Reporting from the garden of Bet Chat HQ, Barbados/Northern Ireland…
Hi,
It’s been a long time coming but, finally, some sunshine!
Andrea and I here are very much making the most of it (shortly after that pic I cracked open a strange but refreshing pineapple beer) and we hope that you are too.
Today however, it’s not the sunshine that I want to talk about but the rain.
You see, the number one mistake that wannabe serious bettors make by far is to expect that a winning service will always win and not have losing runs. Or, at the very least, that those losing runs will be shorter than is realistic.
So, today, I thought I’d share this simple little chart, of the longest likely losing runs that you can expect, based on the strike rate of a service/strategy:
(Please Note: That’s the longest ‘likely’ losing run. A larger number is also possible.)
To convert those percentages to odds, 50% would be even money, 1/1, 2.0. So, even if you’re betting on the toss of a coin, at some point you can expect a losing run of 13…
Yes, 13! I bet that’s a good deal more than the average answer you’d get if you asked a bunch of punters at a casino.
And of course, most betting services/strategies (especially for horseracing) have bigger average odds than even money and, of course, that means much longer losing runs.
So, I suppose the point that I’m trying to make today is, it’s all well and good enjoying the sunshine, but are you prepared for the inevitable rain that comes before and afterwards?
After all, sunshine is a fat lot of good if you’ve already been washed away in the floods and aren’t there to profit from it!
With that, I’m off to see what other random beery delights are knocking about in Andrea’s shed. Cheers!
(7/10: Nice initially but, as with most hipster IPAs, bit weird once the novelty has worn off)
