What is distance in sports betting
Distance is one of the key concepts in betting. Its importance is often underestimated by beginners, but professional bettors know that without passing the distance one cannot draw conclusions either about the profitability of a strategy or about their own results and prospects in sports betting.
What is distance?
Distance in betting is a sufficient number of bets made by a player within a reasonable period of time. If a player makes one bet a week while drinking beer, then he won't get a decent distance either in a year or two.
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Pros consider 1000 perfect bets to be a good distance suitable for evaluation. The first conclusions can be drawn from 500 bets, but not earlier.
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On the other hand, if these 500-1000 bets were stretched in time for ten years, then this is also difficult to call a distance. For such a long time, absolutely everything has changed - bookmakers, teams, entire leagues, the rules of sports, and the personal qualities of the bettor himself.
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Thus, 500-1000 bets made over a period of about a year can be considered an indicative distance. This is more than a feasible figure, for the maximum level it is enough to make only three bets a day, and there will also be time for vacation.
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At the same time, the more bets are made in a shorter period of time, the more accurate the average will be, and the more conclusions can be drawn from this distance segment. A distance of 5,000 bets in six months will be much more indicative than 1,000 bets in a year.
Why is distance important?
First of all, the distance allows you to objectively assess the effectiveness of betting activities. What conclusions can be drawn at ten or twenty rates? None. Their results can be absolutely any - two out of ten or fifteen out of twenty bets can come in, but this does not mean anything at all.
In fact, everything is exactly the same as with a coin toss. With ten throws, heads can fall once, or maybe nine. With a distance of one hundred throws, with a very high probability the heads will fall from 45 to 55 times, that is, more evenly.
If you flip a coin a thousand times, then this distribution will be even closer to half, and the more attempts, the closer the number of heads will be to the 50% mark. After 5-10 thousand repetitions, this deviation will become minimal, and even long streaks from the same results will have very little effect on the overall picture.
Everything is exactly the same in bets. Even if you just bet at random on equally probable outcomes, the results of short segments can be anything, both with a plus sign and with a minus sign. But at a decent distance, this guessing game will inevitably come to a 50% result and a loss in money due to the bookmaker's margin.
Remote indicators
Accordingly, in order to adequately assess your results, you need to conduct experiments at a distance of 1000+ repetitions. This will allow you to see the distant advantage of the bettor over the bookmaker's line. Or vice versa, make sure that there is no such advantage.
And it works for anything:
- To evaluate your own results in betting;
- To evaluate the results of other bettors and compare them with each other;
- To evaluate the effectiveness of a specific strategy and compare the results of several different methods and tactics.
Having received remote indicators - Yield, ROI, profit amount, percentage of traffic, and so on - we can confidently talk about the profitability of the strategy, the potential profitability of the capper, the plus or minus of the bettor.
Moreover, on their basis, you can calculate the approximate profitability of betting in percent or money, display the average figures, adjust and optimize the strategy, draw up a financial plan for the next year or two. It is not possible to do all this on the basis of hundreds of rates - the data will be distorted by the variance.
What else is distance needed for?
Distance is the player's hands-on experience. And this experience is important in any business - driving a car, building a house, growing flowers, performing surgery. At the beginning of any activity, all newcomers behave in about the same way, even if they are well prepared theoretically - nervousness, lack of confidence in their abilities, constant doubts.
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Another great analogy for distance in betting is the sport itself. A team can lose a half, a match, merge with a hopeless outsider, fail a whole month...but its success will be judged by the results of the entire season, that is, after passing the distance.
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And in betting, this experience is no less important. Having covered a distance of 1000 real money bets, the bettor gets a kaleidoscope of various situations and their development.:
- Win streaks for 10 bets in a row;
- Loose streams for 15 bets in a row;
- Drawdown by 40 denominations per month;
- Waves of rapid bankroll growth, doubling in two weeks;
- Offensive bad beats when the bet breaks down seconds before the end of the game;
- Odds passes 5.00, 10.00, 20.00;
- Underruns and even dips in odds like 1.15.
And many many others. All these situations add up to a single bettor's experience, and seriously change his perception of betting as a whole. Emotions fade into the background, drawdowns and upstrokes are perceived as a change of seasons, bad beats cease to be a personal tragedy. Many psychological clamps and barriers are removed.
In the course of passing the distance, experience is also gained with the line, statistics, information sources, as well as the visual experience from watching matches. The subsequent analysis of the distance allows you to optimize your betting activity, cut off unnecessary directions, and modernize working methods.
As a result, the bettor gradually becomes a professional, with an appropriate attitude to business - calm, measured, without hysterics and unnecessary body movements. Of course, not every player will become a pro for 1000 bets, but such a distance is a necessary minimum. Players making a couple of bets per week remain in the vast amateur league.