Betting is not necessarily gambling. When and how does betting become an investment? When and how does betting become more like a stock market investment than a lottery?
I.TWO TYPES OF BETTORS
There are two types of gamblers in the world: those who act purely on instinct and those who rely on reason, on logic. Those in the second category follow a strategy and know what they are doing – they have a method and lucidly analyze every opportunity. Because every match (bet) is, after all, an opportunity to win.
The first category of bettors wins by chance. The second category, having method and detachment, wins regularly and on a long-term basis – and with less likelihood of making mistakes in the grip of passions or uncontrolled impulses. The latter is smart behaviour – in betting, as in life, either the lucky or the smart win. Luck is not up to you – being smart is.
II.LOTTERY AND INVESTMENT SCIENCE
For the instinctive punters, betting remains strictly a lottery, a lottery in an envelope. From time to time it happens that they win, but most of the time they will lose. For the calculating punter who uses a strategy, betting is an investment. The process of making an investment in betting is similar, and very similar to the process of buying shares on the stock exchange. You check the history and potential of the company, you know who runs it, you see the opportunities the market offers, you calculate the risks. Everything is, as far as possible, planned so that chance plays a strictly secondary role, though of course, it can never be ruled out – in any business or when betting.
However betting becomes (and remains) an investment when decisions are made after a rigorous information gathering process. If you don’t have a clear strategy (which you follow strictly) and if you are not informed about the teams/matches you are betting on, then you can only win by chance.
III. RESEARCH AND FLAIR
Attention: nobody excludes flair from the make-up of a winning punter! On the contrary, flair makes the great winners.
But beyond flair, the work of a successful punter is rather like the work of a researcher: he chooses an object of study, follows it until he begins to know it and its behavior becomes predictable. Only then does he bet. Anything else is luck and popular entertainment.
At bets.ai, we believe in science (artificial intelligence), scientific methods, statistics, and responsible, pre-calculated investments. We can’t rule out the influence of accident in a football match (like red cards), which can mess up all the previous calculations, but betting strategically can win in the long run even if from time to time some bets will not win. Chance is an important part of life, it’s what sometimes gives it its charm, but we believe that it too can be calculated, with a significant margin of success.
Good investments are after all an exercise in avoiding bad investments which can only be achieved if you have enough true knowledge about what you are about to do.
