Quote from: bbc.reporter on February 02, 2020, 02:10:07 AM

@tyKiwanuka. What was your worstest experience on bad luck, how long did it last and what did you do to overcome it mentally?

I talked a bit about that here:

Quote from: tyKiwanuka on January 29, 2020, 01:12:08 PM

There were losing stretches, but you should always think longterm, variance happens. My first losing month came after 3.5 years of betting and it even was two losing months in a row with quite some losses. Was hard to digest at first, but I looked at the big picture. I had won amount X during all those years and now I have lost 10% of that, no big deal and it was expected to happen at some point. I was still confident with my abilities and trusted my system. Took my foot off the gas a bit, lowered the stakes and tried to forget about what happened and have a fresh start. It worked and it took a long time for the next losing month to appear on my spreadsheet again.

And this was maybe the worst experience, since it was something that never happened before. For the first 3.5 years, the only direction I knew was up. And then suddenly nothing was going my way anymore and I couldn't understand what is happening, because I didn't change anything with my betting style. It was two months, where even a 1.01 bet would lose easily for me. I more or less kept going as stated in the quote, but lowered my stakes of course (also due to the fact, that I was staking a percentage of my betting bank always and that bank was shrinking all the time). Also talked to my fellow punters and they tried to help me with giving more bets of their own and bring back some confidence with winning those. So slowly but surely I got back on track and was able to win again.

Looking back, it was a mix of greed, variance and getting a bit too cocky and/or thinking the (betting) world is mine. I learned my lesson and it made me aware of the fact, how fast this business is and that it can be over any day. So you better not make too longterm-ish plans and take nothing for granted.

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The worst single event of bad luck, was a football match in Champions League. I don't recall exactly whom played whom (tried to search for it, but no luck), I only know it was Bayern Munich playing an away game and I had a bet on the over 3.5 goals. It was 2-1 for Bayern and 3 minutes of injury time were added. The other team had a corner with one minute left to play. The goalie decided to move upfront as well and all 22 players were in or around the Bayern box. A Bayern defender headed the ball away and Paulo Guerrero from Bayern picked it up and ran uncontested towards the empty goal to make it 3-1 and win the bet for me. When Guerrero was past midfield already, the referee blew the final whistle at 92:30 minutes and I couldn't believe my eyes (well, more my ears to be precise). Match ended 2-1 then, with 30sec less played than announced.

I felt robbed and had to buy a new keyboard afterwards, since it hit the wall and didn't survive Grin

Quote from: nutildah on February 02, 2020, 05:51:19 AM

I just got finished reading the entire thread (good job, I thoroughly enjoyed it) and I don't think I saw anybody ask this question:

Is there any one sport/league that you find to be particular easy in terms of spotting a bargain?

And going in the opposite direction, which sport/league do you find the most difficult to make a correct pick?

Thank you for your feedback buddy.

It's not any particular sport/league that makes it easy to find valuable odds, but more the lower and smaller you go in general. If we look at the NFL, there is really not much hidden or inside information. It's well covered, any stat you can think of is available and news spread very fast. So gaining an edge is very hard there, unless you have a very well developed gut feeling.
Now if you go to Canadian Football League things are different. It's not that well covered, because the public interest in it is not that big. There you are able find some useful information and angles to make profitable bets - if you put in the work.
When you even go one step lower and shift your interest on lets say the German (american) Football League, there is even more information to be found. And in these leagues, the bookmakers don't bother to make any research themselves. They have their statistic models/algorithms and just put the odds up without looking further into it. With you checking the regional newspapers, checking the teams website, reading forums etc., you can get information that is not priced in in the odds. This could be some flu going around in the locker room, some players missing the game because of university exams (they are amateurs and not pros in GFL), some fresh injury to the QB, things like that.

I can give you an actual example of how such information made me some money. It was the last race in winter sports Cross-Country World Cup Season some years ago. For a german athlete it was his last race and he retired afterwards. It was a 15km race and you are allowed to change your ski during the race. That german dude announced the day before, that he would, to honour the sport and his career, change his ski mid-time during the race and instead of using the modern, high-tech skis, he would use some wooden, oldschool skis that people used to wear in the 1960´s. Such wooden skis are probably nice and it was a good gesture of him using them in some pro race nowadays, but there is no way that you can be competitive with these Grin

Bookmakers didn't know or didn't bother and still offered a H2H bet involving this athlete. My friend and me placed max bet on his opponent at every bookmaker where this H2H was available. While being on his modern skis, the german dude and his H2H opponent were still together in the pack, but after putting on his wooden skis (and just running for fun), he lost lots of time of course and finished down 5 minutes to our guy. It was easy money for us and such valuable information can often be found in smaller leagues and non-mainstream sports.

The hardest sports/league to bet on for me, and where I actually had some bets, is Baseball (MLB). Results there are very random and the sheer amount of games played (sometimes twice a day) just makes a single game not that important for the players. They play 162 regular season games and swing their bats nearly every day. So they don't bother a lot with losing on any given day - the next game will be just tomorrow. You can already see the difficulty betting the MLB by looking at the odds. You rarely see a team priced below 1.60 and that already shows how random the results in MLB are. Even if the worst team plays the best team, you will have quite balanced odds. And with not much valuable extra information to be found, this for me is the hardest sport to bet on. NBA and NHL are not any better btw. NFL is a bit different in that regard from the Big4 in US, because with only 16 regular season games, every game is very important and NFL players tend to have some pride, even when 0-10 for the season.