I knew that was going to happen!
Being conscious of hindsight bias will save you a lot of stress on your sports betting journey
Hey everyone! Hope you’ve had a lovely week and a half since I last wrote. I spent this past week in Cape Cod with my family as I’ve been doing every summer for basically my entire life. It’s one of my favorite weeks of the year; one that consists of family, grilled meats and veggies, canoeing, swimming, stringed instrument jam sessions, and most importantly… rock skipping.
If you’ve known me for a while you know my family has an annual rock skipping tournament. We take it pretty seriously and it has become the main event of our family gatherings. We collect stones all year in preparation for rock selection, which is a snake draft that occurs the night before the tournament. The tournament is always held on a Sunday and is 11 rounds plus a replacement round (round 12 replaces your lowest score from the other 11 rounds). There are awards for the most total skips, most skips in a single throw, and style (ranges anywhere from throwing motions to rock/stone puns to wild costumes).
This year the winner of the 2022 rock skipping tournament was… YOUR BOY! The trophy will be back in Boston for a second straight year and I’m honored to carry the flame back-to-back. It was a wonderful week.
Now back to the sports betting…
Let’s talk about hindsight bias
The title of this article is “I knew that was going to happen!” because it’s something we have all said over the course of our sports betting careers. You’re looking at the board all day, crunching the numbers, and you see a bet you like. For one reason or another, however, you’re apprehensive. Maybe there’s a player who is questionable with a bum ankle. Maybe you’re suspicious of the price movement throughout the day. Maybe you just have a funny feeling in your stomach. Whatever the reason, you lay off.
The game starts and you watch the team you were eyeballing get out to a huge lead. That player’s ankle was just fine after all. They win in a blowout leaving you neither richer nor poorer, but it still feels like you lost. That’s when that dreaded phrase comes out…
I knew that was going to happen.
Here’s the thing: no you didn’t. If you knew it was going to happen you would have bet on it. If we were capable of knowing results ahead of time we would all be rich and the sports betting industry wouldn’t exist.
(Side note: I feel the need to make a Back to the Future II reference here and mention Gray’s Sports Almanac, but I can’t really figure out how to work it seamlessly into my writing. So you’re stuck with this clunky, parenthetical, italicized digression instead.)
You, my friend, have just fallen victim to Hindsight Bias.
Hindsight Bias is defined as “the tendency, upon learning an outcome of an event—such as an experiment, a sporting event, a military decision, or a political election—to overestimate one's ability to have foreseen the outcome.” In other words convincing yourself you “knew it all along” when, in reality, you didn’t.
So let’s go back to our theoretical situation at the beginning: you stayed off a game for a few different reasons that were clear at the time but in retrospect look idiotic. Let’s take a closer look at the reasoning:
A starter was questionable with an ankle injury.
This is a great reason to stay off a game. Maybe you read the reports and watched the press conferences and didn’t like the tones of them. Even if the player was likely to play maybe you didn’t think he would be 100% and his impact would be limited. Capturing this uncertainty is extremely difficult to do and often the best course of action is to stay away from the game.
You were suspicious of the price movement
You were eyeballing this game all day. You liked your pick at +125 and you loved it at +130. Then it jumped to +140, +150 and now it’s sitting at +155. You still love the pick, as does your model, but you can’t understand why the implied probability has gone from 44.4% to 39.2%. You understand market dynamics and why prices move (maybe you read my first newsletter article) and come to the logical conclusion: you must be missing something. This a tough one to stomach, as you still can’t pinpoint where you were off. It’s possible you weren’t off at all, but you consider it unlikely because you respect the sportsbooks and thousands of professional bettors who shape the lines. This scenario proves one thing: you’re smart enough to recognize when you might be wrong. Depending on your risk tolerance you can still back your model here, but the decision to stay off is indicative of maturity and intelligence. Don’t beat yourself up and try to figure out what you may have missed.
You had a funny feeling in your stomach
This is more about risk tolerance than anything else. If you’re getting weird feelings in your stomach before placing bets it means it’s time to examine why you’re nervous in the first place. Are you betting too much? Do you get stressed out when you have action? Are you afraid to lose? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, it might be time to think about why you’re betting to begin with. If you’re betting recreationally you might want make your unit smaller so you’re not stressing over each bet. If you’re trying to be a professional bettor you might want to examine your bankroll management strategy. If you’re happy with your unit size and staking strategy but still get queasy it might be time to reconsider if betting is for you. Sports betting is not worth doing if you’re not making money or enjoying it, so once again this is a perfectly acceptable reason to abstain from betting.
So in reality, based on everything I just said, your decision not to bet on this game was a good one even though the bet won. You correctly identified uncertainty you weren’t comfortable with surrounding injury information and price movements. You also internally identified discomfort connected with wagering. You made a great call not betting on this game.
The problem with Hindsight Bias is that we usually only experience it negatively. You rarely say to yourself “Thank God I stayed off that game, I knew it was a loser!” (The logical response to this statement would be “if you truly knew it was a loser you would have bet the other side”). So over time you convince yourself you always make the wrong decision. The truth of the matter is you make a lot of good decisions but only recognize when those decisions go wrong.
When betting be conscious of Hindsight Bias and actively remind yourself why you made the decision you made. You can use the following template to help comfort yourself in this situation: Yeah the bet won, but the lineup wasn’t confirmed yet. Yeah the bet won, but the line kept moving in the wrong direction. Yeah the bet won, but every time you bet on your favorite team you have a miserable time watching the game.
Who gives a fuck how the game ended up? You still made the right decision.
Old school betting story of the week
I recently read a fantastic book called Dead Wake by Erik Larson. It tells the true story of The Lusitania, a passenger ship which was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915. The following is a passage from Dead Wake about a unique type of betting that occurred on ships back in those days:
Lauriat knew well the routines of shipboard life, including the daily pools where passengers placed bets on how many miles the ship would travel in a given day. Places in the pool denoted a particular distance and were auctioned by a ship’s officer. Passengers based their bets on their sense of how the ship would fare given the weather and sea conditions likely to prevail over the next twenty-four hours. The most unpredictable factor was fog, which if it persisted would sharply limit a ship’s progress, for the only safe way of coping with fog was to cut speed and start blowing the ship’s foghorn. The mileage pool and its associated strategizing and arguing and the cigars and whiskey consumed by those present invariably helped spark friendships and break down barriers of formal courtesy and convention.
Go ahead and read that last sentence again. That’s what sports betting is all about. These were complete strangers from all different places and walks of life (though undoubtedly not too diverse a crowd in the early 1910s) coming together to discuss weather factors in the hopes of making some money. Many a drink was drunk, many a cigar smoked, many a friendship made, and many a dollar won. I love everything about this.
If you’re interested in other old school betting stories, you can check out my last article on Vin Scully. I hope you enjoy!
As always, thank you
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