Reader CJ sent me an email last week asking, “What do you wish you knew when you were starting out?”
I could write an entire book detailing the thousands of mistakes that I made in my first six years of wagering. There is so much that goes into being a winning player, and a lot of it can only be learned through experience.
If I were to use my time machine to go back and give an 18 year old Money Line a single piece of advice on wagering, Here is what I tell my younger self:
THE ODDSMAKERS KNOW MORE THAN YOU DO.
Not just about odds, but also about the relative merits of players and teams. It is their job to know more than you, and they are VERY good at what they do.
That may sound like an obvious statement of fact. If it does then you are already on the right track. Some people never get it though.
I spent the first four years of my career donating to the books because I believed that I had an edge over the oddsmakers simply because I knew tons about teams and players.
Talk about having your head up your ass.
It’s ridiculous if you really think about. There aren’t that many other endeavors in life where an otherwise self-aware person can be so easily deluded into thinking he is great at something that he has never even tried before.
For instance, the first few (hundred) times I got laid my performance was terrible, but I was aware of this fact and thus took the necessary steps (practice and penis enlargement meds) to improve my skills.
With wagering I was an all time great in my own mind from the word go. It didn’t matter that I had zero sports wagering experience going in. I was going to take it to the stupid oddsmakers using my finely tuned sports acumen.
It does not work that way. The sooner you can wrap your head around the fact that I bolded and capitalized above. The better off you will be.