Sports Betting: Ways to Minimize Risks of Loss
What can prevent the player and confuse it on a flat spot? These are some features of our thinking that evolved through the evolution of the brain and had the goal of preserving and multiplying our species, separated from the rest of the higher primates quite recently by the standards of geological epochs.
Often not only the whole mysterious element of unpredictability of sports is against us, but also our own imperfect heuristic approaches and a rather mediocre probability detector. Let us list some of their internal enemies.
Sometimes we are offended to the point of being blind. Blinds are so great that we can’t distinguish randomness from regularity even in the simplest situations. Try it yourself – look at 2 rows of victories and defeats and guess where the randomness, and where the juggling.
- LWLLLLLLWLWLWLLLWWLLWLWWLLWWWWWW
- WLLWWLLLWLWLWWLWLLWLLWWWLLWLWLWW
Many people will be tempted to define the top row as invented, and the bottom one as a natural sequence of victories and defeats of the sports team. Meanwhile, this is a delusion. Just the same bottom line was invented, and the upper one is taken from the statistics of the competition on yachts from 1973 to 2004.
For those who are little acquainted with the theory of probability, this can cause distrust. But the fact is that random events behave differently with a small number of repetitions and with a large number of them. This fact is known as the Law of Large Numbers, and the practical conclusion from it is this: until the number of repetitions reaches a certain threshold value, the empirically observed distribution of random events can deviate to either side from the theoretically given one.
How not to get confused and to distinguish a random series of events from regularity? There is a criterion of Wald-Wolfowitz, which shows how many continuous series of victories and defeats should be expected in a chain of random events.
- We make dozens of free sports predictions every day.
`R_e = (2WL) / (W + L) + 1`
Take the fictional series of victories and defeats, in which 10 consecutive victories follow 10 continuous defeats. We have only 2 continuous series, while according to the Wald-Wolfowitz criterion there should have been 11 series. Unstacking is too great, and it is obvious that this is not a random chain of events, although we already knew it.
If it’s unconvincing to determine by eye, you can approach the matter with proper pedantry and run the formal test to determine the probability that the chain of events contains a hidden regularity. To do this, we first find the standard deviation σ.
- Find the best odds for sports betting.
`sigma = root. (((R_e-1) (R_e-2)) / (W + L-1))`
Then, using any statistical package, for example, an open R, calculate the Z-statistics.
`Z = (R_o – R_e) / σ`
- Re – the expected number of series;
- Ro is the observed number of series.
Better, of course, be able to count yourself, but in which case there is an online version of the test.
For example, you are subscribed to a paid advice specialist for projections and for yourself make notes on the history of forecasts. If your series is aligned so that the Z-statistic takes values corresponding to a probability of 0.5%, then the case is clearly unclean, and this is just a kind of divination by the horoscope.