Sports betting is one of those things that people generally say that it is good to do with our head, but too often we do it with our heart. How many times have you been carried away by your enthusiasm over your favorite football team playing against a hard opponent and even though your team does not have realistic chances of winning, you still have placed a wager on a Malaysian betting site for your favored club to win? And the truth is that each and everyone of us, who is involved in sports betting, has done that.
Sometimes it is just impossible to exclude your emotions from making a decision, whether this decision is a high-involvement decision or a much simpler decision that will not have long-lasting effects on your life.
In sports betting, where admittedly, bettors’ decisions do not carry any significant weight for their life, the interference of emotions in betting choices is inevitable. And this is especially the case with betting on football.
Why? Because, football is one of the top sports with the highest rates of popularity and also a sport where fans are not ‘simple’ fans, but mostly ‘die-hard fans’. This means that emotions get in the way and they do so because they are strong!
Whether a fan of football as a game or a fan of football betting, the one thing that is for sure is that you experience ‘big’ emotions while watching a match or while betting on a match.
To what extent, though, these emotions influence bettors’ picks? Professional bettors are generally said to be, almost exclusively, relying on hard data, evidence, information, statistical analysis and records before they are making a bet. They are calculative and they always assess the potential value and the returns. But if they are this way, then what’s the role of emotions?
Well, emotions are there and they affect people’s decisions, even if these decisions seem to be purely based on rational factors or based on data and analysis. Our emotions are what filter every bit of information and eventually help us make sense of things, either consciously or subconsciously. Although it is our cognitive abilities that allow us to make sense of the world, in the case of football betting, the role of emotions can easily overshadow the cognitive aspect.
Imagine that a bettor who decides to bet on a team is confident that his decision has been driven exclusively from his analysis of the available data and information. He thinks that his choice is purely based on rational criteria and that emotions have not gotten in the way.
Now, if that bettor is a die-hard fan of one of the teams, it is easily understood that his decision can well be biased.
But even if that bettor is not a fan of one of the two teams, the emotions may have something to do with his decision as well.
Take for instance, the Halo effect, which describes the tendency of people to transfer their positive (or negative) emotions and positive (or negative) impressions of something over all other things that have something to do with that something!
A bettor has been exposed to information that shows that one team is very strong, is in a very good shape and is having a winning streak and a deep commitment to continuing this streak.
Now, when he wants to make a decision whether to wager on the win of this team, the bettor will most normally judge all other information based on his initial impression.
A positive impression will be spilled over all relevant data and will lead to the decision of backing this team. And the same works the other way around, with a negative impression leading the bettor to think that all other information and data are negative. In this case the bettor is most likely to decide not to wager on that team to win the match.
So, the seemingly rational decision, which is perceived to have been made on the basis of analysis and statistics, is in fact an emotionally filtered decision.
That said, it is difficult to say whether there are in fact pure rational bettors or pure emotional bettors and thus, you should never worry what type of bettor you are. Both rational and emotional elements get mixed in every decision and this is largely true in the case of football betting, where people develop a “natural” affection for the sport.