Three Punting
Traps and avoiding them
1. Perfectionist
Vs Opportunist
Everyone who's had a
play around with gambling (and lost) wants to get better at it and
win. Well, generally speaking of course - there are exceptions to
the rule but that gets in to way too heavy psychological areas so
we'll leave that alone for now. So how do you get better? Most people's
first port of call these days are internet sites that actually do
provide some information (like this one immodestly) and not
just exist for the sole purpose of flogging horse racing systems with
those "magical formulas" and "secrets the bookmakers
don't want you to know". P-l-l-leeease! Go back to the 1980's!!
So a lot of people will
digest many many internet articles and read many books on the issue
and also read many articles suggesting why gambling is the ruination
of all mankind and a pox on your house will follow you every day of
your life that you decide to gamble on anything at all and how your
first born will be taken by the banks etc etc etc.
You'll probably read
half a dozen treatises on the issue telling you why it can't work.
You will probably then think of seven different mathematical models
for generating more revenue than investment, you'll mentally circle
the one you think has the most potential and you'll then find yourself
locked in to total INACTION and come up with 25 new
reasons why something won't work and find yourself paralysed by the
fear of failure to the point of doing absolutely nothing. The psychos
call it analysis paralysis - and it doesn't just apply to horse racing
- it applies to all aspects of life because people don't want to be
seen by their relatives and friends as failures so they find themselves
doing absolutely nothing.
Sound familiar? At which
point it should be said their relatives and friends think they are
failures because they never do anything! Vicious circle isn't it?
The we have the opportunist. He/she is someone who sees what they
think is a half way reasonable idea and just runs with it. They jump
in, get things happening in the next 24 hours, make a stack of mistakes
along the way but at least they get on with it. Something does happen.
Usually they lose, find another idea and start the cycle again.
The correct approach
of course is somewhere in the middle. You don't want to rush in like
a bull in a china shop (has there ever really been a bull in a
china shop?) but you don't want to hesitate the point of being
too scared to try anything new either.
Any kind of personal
growth requires NEW actions, but NOT perfect actions. No one is ever
going to be 100% right - probably 50% is the best you can aspire to
in this game for the LONG HAUL and a consistent 50% result in your
actions in the long haul is going to see you way in front of anyone
who can do 100% for a couple of weeks. We have designed many strategies
over the years and not one of them has proven to be 100% correct but
we have found a lot of ideas that consistently come up with a 30 -
50% result which is why we combined them all in to Multimeth searching
for the long term result we hope is possible. In short, not ONE thing
is perfect - but EVERYTHING must be!
If you are trying to
develop your own punting / gambling ideas you don't have to do it
"exactly right 100% of the time". Get rid of that idea straight
away or you will go mad - instead of "doing it right 100% of
the time" just think of "doing the best I can most of the
time" and you will feel immensely better for it.
2. Tortoise Vs
The Hare
Aesop was a pretty cluey
guy - when he wrote the fable about the tortoise and the hare, it
is impossible to imagine he was talking about punting on the races
- but he was. Making a small income from racing is rather akin to
a huge goal but one that should be approached using small tasks on
a regular basis. When you get goals and tasks confused, you tend to
overwhelm your thinking power in to believe it all has to be done
NOW - YESTERDAY - IN THE NEXT RACE. Nothing could be further from
the truth.
Quite often on the front
page of this site I include this saying: A gambler’s biggest
failure is generally to overestimate what they can win in a month
and underestimate what they can win in a year.
Ending up with a good
profit at the end of the year is a difficult GOAL - it will probably
take around 140 different betting days of making a profit on each
of those days - and each of those days should be broken down in to
a TASK. You can even break down that task further in to 5 to 10 races
on each of those days as being a mini-task. By breaking down the goal
in to tasks over a long period of time (relatively for we short life
span span humans), it makes the goal possible to achieve - even a
goose like me can understand that. Every mini task achieved gets you
closer to the long term goal and I have proven it myself that it will
happen faster than you think ONCE you take the first step.
3. It can't get
any worse!
Oh
yes it can. Don't fall in to the trap of playing around with a gambling
idea for a few weeks of wild success and be filled with the need to
declare the game over and too easy. If you're going to claim success,
you better make sure the success is real and not imagined. Remember
good old George Bush standing on the deck of that ship in the Middle
East and declaring the war on Iraq was over? How many years have gone
by since? What's still happening there now?
There
is absolutely no reason at all why you can’t get worse in any
area of your life. In fact it's simple to get worse. It’s when
you’re overconfident that you’re vulnerable to defeat.
Humility and confidence WILL allow you to make giant strides forward
and retain the good results. A study I saw on another web site found
that people who told friends about their goal intentions were less
likely to achieve their goal. The researchers suspected that they
felt a sense of satisfaction from saying their goal out loud and getting
the favorable, positive response from their friends. In other words,
they may have felt like they had succeeded before they had even started!
Before the first lesson had begun they were doing a George Bush!
At
the end of the day, your goal of a good financial return over the
next year from gambling (in whatever form you select), can
and WILL only be achieved if you take on one small task at
a time, one task after after another (using a consistent approach
you have proven to be right on percentages), and acting in a manner
of humility and civility. If you can't approach your goals in that
manner you are doomed to failure. Sorry to be so blunt about it but
that's the way it is.
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