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How to deal with a red? Analyse, close the position and start over.

How to deal with a red? Analyse, close the position and start over.

Before taking any action, when things go wrong it is important to find out what failed: totally wrong analysis, correct analysis and it was just part of the law of probabilities, bad luck...

Independently of what my conclusion to the above is, what I always do is close my position, every time.

by Paulo Rebelo   |   comments 0
Saturday, April 4 2015


Even if you are an experienced bettor you are not immune to mistakes, you are not immune to placing an Under bet and your team conceding right after against all logic.

When this happens, close your position immediately, reanalyse and proceed as normal.

This happens to me a lot, I preform my match analysis and things just don't go my way. This migh have several reasons:

  • My analysis was wrong, I might have missed something – we must know how to admit these sort of things;
  • My analysis was correct and I was just a victim of the probabilities;
    • I may think that Benfica has a 90% chance of scoring first and my analysis is sound but, even so, statistics tell us that 1 out of 10 times Benfica will not score first, the other team will.
    • So, our first step must be to figure out if we did some mistake of if this was simply probabilities at work.
  • What happened was simply bad luck.
    • Benfica might have already belted two shots to the crossbar and missed a penalty and on a fortuitous counter the other team scored.
    • This was just bad luck.

My main point is, when things go wrong we must try and figure out what failed.

  • If it was just bad luck, I'll probably just keep my bet.
  • If it was purely probabilities, it depends, I must reanalyse the match and then, it might be better to keep my bet.
  • If I totally missed my analysis, I have to accept it, learn from my mistake and understand that it comes with the territory.

Independently of my conclusion about what happened, I always close my bet, ALWAYS.

This rule is also valid when my analysis is correct: every time there is a goal I close my position.

I made myself do it, that is, it is now automatic. If I'm on the market and a goal appears, this always represents a huge variation on my gains and losses over the normal, 0 goals market, so I always close my bet and start over.

If a goal was scored and I lost 1000, I close my position right there and start again, the only difference, instead of starting from 0, now I start from -1000. And from here onward my objective is no longer to turn a profit at the end of my trading period but to finish with a result greater than the -1000 I have now.

Emotionally it is very important to be happy about getting at the end of our trading period with -600. Yes, I lost 600 but, it is important to know that closing with -1000 was a lot worse.


Practical example

What happened to me a lot before I forced myself to close my bets after a goal (winning or losing) was:

  • I was backing a team and that team conceded a goal
  • I did not close my bet and just stood there watching… waiting and "praying" for my team to score.
  • But I was doing nothing, just watching…
  • Then I began to realize that there were moments where if I was working instead of "praying" I could have cut my losses.
  • But, as I was stuck on my initial position, there was nothing I could do…

So, in order to help my emotional control, because we are humans, not robots, I close my position immediately. After that, with my position closed, I'm capable of analysing the match and the market without any emotion and understand where the value lies: continue with the same position as before, open the opposite position or do nothing.

The opposite case also demonstrates, perhaps even better, the reason why I always close my position after a goal:

  • I was backing a team and they scored
  • That team's odd dropped steeply and  event then I could not close my position
  • My thoughts: "Why should I close my bet now and lose some of my profit when my team is even more likely to win?"
  • However, if I had closed my position and thought: is it worth to back this team to win at 1.10 odd? My answer would be no, the odd clearly does not outweigh the risk.

As such, if the answer to this question was so easy to understand, I made myself close my position every time after a goal, either winning or losing.

Hugs,
PR


Comment (1)
  1. GAWI 21 Sep 2021 - 18:33
    Thanks for sharing this, interesting story.