The upcoming Super Bowl is an annual festival of high TV ratings, way too much debate over a meaningless halftime show, and online trend-pieces about 30 second advertisements. It also means a lot of people are betting on football. Indeed, now that sports betting apps are accessible to much of America, a lot more people are betting on football. And they especially love to bet the Super Bowl.
A lot is written about the public policy implications of gambling— how it is addictive, can lead to financial ruin, is essentially a regressive tax, etc. But none of that, of course, deters people who ought to know better from betting more than they should. But maybe coming at this in a different way might get the point across.
To be clear, I love gambling. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother taking me to Santa Anita to see (and bet) the horses. I used to spend my Friday nights at Hollywood Park. And I love playing poker— specifically limit Texas Hold’Em.
But one of the dirty little secrets about gambling is that it is almost perfectly designed to burrow in on the intellectual blind spots of otherwise smart people. In this regard, I don’t mean “house always wins” table games or slot machines, or the lottery. I mean the types of gambling games that purport to be based on skill— poker, horse racing, and, especially, sports betting. Many very smart people lose way more than they should because of this.
What intellectual blind spots do I mean? Well, let’s start with the elephant in the room— you do not know nearly as much about sports as you think you do. Yes, I know you discovered analytics and can tell me which baseball players have the best WAR’s and which football players the best DVOA’s. Yes, I know you follow the Fourth Down Bot on Twitter and know when coaches are making lousy decisions to punt. Nonetheless, you don’t know nearly as much about sports as you think you do.
There are innumerable factors that play into the result of a sports event, factors that are much, much deeper than “which team has the better quarterback?”. For instance, one team’s defensive coordinator might decide to move up an outside linebacker onto the line to threaten Patrick Mahomes with a blitz in an attempt to hurry his throws, and another team might decide instead to drop that outside linebacker into coverage. You can, of course, see this by watching game film. Do you? And do you know which strategy works better against the Chiefs?
Or one team might run blocking schemes that reduce the percentage of time that the pass rush gets through the line. Do you know which team that is? But those blocking schemes in turn depend on whether a particular offensive lineman is effective. He’s hurt this week. Do you know about that?
Or perhaps there’s a team who isn’t as effective as the average team close to the goal line, so they end up kicking more field goals than most teams. High winds are predicted at the stadium this Sunday, making such field goals more difficult. Do you know how many points on average those winds will cost the team?
Player injuries, coaching decisions, matchups (a receiver can look ordinary one game and other worldly the next, just because the cornerback covering him is a little slower), offensive and defensive schemes, weather, officiating, home field advantage— sports are complicated human interactions. But otherwise smart people think they know all there is to know and bet serious money, every week, based on pure guesses.
Beyond this lack of knowledge, however, is another human frailty— people are impatient. You know who is often extremely impatient? Very smart people, some (or perhaps many) of whom may be somewhere on the spectrum and have some level of ADHD. How does impatience play out in gambling? Well, the most important way to counter the issue that you don’t know as much as you think you do is to wait for a clear spot. I’m proud to say I’ve only wagered on one football game in my entire life— January 21, 2018, when the Minnesota Vikings, after getting extremely lucky on the last play of the game against the New Orleans Saints, were installed as a substantial favorite over the Philadelphia Eagles, a far superior team. I drove out to Las Vegas, took the points, and didn’t even have to root, as the Eagles won 38-7.
I don’t claim any great expertise with respect to that event. I simply looked at a betting line that, for whatever reason, painted an incredibly inaccurate picture of the relative merits of two football teams. (The Eagles went on to win the Super Bowl, beating Tom Brady and the Patriots; they were the best team in the NFL that year.) The key point is all the games I didn’t bet. All the times I looked at betting lines, thought perhaps they were a little off, but didn’t feel I knew enough to bet the game. I waited for the one situation in a million where I was able to say “this line is ridiculous”, made my bet, and then didn’t bet again.
This is basically the correct strategy for betting almost any event. Want to be a successful horseplayer? You need to wait for spots where the odds are way off. If you bet every race you are bound to lose over time. Want to be a successful poker player? You need to fold a lot and wait for situations where your hand and position give you favorable odds to win money over your opponents. And if you want to successfully bet sports, you have to wait for the rare situations where the line is significantly wrong.
And importantly, you need to do this even when such opportunities are not presenting themselves. In poker, for instance, it’s possible to go “card dead”— to be dealt so many bad hands that you have to sit and fold, over and over again, for hours as the other players mock you. The human reaction is to want to play something. But then you decide to play your queen-ten suited after a very tight player raises, hit your queen, and pay off a lot of money to the raiser who had pocket kings.
The human brain is primed for action. But sometimes you just have to sit there and not bet, and it isn’t fun. Sports betting services are particularly relentless at trying to overbear people’s wills on this, offering a constant barrage of action and promotions trying to get people to give in and bet when they shouldn’t.
Related to this is that people hate losing, even over a very short term. An important part of my bet on the Eagles is that because I am not a sports bettor, had I lost my bet, I wouldn’t have come back the next week and bet the Super Bowl despite not having a strong opinion on the game. I’m a grown-up— if a bet loses, it loses, and you just wait for the next opportunity, no matter how far down the line it is. But people can’t do this. I learned this during my mother’s trips to Santa Anita when I was a little kid. Back then you had to line up to bet, and the lines were always longest for the last race even though it was almost always an indecipherable, unbettable mess. What was going on? People were chasing their losses. They couldn’t stand the idea of leaving the track with less money than they came with, so they poured money into the pools on a terrible event full of unreliable horses.
If you think about it, this is ridiculous. The track wasn’t closing. There would be another race card with better races to bet. But the psychology of coming home from the track a loser was too much for these people.
Sports, with their playoff systems, are especially designed to exploit this weakness. As you get to the end of the football season, there are less and less games to bet on. The Super Bowl is the last one. After the Super Bowl, you need to wait until late summer to bet on football again. So it’s your last chance to try and get even— and bettors try! The Super Bowl handles far more than any other football game, just like the last race at Santa Anita, except in this instance the windows will be closed for months.
This combines with another human weakness— people like betting on big events that come with bragging rights. The Kentucky Derby. The NCAA Basketball Tournament. You can’t brag about your amazing cash in the Northwestern-Indiana basketball game. Nobody cares. But do it in the Super Bowl and you are a hero.
Is it any wonder that a sports book insider once said to me “if you bet the Super Bowl, you are a losing player”? He didn’t mean it literally (obviously sometimes winning sports bettors bet the Super Bowl), but more in the sense of the Super Bowl is usually unbettable— there’s so much information that the line is generally extremely accurate— and most people are betting it because it’s a big event with bragging rights and because they want to recoup their losses for the season, not because they have any sort of an edge. There’s no reason to bet the Super Bowl if you are a winning player, and plenty of reasons to bet it if you are a loser.
So how should you bet? I’m sure you have heard most of it— set aside a bankroll for betting, and stick to it and don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose. Meticulously prepare and learn as much as you can. Wait for your spots, and don’t go on “tilt” if your bets lose. (Also important is not tightening up and being conservative just because you notch a win— giving up a legitimate betting opportunity is just as bad as betting when there is no legitimate opportunity.) Keep accurate records so you can figure out what you did right and wrong.
But I would also say, psychologically, that most people shouldn’t bet at all. Now I get that throwing $5 into the office NCAA pool or buying a $2 Powerball ticket when the jackpot is gigantic doesn’t really count. Nominal betting is fine. But betting any serious amounts of money requires a dedication and work ethic that most people do not have, and also requires a serious amount of psychological self-examination that most people are not capable of. Indeed, it requires the very thing which is in shortest supply among intellectuals— the capacity to admit that you don’t know as much as you think you do.