Aggressiveness is a tough thing to balance for sports bettors. If you are too aggressive then you are going to see your bankroll disappear sooner or later. If you are too passive, though, then you are costing yourself money because you aren’t getting everything that you have earned based on the quality of your handicapping. It can be very hard to assess how aggressive you are and if you need to step up your intensity. Here are five indicators that you might not be aggressive enough as a sports bettor:
Too many what-ifs – Every once in a while everyone sees a game or two that they would have won if they had just pulled the trigger on the bet. You want to have a few games like that – if you don’t then you probably aren’t passing on enough borderline games. If that what-if feeling happens too often, though, then it could be a sign that you are too tentative. Ultimately the goal of sports bettors is to make money, and you can’t make money if you aren’t investing money. If you would be making money on the games that you aren’t betting then you should probably be betting those games. One good way to see if this is a problem is to write down every bet you are interested in whether you bet on them or not. If the ones that you aren’t betting look good for a week or two in a row then you need to up the aggressiveness factor.
Find yourself taking too many nights off – This is another tough one to balance, but it’s also important. If there isn’t a bet that really seems right on a night then the right thing to do is probably to wait until the next night instead of making a bet that doesn’t make enough sense. If you find yourself taking off a lot of nights, though, then you might have a problem. You don’t lose money on the days you don’t bet, but you also don’t make any money. The amount of time off that makes sense depends upon the sport, of course. An NHL or NBA bettor who is taking more than a day or two off per week, though, could probably stand to be a bit more brave.
Bankroll not changing at all – If you are winning a good number of bets then your sports betting bankroll should be growing. Growth isn’t going to be too fast because good money management means that you aren’t betting too much of your bankroll on any given game. If you are growing slower than you would like, though – and you are a winning bettor – then there’s a good chance that your money management approach is too passive. I’m not suggesting you should be reckless with your money management – far from it – but it might be possible to be much more aggressive than you are while still protecting your seed money.
Results aren’t improving over the long term – The more you bet on sports the more experienced you are, and the more effective you should be at picking out good bets and avoiding bad ones. Improvement doesn’t come about automatically, though. You need to work very hard to understand what you are doing right and wrong as a handicapper and bettor, and you need to constantly be pushing your boundaries beyond your comfort zone so that you can be sure you are betting in the best ways you can. If your results are steady over the long term – or especially if they are declining – then you aren’t being aggressive enough about improving and you are being left behind.
All your bets are at the same book – It can be very easy for bettors to get complacent about where they bet. Making all of your bets in one place is definitely convenient, so a lot of people don’t bother shopping around for the best odds. If you aren’t aggressive enough to be shopping around for the best price on every bet you make, though, then you are leaving money on the table. It may just be a few dollars per bet, but over the course of a year those few dollars can turn into thousands of dollars. Over the course of a year shopping around for the best point spread possible will also mean that you’ll win a couple extra games that you would have lost if you didn’t shop. That’s pure sports betting profit right into your pocket.
