Gambler's Fallacy and Your Bankroll

The team at Sharp has a ton of experience in all forms of gambling over the years but everyone can benefit from talking about basic tentets for successful players. One of the biggest pitfalls can be gambler's fallacy, or believing that past outcomes have any effect on future probabilities. You can check out a video on this subject in the Sharp Academy as well.

For instance, if you flip a coin and it lands on head three times in a row, the cahnces of heads on the fourth toss do not change in any respect. Falling prey to gambler's fallacy can devestate your bankroll in a hurry.

One of the more important aspects of gambling is to understand the amount of money you have to play with and what you are comfortable to lose. Sure, this sounds like basic advice and it is but so many people hit a few bets and things just go right out the window. Realistically, it's understandable. Is there a better feeling than hitting that player prop? Seeing those chips slide across a table into your pile atfer winning a hand at blackjack or poker? How about a team hitting a basket as time expires to cash the underdog that you've been sweating all game? When those outcomes happen, you're invincible and any bet can be made, and won.

The worst possible thing at those moments is being irresponsible with the bankroll. All the coaches here talk in terms of units but that has to be controlled by the individual player. One unit for a coach may not be the same amount in one unit for your bet, and that is totally fine! We're all on one team but the important factor is you stick with that measurement. If you win 4-5 bets in a row, that doesn't mean the next bet is five units because you have a "hot hand". If you lose that next bet, you've given back everything you've just won and potentially more than that. If that's the routine, the success in this field will be so much harder to come by.

If you've been in the Discord with us, coaches may appear to brush off a bad night fairly easily. It's never fun to have a bad day at the book and get a lot of things wrong but the one constant is every player will have down days. Las Vegas didn't build that city on being wrong a lot of the time. This is a hard field to be a successful part of but when you handle the bankroll responsibly, one bad day doesn't hurt because it's not a large chunk of your money.

We're all here to help educate our members as much as we can, and be somewhat entertaining (we hope) and this isn't to tell you to not gamble. It's an absolute blast to find all sorts of wagers to try and exploit weaknesses that sports books have, and they do still have them. It's just always important to remember basic foundations of success. Let's celebrate the bets we hit without runining our bankrolls so we can continue to grow it all the time. Gambler's fallacy is always lurking around that winning bet to drain the bank but don't let it. Keep a level head and you'll already be ahead of a good chunk of the rest of the industry.