Do You Trust Other Bettors?

[FadeThePublic]

Not tips. That's a different question.

I mean genuine trust. The kind where you'd tell someone something true about your situation and believe they'd handle it honestly.

The kind where you'd take their assessment of your betting at face value rather than filtering it for self-interest.

I've been in betting communities for fifteen years. Online forums. Local groups. The serious end of social media.

I can count on one hand the bettors I'd call genuinely trustworthy in any meaningful sense.

Not because they're bad people. Because the activity structurally undermines trust.

We're all trying to beat the same market. We all have methodologies we protect. We all perform confidence we don't always feel. We're all, to some degree, managing impressions.

That's the environment. You can't fully trust people inside it the way you trust people outside it.

Or can you. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this community is different from my experience.

 

[SharpEddie47]

Not with tips. That's been my position for years and it hasn't changed.

Anyone sharing tips freely has one of three things going on. They're wrong about the edge. They want the line movement. Or they want something from you they haven't named yet.

Personal trust is a different question and I'd separate it into two things.

Process trust: do I trust another bettor's reasoning about their own approach. Sometimes yes. Some people in this forum I trust completely to analyze their own situation honestly.

Outcome trust: do I trust that what they're telling me about their results is accurate. Almost never. Not because of deliberate dishonesty. Because we all have the win exaggeration problem we discussed. Nobody tells the fully accurate version of their record.

So: sometimes yes on process, almost never on outcome.

 

[TaffyTipster]

The lads in the pub. Blokes I've bet alongside for years.

I trust them in the way you trust people you've spent a lot of time with.

But it's a specific kind of trust. I trust them to commiserate genuinely. To celebrate genuinely. To cover for me if Bronwyn asks what we were talking about.

I don't trust their tips. I don't trust their records. I don't tell them the real number.

It's a trust built around the shared activity but not extending very far into the actual substance of it.

Might be the same as what Fade's describing.

We trust each other to maintain the social fiction around the betting. Not to be honest about what the betting actually is.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

My group chat girls. I trust them completely in the normal friend sense.

But reading this thread I'm realising I've never told any of them my actual lifetime losses.

I told my sister. I told this forum. I haven't told the people I watch games with every week.

So I trust them with everything except the specific information that would change what they think about my betting.

Which might mean I trust them with everything except the thing that matters here.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

The coaching networks I mentioned in the stranger conversation thread. Other coaches who bet. There's a specific shorthand. A recognition.

That recognition produces something that feels like trust quickly.

But I've noticed it's trust within limits neither person has defined.

We share enough to feel connected. Not enough to actually know each other's situation.

The shared vice creates intimacy faster than it should. The intimacy doesn't go as deep as it feels.

The coach I sat with at the convention. Felt genuine in that room. I'd be surprised if he'd recognise me at the next one.

 

[Klaus]

Do not trust other bettors with methodology.

The Bundesliga model took years to develop. It produces consistent results. I share the fact of it but not the contents.

This is not paranoia. The model's value is partly in its distinctiveness. Sharing it widely would alter the markets it applies to.

Trust in the information sense is incompatible with serious betting. The information is the edge. The edge is the product.

Sharing it is not generosity. It is self-destruction.

Personal trust is a different question.

In this forum: some. Selectively. Based on observed honesty over time.

Conor I trust completely because the honesty has been consistent and demonstrably costly.

Klaus trusts the people who have shown they can tell themselves true things. Most bettors cannot.

 

[oli_sussex]

No. Professionally trained not to.

At the exchange trust was a specific liability. The people most likely to mislead you were often the ones presenting as most trustworthy. The manufactured signal we discussed in the line movement thread.

Competence at appearing trustworthy is a skill with uses beyond genuine trustworthiness.

After years in that environment I cannot read bettor-trust accurately. The calibration is broken.

In this forum I've noticed honesty I didn't expect. Posts that cost the person something to write. That's a form of trustworthiness.

But I apply it carefully and specifically. Not generally.

 

[DublinDegen]

complicated answer...

the betting friends from my worst years... the ones who kept telling me i'd turn it around... who said the value was still there... who never once said something's wrong here...

i thought i trusted them...

looking back they were just people who needed me to keep betting so they could keep betting...

the shared activity was the bond... not anything underneath it...

but this forum...

i've said things here i haven't said anywhere else... and the responses have been honest in a way that required something from the people writing them...

that's something different from the pub friends...

not sure what to call it exactly...

something more like trust than what i had before...

 

[FadeThePublic]

Conor's distinction between pub friends and forum is the one I keep coming back to.

The pub friends needed him to keep going. That's not trust. That's mutual enabling with a friendly surface.

The forum sometimes says things that don't help the person feel better.

Klaus telling someone their methodology is wrong. Oli saying something uncomfortable about the exchange psychology. The kids thread. The hypocrisy test.

Trust might be partly the willingness to say the true thing even when the comfortable thing is available.

 

[SharpEddie47]

The mutual enabling as false trust is real.

The betting friend who validates your bad run as variance. Who says the edge is still there. Who never asks the hard question.

That feels like support. It's the opposite of trust.

Trust would be: I think you're telling yourself a story about this. Trust would be: have you considered stopping.

The pub friend says neither of those things.

Neither do most of us to each other in real life.

 

[TaffyTipster]

We say them here though.

Which is strange because we know each other less.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

The anonymity does something.

No ongoing relationship to protect. No social equilibrium to maintain.

You can say the true thing because the cost of saying it is lower.

Which means the trust here is built on a structure that wouldn't survive being made real.

If we all knew each other properly we'd probably go back to the comfortable version.

 

[Klaus]

Conor I want to answer the thing you said.

You said you trust this forum. That the responses have been honest in a way that required something from the people writing them.

I think that's accurate.

And I think you are one of the reasons it's accurate.

The consistency of your honesty over these threads has made other honesty possible. You said the difficult version first, repeatedly. That lowered the cost for everyone else.

I don't say this to be warm. I say it because it's analytically true and you should know it.