How To Bet And Trade Without Emotion: Guide To Avoiding Emotions When Sports Betting

Knowing how to bet without emotion can be the key factor that helps you to take your betting to the next level. You’ll avoid placing silly wagers that you later regret, and start making consistent profits.

Let’s take a look at how to remove emotion from sports betting.

Be Aware Of Your Emotions When Sports Betting 

When we place a wager, many of us experience a rush of excitement and adrenaline. This is partly because betting gives us a buzz in itself, but it’s also because we know that we’ve got a chance to win serious money here.

As such, dopamine is released into our brain, causing us to lose control of our emotions temporarily. We experience a huge high. We visualise winning and making money.

The consequence is that, if the bet loses, we’ll then experience a crushing low. 

Then, the trigger is released. We start betting more than we can afford to lose in order to a) chase our losses and b) experience that dopamine hit once more. 

Professional bettors aren’t like this. Chasing isn’t for them. Instead, a bet is a bet. It might win, it might lose. But what’s important is that they’re so aware of their emotions that they don’t become emotional. They don’t experience that crazy high when they place a wager, they don’t visualise winning when betting – and thus they manage to stay in control of their emotions when they lose. 

This is called emotional management and it requires you to stay calm when you place a bet and calm when you lose. You need to accept that winning and losing will always happen. It’s just part of the game. 

Study & Analyse Everything 

What’s the opposite of emotions in betting?

Logic. 

And logic is built on cold, hard analysis.

Too many recreational punters buy into the availability bias and run with their heart instead of their head too often.

Here’s an example. Let’s say there’s a tennis match currently on, and that Player A has just held to love 3 games on the spin. So, our bettor thinks it follows that they will hold on to love once more, and they will make money off this wager.

They place a bet, experience a rush of adrenaline – and Player A gets broke to love.

Just because something happened once, twice or thrice doesn’t mean it will happen a fourth time. Gambling doesn’t work like that. Instead, the key to succeeding at sports betting is understanding and ignoring the availability and instead putting our faith in sound analyses. 

Spend time watching hours and hours of your favorite sport. Get to understand real patterns. Crunch the data and build a strategy out of it all. 

Take Breaks From Betting 

Lastly, many punters who gamble lose their discipline and wager more than they can afford to lose in the heat of the moment. They’re either in a bad mood, they’re chasing, or they’re angry with a sports team for costing them a wager. When this happens, we never place logical bets.

So if you feel the red mist descending and know that you’re not in the right frame of mind, close your app and go do something else for a few hours (and preferably even a whole day).