Why do I bet on sports?

2024 December 11

As I get older, knowing my motivations for why I do something becomes increasingly important. With more responsibilities to care for, less energy to spend, and more advancements in the world around me, effective and efficient use of time is needed. Knowing my motivations serve as one helpful input in justifying the use of time. On this thought, I wonder, ‘What are my motivations for sports betting’? To answer this question, I thought of motivations for why anyone would participate in sports betting. After some brainstorming, some reading [1], [2], [3], and some prompting of LLMs [4], [5], I drafted the following list of motivations:

    1. Be entertained
    2. Be part of a community
    3. Gain profit
    4. Make back losses
    5. Validate expertise
    6. Validate ego
    7. Satisfy an addiction

Reviewing the list and identifying my own motivations as objectively as possible, I believe my motivations are best summarized by points 3, 5 and 6.

    • On point 3, this may achieve an effective and efficient use of time. Effective because there may be positive expected value in financial gain. Efficient because the time I spend watching sports can also be time used to think about sports betting.
    • On point 5, this may achieve an effective use of time. Effective because there are learnings in statistics, data engineering and psychology that can be gained. Through these learnings, there are other domains in which the acquired skills may be applied. For example, consider the opportunity to better learn statistics. These learnings help develop a more quantitative analytical mind, and this can help improve decision making across different environments.
    • On point 6, this is neither an effective nor efficient use of time. With anything, it is important to be aware of the positive and negative aspects of a pursuit. In the participation of sports betting, there is inevitably some motivation to validate one’s ego as this is often a component of pursuing profits and demonstrating expertise.

Next, defining successful outcomes as a result of participation in sports betting is important. As of this writing and after considering my motivations, I drafted the following list of successful outcomes:

    1. Achieve profitability [6]
    2. Achieve profit CAGR of X% over N years [7]
    3. Develop specialized pattern recognition in a sport [8]
    4. Build a workflow to automate winning bet ideation [9]
After writing the list of successful outcomes, I feel nervous, excited and determined to achieve the outcomes above such that my participation in sports betting makes for an effective and efficient use of time.

Footnotes
1. The Logic Of Sports Betting writes about one’s participation in sports betting markets.
2. Interception writes about one’s participation in sports betting markets.
3. The Laws of Trading about one’s participation in financial markets. To me, there are similarities between sports betting markets and financial markets which make this book’s chapter on motivations highly relevant.
4. Google Gemini response to the question “What are motivations to participate in sports betting?”
5. Meta AI response to the question “What are motivations to participate in sports betting?”
6. Profitability is defined as there is net positive change in the capital allocated to sports betting.
7. X% is to be determined, and N years is to be determined. Adding onto N years, this can be largely influenced by the sports book operators themselves, because profitable sports bettors tend to have their accounts limited with the respect to the degree of freedom in a sportsbook.
8. On this note, sports are played across the world. As a result, popular sports like basketball tend to have leagues across countries. Leagues tend to adhere to highly similar, if not the same, sports rules. For example in basketball, almost all countries follow FIBA rules. As a result of this similarity, there is potential for a similarity in outcomes as well with regards to patterns in results based on patterns in situations.
9. Sports betting markets are always live, and are vast as measured as a function of sports books, sports, leagues, types of bets and variations in bet offerings. Automation is needed to find potential winning bets based on a user’s framework for winning bet characteristics.