College Football Betting: Things You Must Not Do
By Loot, NCAA Football Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
In college football betting, there are things you must do in order to win. Those things are difficult to explain and even harder to acquire. Veteran sports bettors who consistently win take years and even decades honing their craft. Easier to learn are the things you must avoid doing–pitfalls that swallow up hordes of bettors year after year.
Look at it like you're an insect trying to get into a house. There are predators and insecticide you need to avoid, a periphery of poison around the house with just a few gaps in which you can enter. And when you get in the house, there are a bunch of other things that can kill you. That's what it's like being a NCAA football bettor trying to gain entry into the club of winners–an exclusive group indeed.
One of the first things to watch out is what motivates you to bet on a certain game. The drive behind any bet should be that you have a few nice nuggets of original information and insight that makes you lean towards a side. Or perhaps you are getting exceptional value on a wager. Where a lot of us run into trouble is when we start betting for mostly entertainment purposes. There is a game on TV and we want action.
We might make a case in our head for why we should be taking a team, but deep down, we know the thrust behind the wager is coming from a bad place. It's not even really a bad place, it's just that you need to determine what kind of sports bettor you want to be–a serious one or one who is mostly in it for fun. Serious bettors have a lot of standards for whether they will make a bet and one of them isn't to make a game more fun to watch.
Another thing we never want to do is bet with money we need. This is time-worn advice and who here among us hasn't bet $1000 on game when we had $1004 to our name? It's just that the more times you fly close to the flame like that, the more you will notice how good fate never favors desperation. You don't even have to believe in cosmic forces to have noticed how the gambling gods seem to frown on those who most need to win and are pining the hardest to come out ahead.
Some of this may stem from how we handle ourselves as the results start mounting, whether we're winning or losing. Losing has a way of eroding the good-sense of gamblers across the whole spectrum of gaming. Casinos bank on this very human element–the need to right “wrongs.” When the average person loses, the first instinct is to get it back quickly. There's nothing “average” about becoming a winner at college football betting.
If we want to become winning college football bettors, we need to check our emotions in at the door. No batter gets a hit every time at the plate and not every running back makes a great run each time he gets handed the ball. We need to look at it like that. If we allow a bad result to become the catalyst for a downward-spiral, we are as good as cooked.
It's surprising how many people struggle with winning. There are two telltale signs of a temporary winner who is about to become a permanent loser. One is how some will begin getting loose with their money, under the absurd pretense that they're “playing with the house's money.” The other pitfall is when bettors start getting a big head after a short window of success.
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Winning money should provide encouragement, but we need to realize that it is in fact our money. Placing bets you would have not otherwise made just because you're “up” is a sure way to not be “up” for long. And if you hear yourself saying, “Damn, I'm good” after winning for 3 straight weekends in football, you might be falling into another deadly trap. Any thoughts of how good you are should only come about after proven success over the course of years. College football betting has a knack for humbling people who get too big for their britches. Never think you're a hotshot after a good day, week, or even month. Success in college pigskin betting is something that takes years and hundreds if not thousands of results to prove.