Availability Bias: Useful Things for Punters

Professional punters are sure that making a bet under the influence of emotions is a serious mistake. One of the reasons for this to be true is the availability bias that changes our intuitive perception. As a result, we tend to answer wrong questions that, in their turn, make us overestimate the likelihood of certain outcomes happening.

Availability Bias Explained

The most exciting aspect of the human brains is that people always have answers to all the questions even if a question is not fully understood. In other words, people can answer an extremely difficult question they do not know how to answer. This becomes possible due to the availability bias that makes us subconsciously replace a difficult question with a simpler one.

The easiest example of substituting the questions can be found when people are buying a shampoo. In this situation, the difficult question looks like:

• What shampoo is the best among all the possible variants?

At the same time, if you are not a shampoo expert, you will not be able to answer the question, and your brain will replace it with a simpler one that will be as follows:

• Which shampoo have I already tried?

The second question proves the thought that people are more likely to choose familiar products rather than to risk buying something new. The given tendency becomes even more strict when the products prices are approximately the same. Since our brain tries to work as efficiently as possible, it saves the resources for the important decisions, which leads to substituting the questions. Although it can be beneficial for people in some cases, the impact of this bias is usually negative, especially if we speak about betting.

As for sports betting, the most important thing here is to properly assess betting odds offered by a bookmaker. Sometimes, however, this task is unrealizable for human brains. When you see that Barcelona has a 70% chance of winning, your brain considers this issue as a difficult one to check. The problem here is that our brain is developed to think in yes/no categories rather than to be able to distinguish and analyze shades.

As for the football example above, the following questions are difficult and easy, correspondingly:

1. What is the probability of Barcelona winning the match?
2. How well can I remember the team’s previous victories?

Since the first question is extremely difficult for you to answer correctly, the brain tends to create a simpler one. If Barcelona happened to confidently win a few last games, you will evidently assess the team’s chances of winning as high. At the same time, you should understand here that the answer cannot be used for betting purposes.

In order to better understand the availability bias impact, let us consider the following situations when people are more likely to face it:

1. Hollywood divorces and terror attacks are heavily advertised in the media, which makes people overestimate their likelihood;
2. Goals scored directly after a corner survive in gamblers’ minds for a long time, which makes people overestimate the real probability of goals occurring after a football corner.

The Truth about Corners

Since the thought mentioned above seems to be common and doubtless, numerous scientists tried to either prove or contradict such a great importance of corner kicks. Although stadium crowds across the world tend to celebrate as their favorite team is going to shoot off a corner kick, the scientists have found that corners are not so dangerous as they are considered. Yes, a number of corners can be chained with a number of shots, but a higher number of corner kicks does not obviously lead to a goal. To be more exact, ten EPL seasons provided the scientists with the information that only 20% of all the corners resulted in a shot on goal, while only 11% was turned into goals. From a statistical point of view, a corner has a 0.022% probability of leading to a goal. With this in mind, it would be more reasonable to stop considering corner kicks as something useful or beneficial.

At the same time, we should consider the conclusion above with a grain of salt. The fact is that the analysis did not consider that not each corner is shot off to lead to a goal. There can be a lot of cases when teams try to kill off time with the help of one. Moreover, it is necessary to remember that some teams are better at corners than others.

When we consider the adjustments above, some correlation between corners and goals can be identified but it will be quite small. If you still want to bet on corners, you can succeed in live betting. The fact is to bet against a team that gets a corner. The reason for this is that you will obtain the probability to trade out of your position again at improved odds as soon as the dangerous situation has passed. This strategy can be performed by trading on a betting exchange. Finally, you should remember that no strategy may be applied blindly without previous analysis and assessment.

General Principles of Availability Bias Explained

When we want to precisely understand how the availability bias works, it is necessary to take a look at the experiment conducted by German psychologist Norbert Schwarz. In the experiment, the scientist asked two groups to assess their ability to assert themselves. The main difference was that people from Group 1 were asked to describe 6 situations when they showed the ability, while representatives of Group 2 were to name 12 situations.

At first, it was expected that people from Group 2 would think of themselves as assertive, but the answer was surprising. The fact is that it was easier for people from Group 1 to find 6 necessary examples, which made them believe they were extremely assertive. At the same time, the necessity to find 12 examples was quite difficult to deal with, and the people decided that they were less assertive. The given tendency works equally effective in other spheres, too.

Availability Bias in Betting

Considering the fact that the availability bias can be found in any sphere of our life, the betting industry is not an exception. It can be found every time strong favorites play. As a rule, odds on these teams drop heavily when there is only an hour left before kick-off, which happens because a lot of wagers are placed on the teams to win.

Under these conditions, the availability bias makes us believe that it will be extremely profitable to contradict the common trend. Here, betting on underdogs seems to be attractive because the odds are extremely high. The main explanation for this is the fact that it is rather difficult to recall when these teams performed well for the last time.

Also, the bias under consideration forces us to pay attention to very recent information that can be easily used to identify some trends. However, it is necessary to think in long-term patterns if you want to achieve successful results. Thus, ignoring the temptation to be controlled by a short-term trend can give you an edge over bookmakers and other gamblers.

Final Judgment

So, the given article has just presented the exhaustive information on what the availability bias is and how it can influence our betting. The most important advice here is that it is not enough to know everything about a sport you bet on; it is also of key importance to ask yourself correct questions.