Can Betting Skill Be Taught, or Is It Mostly Temperament?

CoachTony_Bets

CoachTony_Bets

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I teach 16-year-olds to run a play under pressure, and what I've learned is that I can teach the play in a week and I can't teach the pressure in a season. Some kids step on the field and it slows down for them. Some know every assignment cold in practice and lose it the second the crowd gets loud. Same teacher. Same drills.
So I've started wondering the same thing about betting. The math, the tracking, line shopping, Kelly: I think all of that can be taught. I've watched people on this forum learn it. But I'm not sure that's the skill. The skill might be sitting there with a red week and a Sunday evening and not doing anything.
As a coach, the best thing I've found is reps under stress, with someone next to you. You don't lecture composure into a kid. You put him in at a bad moment and stay beside him. I think there's a middle ground: maybe temperament can be built, just not by reading about it.
I lost money my first three or four years and knew the math by year two. So I'm asking. Did you learn it, or were you already built for it? And if you learned it, what actually did the teaching?
 
I will answer with data, since I have some. Over the years I have taught three people to bet, one at a time, using the same workbook: tracking, unit sizing, line shopping, closing line value. Identical curriculum, identical access to me.
The first quit after four months, because the discipline bored him and he wanted the Sunday feeling. The second tracked every bet perfectly and never changed a stake, including after I showed her that her sizing was costing her roughly a third of her edge. The third is profitable. He is also the only one who was already, when I met him, the sort of person who leaves a restaurant bill unchecked and a budget unspent and is never anxious about either.
I take two things from this. The mechanics transferred to all three. The outcomes did not. Whatever separated them was not in the workbook, and I do not know how to put it there.
My position: skill is teachable, and temperament is a precondition for the teaching to take. The curriculum is necessary. It is not sufficient.
Trust the process, not your gut.
 
Here's what nobody wants to hear: temperament might just be survivorship. Everyone on this forum who looks disciplined is the version of themselves that didn't go broke. Every impulsive version of Eddie lost his bank in year two and isn't posting. We look at the survivors and say "look at the temperament," when the thing that filtered them might have been time and money, with the discipline installed by the losses. (Expensive teacher. Great curriculum. Terrible refund policy.)
And how many of Eddie's three quit before they'd been taught anything? Quitting is the one thing that stops the lesson.
 
The hypothesis is testable and I cannot test it. It predicts that the students who stayed and lost would eventually improve. My second student stayed for two years and did not. Survivorship explains who remains. It does not explain why a person who remains changes nothing.
 
I can offer a data point of one.
I held the finance degree before my first bet. I knew Kelly, expected value, variance. I lost money for two years with all of it in my head.
What changed was not knowledge. The trading psychology books gave me a vocabulary for what I was doing. Once I could name it, I could observe it, and once I could observe it I could write it down before acting.
The teachable part is therefore not the mathematics. It is the observation. A person can be taught to watch himself. Whether he then changes what he sees is a separate matter, and I do not think I can teach that.
 
I taught probability and statistics at University College London for twenty-eight years, and one must consider what that implies for the question, I taught some four thousand students and I know of seven who went on to bet seriously, of whom two are, to my knowledge, solvent, and the two were not the best mathematicians, the best mathematician I ever taught, a young woman whose work was quite beautiful, told me she regarded betting as an unusually dull way of losing money, and she was entirely right, the one former student whom I would call a genuinely good bettor was a young man who scraped a pass, whose scripts were untidy and whose grasp of the theory was, I regret to say, patchy, and who wrote to me some years afterwards to say that he had made a modest living for a decade, I asked him what he did, and he said he simply did not mind being wrong, that when a bet lost he felt nothing in particular, and that this was the entire method, I thought at the time that this was a facetious answer, I now think it is the most precise account of the matter I have been given, because the mathematics I taught is the part of the skill that can be examined, and the part he described is the part that cannot, and I observe with some discomfort that I, who could derive anything, minded a great deal, and that this was the whole of the difference between us.
 
Okay so I'm kind of the experiment here lol. Six weeks in. I'm tracking every bet (date, stake, odds, result, reason, like Oli said). I only write my number in tens. I've closed 9 slips because the reason box was empty.
Here's what I've noticed: the tracking was EASY. Like genuinely easy, I like spreadsheets, I made the columns different colors 😅 The hard part is Sunday. Last Sunday I closed a slip, felt SO proud, and then like two minutes later I opened it again and put in a parlay anyway. 4 legs. And the reason was literally the word "vibes."
So I think I learned the stuff but I haven't got the... other thing? The thing that makes the stuff matter at 7pm?
 
Princess, a reason field containing the word "vibes" is an empty reason field. You did not close nine slips and fill one in. You closed nine and filled one with a euphemism.
That said, the tracking is a genuine improvement and I would not dismiss it. Six weeks is the start of a record.
Trust the process, not your gut.
 
I'd separate knowing what to do from actually doing it when things get difficult.
Probability, analysis and proper record keeping can be taught. Patience and emotional control are harder to develop, but I wouldn't call them fixed personality traits either. What interests me most is how someone behaves after a losing streak. It's easy to look disciplined when everything goes well. Maybe real skill is a combination of sound analysis, self-awareness and the ability to admit when you simply don't know enough.
 
Neither. Temperament is unreliable at seven in the evening. My stake is calculated by a script and a bet with no logged reason cannot be sent. I have not needed to be disciplined in years.
 
Never learned a thing about wiring from a book butt.
Learned it off an old sparky called Gethin who stood next to me for two years.
First week he made me hold a live lead with the power off and said treat every wire as live.
Never forgot it.
Never touched a live wire neither.
Knowing's not the thing.
Someone standing next to you when you're about to do the daft thing is the thing.
Nobody stood next to me for betting.
Might be why it took twelve years.
 
Its purely mathematical. If you want 2000% gains, its a gamble. If youre happy with 15% over a year, its pretty plausible imo
 
lads i was taught all of it... kelly bankroll tracking the reason before the click... people in these threads have been telling me for years... i could recite it to a stranger... i know more about how to bet properly than most people who actually do it properly...
and it hasnt been the knowing... the knowing was never missing...
taffys thing about someone standing next to you... thats the only time ive done it right... when theres a thread open and someone is watching me write the reason... then i do it... then the thread closes and its me and the phone...
so i dont know if its taught or temperament... maybe its just whether someones there...
 
Removing the choice is correct for the mechanics, Oli. It does not address who decided to remove it. Someone had to choose the constraint, and that choice is temperament.
 
I would add that a rule decided once in the morning is a very good use of temperament, in the sense that one spends the discipline early, when it is cheap.
 

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