What Happens to Your betting Skill After a Month Off?

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DublinDegen

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lads genuine question and not a joke... i went nineteen days without a bet... first time in years... and when i came back the first thing i noticed was i couldnt remember how i used to pick... the numbers looked like a foreign language for about a week...
so does skill go rusty when you leave it or does it come back sharper... because for me it felt like both... slower and clearer at the same time... and then on day nineteen i bet three times what i normally bet and the clear went out the window...
i dont know the answer to the question... but i know what i did on day nineteen...
 
I can offer a small data set, with the caveat that it is very small. In fifteen years of records I have had four gaps of three weeks or longer: two house moves, one long trip, and a stretch of work I could not postpone. I looked at the first twenty bets after each gap, 80 in total.
Two results. First, the ROI on those 80 was minus 2.1%, against my long-run plus 4.1%. The standard error on 80 bets is roughly ten points, so I cannot distinguish a real deficit from noise. Second, and more interesting: bet volume in the first fortnight after a gap averaged 5.4 per week against my normal 9. I passed on 40% more of what I would ordinarily have taken.
So there are two mechanisms and I cannot separate them. One is rust: stale team news, forgotten injuries, lines I had stopped watching. The other is caution: I knew I was out of touch and I behaved accordingly. The caution may have protected me from a larger deficit. The rust may account for the whole of the one I have. With four gaps, I will not pretend to a conclusion.
Trust the process, not your gut.
 
Back on a job after a fortnight's holiday.
Slow. Test everything twice.
Best work I do all year mun.
Holidays make me careful.
Don't know if betting's the same.
Tried a month off once for Bronwyn.
Made twenty-two days.
First bet back I was careful for about an hour.
 
The Bundesliga closes for about ten weeks each summer and I do not bet. I have done this fourteen times, which is the largest experiment on your question available to me.
First four matchdays of each season: approximately 70 selections, ROI +1.2%. The rest of each season: +5.1%. The sample is small and I report only the direction.
I think the cause is not rust in me but staleness in the inputs. Squads change in the summer. The model carries last season's information into a league that has partly turned over. I now pull the model toward the market by a quarter for the first four matchdays, and the gap is narrowing.
 
Here's what nobody wants to hear: I've never had a month off. The calendar doesn't allow it. There's always a sport and the app knows it. But I had two weeks in a cabin with no signal, and I came back better for about nine days. (I know. I'm as surprised as you are.)
For nine days I looked at a reverse line movement spot and saw it for what it was. A number. Not a story, not a messenger, not Vegas whispering to me personally. Then I got back into the narrative and it all came back. RIP public money, but mostly RIP my perspective.
So I think some of what you lose in a break is skill, and some of what you gain is distance. They're different things and they cancel out.
 
Okay so I took 3 weeks off for a work trip!! And I came back and forgot what juice was lol. I literally had to google it 😅 The first bet back I wrote the reason as "missed it." That's it. That was my whole reason.
But then I only placed 4 bets that first week, which is usually like 14. And 3 of them hit!! Is that rust or is that me just being too scared to click? I can't tell lol 🏈
 
Nothing in code decays. What decays is what is in your head, which is why I keep little there. After a 3% halt I take 48 hours. The pause is for the person, not the model.
 
As a coach, the summer is the best experiment I've got. A kid comes back in August having touched nothing for six weeks. What's gone is conditioning, the legs and the lungs. What isn't gone is knowing where to line up. Those two decay at different speeds, and I've learned not to panic about the wrong one.
What I really watch for is how he treats the cold start. Some come back careful, they know they're behind, they do the little things right. Some come back and decide they've earned something, because they rested. The first group gets better quickly. The second group gets hurt.
I think there's a middle ground, but it isn't about how long the break was. It's about whether the person coming back thinks he's behind or thinks he's owed.
 
The skill I should have expected to fail was not the one that did, one must consider that I did not place a punt for five weeks after Margaret died, I had supposed that on returning I should find the model rusty, I found instead that I could not recall how I bet, I could not say what edge I demanded or what fraction of the bank I staked or which markets I had marked as forbidden to myself, none of it was in my head, it was in the ledger and on a short page of rules at the front which I had written years before and never reread, so I sat in the study and read my own instructions as though a stranger had left them, and the stranger, I am bound to say, had been rather sensible, two per cent minimum, a quarter Kelly, no punts after nine in the evening, and what struck me was that the discipline had never lived in me at all, it had been written down, and I had been executing a paper procedure for years while believing it to be character, a month off does not erode skill if the skill is on paper, it erodes only what one carried about in one's head, which in my case turned out to be the team news and a great deal of vanity, I now keep the page at the front of the ledger up to date, and I read it before the first punt of every season as one reads the instructions on a medicine.
 
Conor, a break that licenses a larger stake is not a break. It is a deposit made against a future excuse. Nineteen days of abstinence became, in your account, an entitlement to triple. That is a common pattern with any behavior that runs in streaks: the gap is treated as credit.
My own stake is a fixed 1% of bankroll, and it does not move after a gap or after a win. That is not discipline in any admirable sense. It is a rule that was written before the break, and it does not consult the person who has just returned from one.
Trust the process, not your gut.
 
license... thats the word... i felt like id earned it... nineteen days was a tab at the bar for being good... and i spent the tab on the first night...
 
A re-entry rule written before the break, not after. First fourteen days at half stake.
The version decided afterwards will be generous to the person who is deciding it.
 
Bronwyn counted the days.
I'd lost count at nine.
 
DublinDegen said:
lads genuine question and not a joke... i went nineteen days without a bet... first time in years... and when i came back the first thing i noticed was i couldnt remember how i used to pick... the numbers looked like a foreign language for about a week...
so does skill go rusty when you leave it or does it come back sharper... because for me it felt like both... slower and clearer at the same time... and then on day nineteen i bet three times what i normally bet and the clear went out the window...
i dont know the answer to the question... but i know what i did on day nineteen...
Click to expand...
Come back at your normal unit or smaller, never bigger. After a month off your edge estimate is at its least reliable, so a week of half stakes on markets you're following again is the safe way back in.
 

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