the times you lost because you failed to follow through with your research and stuck with your gut feeling.
Should you ignore your gut instinct?
If you believe you can make money betting and have a good strategy backing you, why would you need gut instinct?
Gut instinct is no different from personal opinions, speculation and it can be dangerous to only rely on it. A betting strategy will far outweigh guessing and an optimised strategy can far dictate any instinct.
Creating a betting strategy may be more difficult than using gut instincts but over the long term, you’ll find a great, solid method of analysis that can earn a long-term profit.
If you’re able to ignore other influences such as gut feelings, personal opinions and speculation then you should see rewards. Without a strategy, it is very likely a bettor will have a lot of poor decisions that overlook the real influences that create an outcome. Gut instinct is something that can be useful but should be considered dangerous, it can be perhaps a fraction of your reason to pursue, but you should always back up your decisions with strategy, statistics and analytics, that is what will help you in the long-term, stay profitable.
