How Hard is it Mentally for Bettors to Pitch the Obvious?

I sat down and listened to the Bet With the Best podcast yesterday, which was a (part one) revisit with warm 'n cuddly ITP. 

One area I think it's worth looking at again here on blog has to do with a big, huge, everything of ITP - being able to take a stand against the common funnels in pick n tickets. 

ITP talks about this almost casually, like it's an immutable truth, and if you can't see this strategy as positive, you're from a different horseplayer planet. 

The issue many have, from what I see, is that we are from a different horseplayer planet. Doing what he prescribes and does so easily as a learned heuristic, goes against human nature. 

This isn't the only game where we see this phenomenon. 

In DFS, we'll read the fantasy websites, turn on NFL.com or ESPN or Matt Berry and we'll hear all week how the top-rated running back of the week is Saquon Barkley against the Giants. It's anchored in our minds, and if we don't use him, we feel we're losing something. And losing something so obvious is pain. 

Smart players, as Garett Skiba talks about in DFS and has won million dollar tournaments using, think differently. 

They say there's a chance in a -16.5 chalk game that Hurts gets three TD's with tush pushes and Cooper DeJean returns Gabe Prewitt's buddy DeVito for a pick 6 in the first half. And then Kenneth Gainwell gets the carries in the second half. He pitches, and doesn't care if he loses. 

Kahneman and Tversky won a Noble Prize in 2002 exploring this phenomenon in cognitive bias and behavioral economics; namely, "EV" that everyone talks about is really, really hard to take advantage of, because of the way we're wired.

For example, if people are given the choice to get $400 or a coin flip for $1,000, folks choose the bird in the hand. The bird in the hand is Barkley, the Pletcher firster everyone is talking about on TVG, or the stumbling Sandman in the Rebel. Our mind simply melts if we miss those. We want to avoid this risk because losing is more painful than winning is joy. Self preservation is a reason the human race has been around for 200,000 years. 

ITP's mind, I believe from having success with this strategy for a long time (including just after he taped Chris's pod this week), doesn't melt, it gets excited for it. Skiba's does too. 

There's a lot that goes into making a mind-pivot like this, where it's second nature. You need good bankroll management, a mindset where when the chalk you pitched does beat us, we don't go into regret mode and let if affect our play. We, of course, need the requisite skill to find horses that maximizes our chance to cash outside that one Barkley race. We need to make great tickets. Putting that all together isn't easy. 

But the fact remains. When everyone is funneling a sequence through a set of horses, and we see a different path, we have to at least be open to training our minds to take advantage of it. Accepting that $400 is okay, when a 50% chance at $1,000 is available, is no beuno in a 20% takeout game. 

Have a nice Tuesday everyone.