Strategies to keep gambling sensible
Strategies to help you gamble safely – & enjoyably
Safer gambling isn’t just a topic for those who suspect or know they have a gambling problem – it should and can be practiced by all bettors. As the adage goes, 'prevention is better than cure', and thinking carefully in advance about how much you should bet, how often, and in what circumstances, is vital to maintaining a good relationship with gambling. Whilst there’s a raft of strategies bookmakers and banks have introduced to help you do this (which you can read about here), they all boil down to self-discipline.
However, whilst all gambling involves some element of risk, there are a number of things you can do to reduce or minimise risk – for any given bet, and for your financial and mental health in the long-run. For over 70 years, punters have looked to Timeform to help them ‘play smarter’, and there’s every reason that should extend to your betting habits as well as your selections themselves.
Play smarter: think long-term
Rather than betting off-the-cuff, it undoubtedly pays to focus on the bigger picture, and gambling strategies needn’t be reserved for the card-counter, the Exchange professional or the spreadsheet wizard. This could be as simple as a staking plan or even betting budget, a record of your bets, and a record of your balance. So what are the advantages?
• Encourages budgeting and staking limits
Keeping track of how much you’re spending monthly makes it far easier to control, and helps you see your betting expenses clearly in relation to other outgoings. It also serves as a reminder of how much you can safely stake on any one bet, which can help reduce the effect of the “gambler’s mentality”, when winning bets are met with a feeling that more should’ve been staked. A carefully-calculated maximum stake means you can be confident you’ve gotten the most from a bet, in that sense
• Helps you keep track of profit & loss
‘P&L’ as it’s known can help you appreciate how small losses can add up, and how difficult it is to stay in profit in the long-run. It can also serve as a reminder that despite the bragging, most others that appear successful are likely to be ‘down’ overall
• Puts your chances of winning in perspective
Tracking your bets over time could help you reassess your motivations for gambling. You may find betting more enjoyable once you’ve tempered unrealistic expectations of winning
• Prevents ‘chasing’ and encourages patience
If you can see things in the long-term, you feel less of a need to address them straight away. This might come in the form of waiting for a horse or team you like to encounter optimum conditions before backing them. Meanwhile, accepting that even the soundest mathematical strategies involve days of losses helps you process your own ‘bad’ days
Making sure reward outweighs risk
Put wins & losses in context
It’s tempting to think that you are the only person who can decided what’s ‘worth it’ and what isn’t, but the reality of course is that your behaviours and spending habits can and do affect many others in your life, be they your partner, child, parent, friend or colleague. Maintaining an awareness of how your gambling might affect others is a key tenet of safer gambling, but even when it does affect just you, there are multiple ways of interpreting this.
Establishing a maximum stake to limit losses in advance is not only useful in terms of long-term strategy, but also for betting occasions – a day at the races for example. Factoring your potential losses into the cost of a day means you’re going in prepared to spend a certain amount on the experience, rather than setting yourself up for the disappointment of losing, or worse, chasing the losses afterwards.
On the flip-side of the coin, it can help to have a specific win value in mind in advance, that you’d be happy to settle up and walk away with – if and when you achieved it – rather than being ‘greedy’ and carrying on. For example, Timeform’s founder, Phil Bull – a man who made his fortune from a mathematical strategy – was heard to say that a win to him meant a case of champagne, as opposed to an arbitrary monetary value.
Value betting: the maths of risk vs reward
There are surprisingly few people out there who understand that the only realistic strategy for long-term profit is value betting. That most definitely does not mean that value betting is easy to do, but the concept of a value bet itself is very simple: a value bet is when the odds given on an outcome by a bookmaker are longer than the true odds of that outcome happening.
You’ll often see ‘no bet’ listed as the selection for a race in our premium tipping products, and the reason is simple: sometimes, should it go on to win or lose, it just does not make mathematical sense to back a horse at the odds given.
To read more about how value betting works, you can read our guide here. For now though, a simple way of seeing it is this:
- A horse is priced at 9/1, which is equivalent to a one-in-ten chance. However, its true chances of winning are one in eight – or as expressed in odds, 7/1
- In other words, the horse is overpriced. You bet on this horse, and over the course of a season, many more who are similarly overpriced
- Over time, betting on multiple horses at ‘value’ prices means that the combined winnings are statistically increasingly likely to outweigh the combined losses.Note though: it can never guarantee profit, as each individual bet is still effectively a matter of chance, as it is outside the bettor's control
- Value betting also puts the losses in perspective, and stops you taking them personally; no matter how good a judge you are, it’s logical you would still lose the majority of these bets simply down to the law of probability
The house (nearly) always wins
Because fixed-odds bookmakers (also known as 'sportsbooks' – your on-course or high street bookmaker or their online equivalent) are setting the prices in a market, they are in effect taking thousands of value bets, day in day out, and mathematically can therefore be almost guaranteed a profit over time. On a per-person basis, It’s actually more difficult for bookmakers to turn a profit from the occasional bettor than from the habitual one, because there’s far less opportunity to get the value principle to work.
Value betting cannot be rushed and requires an elite level of knowledge to be done effectively, and if you harbour an ambition to be one of the tiny percentage of bettors who remain in profit, it is a concept that’s simply impossible to ignore. Indeed, many or most successful bettors have been banned by at least one bookmaker – which firms are completely within their rights to do.
To sum up
Again, given how difficult it is to succeed at gambling, and how vital it is for your financial and mental health to be realistic about your chances of winning, it’s wise to sit down and think about what it is you like and don’t like about it, and how often you’re doing it – especially knowing that the more often you bet without a strategy, the less likely you are to win overall.
So, as alien as it may seem to some, you may find that recreational betting with a statistically smaller chance of making profit is actually a far more entertaining and healthy way to bet than trying to eke out profit at every opportunity.