Accept Losses as Part of the Game
Acknowledging that losses are an intrinsic part of betting is fundamental to your success. Once you accept this, you free your mind from tension, making more rational and focused decisions. Interestingly, the more you resist something, like losses, the more likely you are to encounter it.
Focus on Managing Risk, Not Just Winning
Many novice bettors focus on picking winners, but the pros know that managing risk is what really counts. This approach extends your betting lifespan and fosters continuous learning, leading to more profitable outcomes over time.
Bet for Profits, Not Just Thrills
What motivates your betting? Is it the pursuit of excitement or the goal of making profits? If it's the former, your approach may be casual, lacking in structure. However, if it's about profitability, your decisions will likely be more strategic, aiming to optimize gains and minimize losses.
Value the Process Over the Outcome
For professionals, the betting process is paramount. It's not just about winning bets; it's about adhering to a disciplined, well-thought-out strategy. This "mastery approach" leads to a sense of satisfaction from knowing you've done everything possible to secure the best result.
Take a Long-Term Perspective
"Get rich slowly." Patience and a long-term outlook are essential in sports betting. Short-term setbacks are part of the journey. It's about staying focused on your strategy, executing flawlessly, and not getting swayed by the highs and lows of your recent performances.
Savor the Small Victories
Starting out, even the smallest win feels fantastic. Over time, the craving for bigger stakes and wins grows. But remember, many successful bettors have built their success on multiple small wins, not just the occasional big score. They're masters at risk management, reveling in the gradual growth of their bankroll.
Develop a Healthy Relationship with Money
Your attitude towards money can profoundly influence your betting behavior. Respecting your betting bank as real money, not just numbers on a screen, is critical to making wise decisions and becoming a successful sports trader.
Believe in Your Ability to Win
Lastly, belief in your ability to win is crucial. With the advent of sports spread betting and betting exchanges, the power dynamics in betting have shifted. You now have the tools and resources to gain an edge. It's no longer just the bookie who can come out on top. For more insights on maximizing your chances in sports betting, visit link.
If You Want to Be a Winner, Shift Your Mindset
Interviews with industry insiders reveal that thinking like a bookie – not a punter – is key to success. Avoid the traps set by the betting industry and focus on leveraging resources to your advantage. Success in sports betting is within reach, but it demands a professional approach, discipline, and, most importantly, a change in mindset. About Steve Ward – The Mind Behind the Winner's Mindset Steve Ward is renowned for aiding individuals in finance, sports betting, and poker to achieve exceptional performance and profitability through his coaching and consulting services. Author of "Sports Betting To Win" and "High Performance Trading," Steve has a track record of establishing successful trading teams and contributing to industry education, including his work with the Centaur Sports Trading Academy and as a consultant on the BBC's "Million Dollar Traders." Reach out to Steve at info@highperformanceglobal.com or visit www.highperformanceglobal.com for more insights.
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Data Collection
A sample of OSB television advertisements was selected for the present study (N = 135). The study was conducted in the context of a broader study in which all the authors took part (Lopez-Gonzalez et al. 2017a, b). Advertisements were downloaded from the official YouTube channels of 29 different betting brands.1 The number of advertisements per brand selected ranged from 1 to 19. These brands were selected based on their popularity on specialised internet forums, profit rankings in the gambling trade journal iGaming Business, and their presence as sponsors, official partners, or regular advertisers in sport events. The sample comprised advertisements that met the following inclusion criteria:
(1) only those advertising soccer were included, thus excluding horse and dog racing as well as other sports whose popularity is more country-specific; (2) only advertisements from Spain and the UK were selected because these were the two languages that the authors could understand as native speakers, and the representativeness of La Liga and Premier League competitions in European soccer (1st and 3rd, respectively, in UEFA ranking); (3) the advertisements belonged to companies with a legal license to operate in one or both of the countries analysed; (4) the upload date of the adverts had to be from June 2014 to September 2016; (5) the adverts had to have a televisual and temporal format (between 20 and 60 s duration). This latter inclusion criterion excluded made-for-internet promotions that typically allow informal shooting or discussion-like videos including tipsters sponsoring a brand. Also, longer advertisements were excluded because they were unlikely to have been shown on television; (6) the advertisements had to mention OSB, excluding those only addressing offline betting.
Additionally, nine UEFA Champions League, Premier League, and La Liga soccer matches (including pre- and post-match advert breaks) were recorded from May to June 2016. The aim was to double check if those advertisements seen on televised matches corresponded, and were also available, on the brands’ YouTube channels, in order to ascertain how similar the two samples were. The results confirmed that every television advertisement was made accessible, sometimes with a few weeks’ delay, via the operator’s YouTube profile. Also, the electronic banners around the soccer field were analysed to make sure no betting brand being promoted was excluded from the study sample.
Procedure
Advertisements were collected and analysed initially by first author over a period of 8 months. To reduce the subjective interpretation in the coding, a sub-sample of 23 advertisements (17% of the sample of 135 advertisements) from British television was randomly selected in order to be coded by all the authors. After discussing the operational definitions regarding CMT, each author independently analysed the selected sub-sample and shared with others his understanding of what constituted a structural metaphor in OSB. After a more nuanced agreement was reached, a second round of analysis was conducted. As three coders were involved in the task, the inter-coder reliability was calculated using ReCal3, an online software designed for nominal data coding designs with three or more coders for which Cronbach’s alpha is not appropriate. The mean inter-coder reliability using Krippendorff’s alpha was 0.956 (SD 0.06, range from 0.78 to 1), much higher than the conservative 0.80 coefficient typically recommended by the author in the context of content analysis (Krippendorff 2013). Once this coding method was deemed appropriate, the first author concluded the analysis of the remaining sample.
CMT was applied in search for entailments that marked the transference of meaning from a source to a target domain. As the purpose of the sample was not being representative, betting brands were not singled out in the analysis and all the advertisements were considered as a single unit of analysis in which the different structural metaphors, to be truly regarded structural as such, should emerge across a variety of betting brands and time periods. The rationale for this was to identify underlying metaphorical conceptualisations as ingrained in the OSB culture of advertising as possible, even as to go unnoticed by advertisers themselves.
A preliminary list of metaphors was identified by the first author. After closer examination, most of those metaphors were discarded based on three criteria. Firstly, despite the purpose of the sample being analytical, a more general representativeness was sought after in the metaphors selected. Thus, metaphors identified in less than one-fifth of the advertisements were excluded. Secondly, the selected metaphors needed to be structural, with a detectable source domain that systematically and consistently framed the domain of significance of sports betting. Thirdly, the selected structural metaphors and their entailments were better positioned in connection with the ongoing research conversation regarding gambling advertising and had more far-reaching implications in terms of socially responsible gambling.
