Overconfidence in Betting Sports Killed This Cat

Overconfidence in Betting Sports Killed This Cat

By Josh Nagel


There’s an old sports axiom, courtesy of John Wooden, that states, “Never mistake activity for achievement.”

This remains in sports lexicon – and found its way there in the first place – because of one Bill Walton, the free-spirited, peace-seeking redhead who went from UCLA All-American to oft-injured NBA journeyman to ultra-bold and super new-agey NBA analyst.

He never misses a chance to pay homage to the nearly 100-year-old legendary coach by repeating this mantra.

We won’t hold this against him, because bashing such a time-honored motto would be horrible … quite possibly the worst idea in the history of Western civilization.

But we are going to twist it just a little bit to illustrate an analogy. In sports betting parlance, a similar motto might read, “Never mistake momentum for knowledge.”

In the past few weeks, I’ve witnessed a couple of examples illustrating that failure to acknowledge this truth can be quite costly.

We’ll get to me in a minute. The first example was a recent contestant on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” whose fatal gaffe was borderline tragic, simply because it didn’t need to happen.

There was an extremely sharp, late 50ish woman from San Francisco in the hot seat, and she immediately ran off about eight answers in a row without even thinking. Of course, most players are bound to get the first couple right, but this woman’s swift and confident answers as the difficulty increased showed she was of above-average smarts for a “Millionaire” player.

After breezing through the early going, there were a couple of questions that caused her to pause. She claimed to be not 100 percent sure, but that an initial thought came to mind for each question, and she would trust her instincts. She was right on both answers. The stakes were going higher, and she was in the enviable predicament of having all four lifelines at her disposal.

Unfortunately, when you invite disaster, it rarely declines. She fell apart on the next question. It was something geography-related, such as where a certain body of water is located (I don’t remember the exact question). The woman pondered the options, then stated, “Well, I am not really sure, but I’m going to ride my wave of momentum here … D, France, final answer!”

Insert loud, annoying, Buzzer of Defeat noise here.

Wrong.

This woman costs herself potentially hundreds of thousands in prize money because she somehow concluded that the “momentum” gained when she guessed correctly on a borderline question would carry over to the next one. Instead, her luck ran out.

It was a cringe-inducing scene because this woman was a viable candidate to go deep in the show. Even by simply diligently using her lifelines, she could have backed into a $100,000 payday, maybe better if she was fortunate enough to nail some of the big-money questions on her own.

Instead, she went home with $1,000 in prize money and a million dollar’s worth of What Might Have Beens.

Never mistake momentum for knowledge. I reminded myself of this lesson a few weeks ago, when I declined to leave well-enough alone on a profitable Saturday of college basketball betting.

I had bet seven games and went 6-1, a result I’ll take any day of the week. Then I saw a late-starting tilt between Fullerton State and Pacific about to tip off and I irrationally decided that there was value with Bookmaker.com dealing Fullerton +1 at home.

This wasn’t exactly blind gambling, mind you, but it’s tantamount to the next-best thing. The Fullerton coach, Bob Burton, is a longtime acquaintance, and he has done amazing work with that program, including reaching the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history last year.

In a nanosecond, I concluded that the oddsmakers didn’t know what I knew about coach Burton and the Titans, and the line was a major show of disrespect.

What’s more, I was feeling my sports-betting oats on this particular day, teetering on the outskirts of the proverbial “zone.” I was convinced ole’ momentum was on my side, and we know what happens next.

Ready, aim … fire. A blank.

What I failed to account for, which the ESPN2 commentators dutifully pointed out in the early going, is that Fullerton’s lineup was decimated by graduation and early-season injuries. They had only eight healthy players available against a well-coached and seasoned Pacific team. I could have known this too, had I, you know, looked into it a little.

But I let the euphoria of momentum take over and all logic, like my betting slip for this game, went to the curbside dumpster.

The result was predictable and ugly. Pacific shot something like 75 percent from the field in the first half, built a 20-point lead and never looked back. It was over in the first 5 minutes.

The lesson here being, whenever you think you are so on top of your game that you can’t possibly miss, think again. I know I will.



Overconfidence in Betting Sports Killed This Cat