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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.

This article is copyright RaceRate.com 2012 . All rights reserved. May be copied freely for personal use and yes you can put it up on your web page providing this copyright notice stays in tact.