For every punter in this world, irrespective of the type or style of sports wagering they engage in, the main objective is to develop a robust, strategic, and skill-based approach to betting, with the hope of becoming as efficient and effective as possible against the house.

For the house, now, the main objective is to generate as much profit as possible by tapping on opportunities for revenues as well as taking advantage of all the weaknesses of bettors and transforming them into revenue streams. Every platform offering the chance to bet on sports – all bookmakers in the world, including Japan betting sites– is now getting richer and richer because of two huge mistakes that punters make.

Luckily, these mistakes are not something that bettors can’t get rid of. Instead, we are talking about two biases, that if recognized by bettors, will no longer be a problem for their betting games and this will enable them to develop their betting skills and strategies without any interference.

The gamblers’ fallacy

Some of you may have heard about the gambler’s fallacy, but even if you haven’t been familiar with the term, you most certainly are aware of what it is. Well, the gamblers’ fallacy is a bias whereby people believe that certain events are occurring because there is a pattern of past records. In short, people look for past patterns to anticipate future events, thinking that past events have some sort of predictive ability.

Instead of treating every event as a distinctive episode, individuals find some kind of pattern, which -as they expect- explains what will happen in the future.

Considering gamblers’ fallacy in sports betting, we are safe to argue that it is an extremely erroneous assumption. If bettors base their decisions on such assumptions, they will most likely end up losing. If they decide to bet, based on how events have shaped up to now, then we are most certainly going to lose, because what has happened can’t actually mean something about what is going to happen.

To understand gamblers’ fallacy, let’s take the example of a football fan who thinks that just because a football club has a winning streak, it’s going to lose the next time they play a game. This wrong assumption comes from the belief that odds will play out so that in the bigger picture, there will be some form of balance because that is the nature of things. So, based on the perception that the club has won several matches and now it’s time to lose, the bettor chooses to back the opponent.

But what has happened up to now does not mean that will determine what will occur. Of course, a club’s recent performance is an indicator of how they’re gonna play in an upcoming match, but the fact that they have been winning does not mean that they will lose just because the ‘universe’ wants to restore balance.

It doesn’t take much to understand that this will not lead any bettor to a smart choice. When we are filtering our predictions with such a bias, we are most likely to make a wrong decision. But if we manage to isolate assumptions that come from biased perceptions, then we have far more opportunities to make informed and rational decisions.

Hot hand fallacy

Unlike the gamblers’ fallacy, the hot hand fallacy is the assumption that when a bettor has a winning streak, they should most probably leverage and take advantage of this streak for as long as it lasts so as to make more profits.

The hot hand fallacy works in the opposite direction of the gamblers’ fallacy. Instead of believing that there’s gonna be some kind of reversal in the events taking place (in a coin flip, for example, the gamblers’ fallacy makes people believe that after too many times heads coming up, there will be tails), the hot hand fallacy implies believing that there’s gonna be a persistence of certain events taking place.

Here bettors believe that having momentum will last for a long time and that having a winning streak will continue to happen. So, what they think they should do is keep on gambling in casino sites in Japan or Japanese betting platforms or even anywhere else offering sports betting. In short, if someone has a winning streak then they will most likely continue experiencing this because doing good improves the probability of doing good in the future as well. It’s not that winning improves one’s talent or skills, it’s more that winning brings in more wins.

The hot hand fallacy leads to poor decision-making when it comes to sports betting and as such it can be really risky for the bettors. With the hot hand fallacy, punters are making wrong choices, on the basis of what they think will happen, because it is already happening. If they experience, for instance, a streak of wins in their last bets, they may believe that they have momentum and that they should leverage this momentum.

They end up betting more because they expect that their winning streak will persist. But every bet should be counted as a different episode, irrelevant and independent from the previous bets. Failing to consider every bet distinctively, means that bettors believe that ‘luck’ will continue to be with them and that’s what they ought to take advantage of.

The hot hand fallacy leads bettors to erroneous assumptions and this distorts their rational decision making. Maybe they wouldn’t bet at all after a series of wins if it weren’t for this bias, but they feel “compelled” to bet particularly because they believe they should do it to sustain the momentum.

Both those fallacies, which are amongst the most frequent bettor biases, influence bettors’ decision-making and ‘force’ punters to make false assumptions and mistaken moves. It is very important to be able to recognize them because this gives us the chance to ignore them and put ourselves out of the risk of losing. Our betting choices should be informed, backed by data and analysis, instead of being affected by biases.

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