One of the most important aspects of sports betting is record-keeping. Every bettor who wants to succeed in the long run needs to constantly track and analyze his bets. It might not be the funniest thing to do but every day you need to take time and write down your results. This is the only way to know what are you are doing right or wrong and where your profits or losses stand at any time.
The importance of tracking your bets
If you want to make money from betting you need to act as a professional. Even if you want to earn a side-income or become a professional punter you have to keep a full record of your bets. You have to consider yourself as any other business owner who is always keeping track of his sales and expenses.
Sports betting should be treated no differently. You have to know the amount you have invested in your bets and what is your profit or loss at any given time. You should be able to analyze at what type of markets you are performing better, at what odds or sports and many other important metrics. If you are testing new strategies record keeping is the best way to check their profitability and what is needed to be changed in order to make them profitable.
Record keeping can also help you in the mental aspect of betting. How do you feel when you are having a losing week or a losing month? Going through and overcoming losing runs is difficult and requires discipline to continue forward. If you are profitable in the long run by checking your overall stats it’s easier to cope with a losing run.
What information should you track
Now, let’s see what information you should be tracking. Everyone may have a different way to track his bets but you should definitely write down the following:
- Event
- Date
- Selection
- Bookmaker
- Stake
- Odds
- Final result
- Profit or loss
This is the bare minimum that you need for every single bet that you make. If other stats are more important to you then you can also take a note of them. The above list contains the essential information that you need. There is much other information that you can take a note of and can help you in the long run to make profitable decisions. Those are not measurable and can be recorded in a form of a diary. Some of those points are listed below.
- How the odds moved when you placed the bet?
- What are the opening odds?
- What forced you to make that bet?
- How confident were you when opening your position?
- What happened in the game and you lost or won a bet?
- A thought of a bet that didn’t make. Was that a winning or a losing bet?
It is important to note that in order to make safe assumptions the size of the sample has to be big. You cannot make a safe estimation with a handful of bets. Sports betting is a long-term project and you may encounter many winning and losing runs which will ruin your conclusions if you count only them.
Finally, you should track all your bets, even those which you wouldn’t normally take. If you made a bet just for fun or without having done a proper research you should count that bet as well. Betting has a lot to do with the correct mentality and if you are placing bets driven by your emotions you should record them too. You should be honest with yourself and track down every bet you make, even if this was made by a mistake.
Ways to track this information
There are three ways that you can use to track your bets. If you are not into technology you can write down your results into a notebook. This is not recommended as it will be difficult to make calculations of your results. If you are serious about betting you need to invest time or money in more advanced methods.
Secondly, you can use excel spreadsheets to write down your results. If you are familiar with that program you should be fine. Otherwise, there is some other software that you can use. That brings us to the third option. Those platforms have both paid and free plans. I strongly recommend that you use one of them as they have a lot of features like graphs and others and make the whole process a lot easier and effective. If you want to be a professional bettor you have to invest in the best tools to help you achieve your goals.
Conclusion
Even though, it might not seem such important, bet tracking is one of the first things to do if you are starting to treat betting as an investment. Record all your bets, be honest with yourself and I am sure that you will be amazed by the new angles that you can find in your betting.
I hope that you have found this article useful and informative. If so feel free to share it or leave a comment below.