While not a threat to your betting experience in a direct fashion, confirmation biases are the type of psychology phenomenon that can have a very direct effect on your betting behaviour. From the fact that they can influence your decision-making process to the overall money movement that goes into your betting, these biases can be of surprisingly various kinds.
Think of confirmation bias as a tendency that tends to operate without you realising. Given that it can vitiate your processing to a degree that losses and frustration can arise, such a bias requires intentionality when making betting decisions. To truly avoid them, you actually have to know, acknowledge, and actively understand them.
We will use this article to provide this level of assistance. We will discuss why confirmation bias can be concerning when it occurs during your betting experiences, how it can manifest within various betting contexts, and how each concern can have a natural counter.
Why Confirmation Bias Is A Concern When Betting On Sports
Quite surprisingly, sports betting has the type of nature that it increases its depth as you familiarise yourself with it. You start with the basics, get in step with football betting odds explained, learn staking strategies, understand research and data, and then you even become self-aware about how this entire sequence works.
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A confirmation bias, regardless of its typology or intensity, is an error in this system. Rather than being able to judge circumstances as clearly as possible, these fallacies work in a way that creates an imbalance.
The sliding scale tells us that they can lead to substantial errors in how you assess betting opportunities, the arcs of sports events, probabilities, and, ultimately, how you manage your money. Incessant losses that are genuinely avoidable are certainly unfortunate circumstances, which is why actively avoiding confirmation biases is more important than it seems.
Overall, biases of all kinds are unfitting for online gambling. Even your own emotional bias toward your favourite team is a suboptimal phenomenon for something as calculator-centric as betting. As such, whatever doesn’t entail emotional connection shouldn’t have a place in proper betting.
Case 1: Benchmarks And Recency
While the hypothesis-testing behaviour phenomenon has shown plenty of formats of a confirmation bias since the mid-20th century, the idea of the anchoring bias has been particularly popular as a type that influences gamblers from a psychological standpoint.
The anchoring idea is the impact that an initial piece of information has on your psyche. You are using it as an anchor because your entire perception revolves around that particular set-up. If a team starts out slow, a better form down the season may have a watered-down effect in your perception, which makes you particularly focused on betting against that team because of the anchor.
The natural counter to this is quite simple: maintain focus on how teams/athletes evolve or devolve in their form, especially via the eye test of consulting as many advanced metrics as possible. Understanding the arc is essential in knowing where they’re currency at.
This is particularly essential when thinking about the reverse of the anchoring effect, which is the recency bias. This might be one of the most popular types of confirmation biases because of its tendency to permeate narratives, especially with awards.
Confirmation bias is about relying too much on recent context without recognising underlying or fundamental issues. If a team’s defence is doing well enough recently by not conceding too many goals per match, it doesn’t change the fact that the unit may be devoid of talent or ability. The same applies to the reverse, when disparaging a unit, player, or team that is simply going through a bad time, but they can always have a breakout.
With recency bias, you should never rule out a significant swing in fortunes, especially if the recent form is relatively different to what you expect from a team, player, etc.
Case 2: Overrelying on Patterns Instead of Acknowledging Randomness
This is a simple confirmation bias that, without mincing words, is the type of phenomenon when you fancy yourself a genius who sees connections everywhere. We’re talking about the spectrum of correlations without causation, which is something that many of us have issues with.
Naturally, you may be a genius, and you may be right in how you assess certain situations. There are plenty of connections that you could make between form, the eye test, stats, advanced analytics, and the overall system that leads to certain results.
However, gambling is gambling, and the issue will always be to recognise the idea of randomness. This is why certain things are entropic nightmares that lead to unexpected results. Any given fixture can be a collapse or a resounding success, not a reason to blame referees for fixing matches.
As such, when studying for context when preparing to make bets, think about what things are aberrations, and which are patterns. Some teams have issues beating good opponents, while others are the type that lose concentration against weaker competition.
This is where you need to scale back any innate bias towards seeing patterns, recognise flukes, and see if there is something to consider as a pattern. We’re not saying that you should ignore any familiarity between circumstances nor dismiss them, but filtering your instinct toward seeing patterns is a way to mitigate confirmation bias.
Case 3: Precedent Success Making You Ignore Odds
This is yet another type of confirmation bias that can easily turn into circumstances that, for lack of more fitting words for this context, tax arrogance. You can have a hand in your own losses not just by making bad decisions, but by having undercooked processes.
Precedent success can easily be proof that you are good. You may have a good way of preparing for your bets, your betting intuition may be top-notch, or Lady Fortune is smiling upon you. However, luck makes things unpredictable (as explained in the previous section), which should remind you that there is a humbling factor in this.
Overconfidence is what can make you believe a bit too much in your ability to override odds. Some bookies may provide numbers for certain underdogs, and this confirmation bias may lead to you scoffing at them in the sense that you actually see an obvious upset in the making. Sometimes, there will be a stunner per your intuition.
Other times, the books were actually right, and their understanding of their situation was just a little better. This is where you need to filter out your previous success. Just taking each situation in a vacuum is the best way to have a certain sense of clarity.
Case 4: Loss Aversion Affecting Enjoyment
Are you afraid of the fact that every single bet that you make will turn to ruin? It may simply seem that betting is not for you, in which case you may be right. However, there are also circumstances when you’re just experiencing a level of loss aversion that has poisoned your perception of gambling in general.
The most rudimentary way of understanding gambling is to accept the fulcrum of wins and losses. Sometimes, things just work in a very frustrating way because that’s how the arc of gambling goes, and sports betting is no better than that. Yes, preparation allows you to be closer to the likelihood than a game based on RNG.
However, once you accept the idea that there will be losses, there is a certain method to respond to them, which is particularly toxic. We are talking about chasing those losses on the biased basis that, at some point, a big bet is going to hit, and you are going to recoup said losses. This is beyond problematic, and it’s a reason why gambling addiction can stem from the inability to stop.
The most important thing here is to realise that losses are a natural part of your betting days, but they are not the nemesis of enjoyment. Sometimes, near misses have bittersweet entertainment to them, just like near wins. This is why you should remember that living with losses, rather than chasing them, is the most responsible thing to do!