Kategoria:
My Way
Teachings to betting from fishing
I took the whole of June as a complete holiday. I didn’t open e-mails nor react to any work-related SMS messages. No betting or stock trading. I closed my ”office” inside my head. I only relaxed: thinking, reading, and fishing.
I restarted fishing after a fifty-year break. A third-generation fisherman, a friend of mine helped me acquire good quality equipment and taught me the basics.
I’m very clumsy and impractical, but to my surprise, my learning curve to fishing was quite steep. On average, I caught about one and a half pike-perches per hour during my ca. 30 fishing hours in July.
But it was not only fishing skills I learned during this summer of my life. Through fishing, I discovered, focused, and learned many things related to ” everyday life” and betting.
First of all, I became a lot more patient person. In fishing, one faces a lot of minor inconveniences: the lines getting stuck, the cooks fastening in your clothes and everything, all the preparations before going to the seas, and of course, all the work before the catch is prepared to be eaten.
Similarly, one should not allow numerous inconvenient issues to hurt the essential – the betting performance. Money transfers, KYC bureaucracy, comparing the odds, placing the bets fast with the best odds in the best market, avoiding being limited or eighty-sixed… – the list of frustrating details in the investment process is lengthy.
Earlier in My Way, I was more impatient than nowadays. The fuss and trouble were even more significant. Fortunately, nowadays, Sportmarket helps a lot with their brilliant customer service and fast, reliable, and practical software. After I learned more and more patience with all the new situations with fishing this July, I feel I am more prepared to face the frustrating and boring practicalities of betting.
Variance is a more challenging issue to deal with. Even on that front, fishing was a great teacher. One could catch ten pike-pearches in two hours in one day and go without any in an unlucky half-a-day session.
It is similar in the betting business: one can get very lucky or unlucky in a small sample. Partly one should accept the variance as unavoidable and keep working with tested strategies regardless of the short time results.
The challenge with fishing and betting is that we cannot always determine if the results depend on luck or something more deterministic. How fast should one change the strategy used if the results achieved appear disappointing?
In fishing, I faced that named dilemma from a fresh mindset. I decided to test different baits, lengths of line (=depth), places, and the time of day and then stick with the selections which have given most fish. In the case of the results returning toward the mean, I came back to the test mode. From the start of my fishing hobby, I started to track my results in an Excel worksheet. In addition to the information I already mentioned, I recorded the strength and direction of the wind, the air and water temperature, and if the sky was sunny/cloudy.
In betting, it is equally important to understand why one wins i.e., where the competitive edge against the market lies. At the Sportmarket site, one can access a lot of helpful research material automatically and then do searches and calculations directly or download the information to Excel. Knowing which markets, sports, leagues, and layers have been most profitable is essential.
In sustainable fishing, there is no idea to take more fish than one needs for food, nor the undersized fish. Similarly, one should not increase risk, workload, stress, and variance by betting too greedily in sports betting. And one should not aim towards small fish – low equity bets. Everybody has only a limited amount of time and energy. Therefore one should set clear targets for investing and bet towards it disciplined, maximizing the Sharpe Ratio – expected ROI per risk level.
The most important thing I learned during my fishing project is that independence and freedom are crucial in life. Even for a winning bettor, it is healthy to have a break occasionally to ensure that one has not developed an addiction to betting. After a lucky fishing streak, I was urged to go to sea even in not-so-promising circumstances. Equally, one quickly finds false ”value bets” in a hot run. In betting and fishing, staying disciplined and not getting dependent is vital.
Uutiset ja blogitekstit RSS-syötteenä