Preparing for Gambling/Betting

The first thing you should be thinking when you have planned to gamble or bet is decide how much you want to lose.

You need to get out of your head that you are “instantly” going to win if you go gambling. A lot of people assume “professional gamblers” win all the time, they only tell you about the wins and not the money they have lost.

You need to know the odds are always against you and there is more chance the house/bookies winning your money, then you do theirs.

So...going back to deciding how much you want to lose.

Here are two scenarios:

If you go out on a night-out with friends most people decide that they will take out £100 and that’ll be enough for drinks, entry to the club, taxi and a kebab. The morning after you feel hung-over and say to yourself “that was a good night”. Mathematically you have just lost £100 of your money.

Second scenario is that you’ve decided to go to a casino with your friends. You take out £100 for drinks, entry, gambling and a kebab. You wake up in the morning and you feel annoyed because you look into your wallet and find no money and you realise that you didn’t win anything last night. As a night out with your mates, it probably was a good night but a gambler it was a bad night because you lost all your money.

The point of the two scenarios is that the result is the same; you lose £100. The difference is that the first scenario you went out knowing you’re going to spend your money and spending all of it was expected, but, the second scenario you went to the casino expecting to win meaning that if you spend (or lose) all your money you feel disappointed or cheated.

So to prepare for betting/gambling you need to set a specific amount of money you want to lose and stick to it. If you lose it all that’s fine, you were expecting to lose it. If you don’t stick to it and spend more, you are only breaking your discipline, when it was not necessary to do so.

If you do win money from gambling use the money you have won to gamble with. I like to call this “free money”. It is effectively money that you didn’t have before so therefore you can do what you like with it. Obviously, the sensible thing to do is, walk away and save it, but if you’ve just started a night-out then use this money to gamble with. When this money runs out you can go back to the original money you set out to lose (hopefully by then you won’t need to do this because the nights over).

An ideal situation from gambling is to come back with a profit. The next best thing is to come back having a good time but not lost or gained any money (breakeven). The usual and expected situation is to come back with minus the money you decided to lose. The worst situation is losing more money than you decided to lose.

To summarise:

• Decide how much you want to lose and stick to it.
• If you have lost your the money you expected to lose, walk away, the house has won. (Try again another day but not straight away) Emotions tend to make people do stupid things.
• Always bet with “free money” you are not losing anything if you don’t win with it. The money was not your money in the first place.

By iloot