Have You Ever Felt Genuine Contempt for a Winning Bettor?

[FadeThePublic]

Not envy. Contempt.

Important distinction. Envy is wanting what someone has. Contempt is looking at someone who has it and finding them lacking anyway.

Two years ago a guy in another forum posted a screenshot. Big parlay win. Significant money. Caption was something like "research pays off" with a flexing emoji.

I looked at his post history. Four parlays a week for eight months. No methodology visible anywhere. Just picks with no reasoning attached.

He'd gotten lucky on a big one after months of losing and was now the research guy.

I felt something I wasn't expecting. Not jealousy of the win. Something colder. A specific disdain for the story he was telling about how it happened.

I've been sitting with that feeling since. Because if I'm contemptuous of lucky winners who misattribute their success, what does that say about how I think about this whole thing. And about myself.

Has anyone else felt it. Real contempt. Not for losers. For winners.

 

[SharpEddie47]

Yes. Specific and recurring.

There's a type in serious betting communities. The person who ran hot for one season, built a Twitter following off it, started selling picks.

I know what a one-season hot run looks like statistically. I know the difference between variance and edge. The sample size is almost always wrong. The methodology is almost always undocumented.

The contempt I feel watching someone monetize a lucky run while presenting it as expertise is genuine and I don't fully apologize for it.

But I've also examined it.

Some of what I call contempt is probably threatened identity.

If luck can produce what I have twenty years of documented work to show, the twenty years are less meaningful.

The contempt might be protecting the story I need to tell about why what I do is different.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Different version for me.

Local lad. Pub regular. Won a big accumulator on a bank holiday weekend. Few thousand.

For about three months he was the betting expert. Everyone asking his opinion. Acting like he'd cracked something.

No system. No research. Just a lucky Saturday that he was dining out on.

I felt something watching that.

Not angry that he won. He deserved the win fine.

Angry at the authority it gave him. That people were taking his opinion seriously because of one afternoon.

Thirty years of actual knowledge in that pub and he's the one they're asking because his slip came in.

That's contempt probably. I should be honest about that.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

Oh I've definitely felt this.

There's a girl in my social group who bets casually. Never talks about it much. No strategy, no interest in learning, just throws stuff on occasionally.

Hit a big parlay last spring. Been talking about it since.

And I felt... not nice things. Which surprised me.

Because I also bet casually and also don't have much strategy.

So the contempt I felt for her was basically contempt for a mirror.

Which made me feel worse.

Not about her. About what it revealed about me.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

The contempt I feel is very specific.

It's for winners who stop.

Person runs hot for a season. Wins a significant amount. Decides to quit while ahead. Walks away.

Tells the story as: I knew when to stop. I beat the system. Smart money management.

I feel something toward those people that I'm not proud of.

Not because they won. Because they got out.

And somewhere underneath the contempt is something closer to resentment.

They did the thing I've been telling myself I could do for twelve years.

They just did it and left.

The contempt might actually be envy of a completely different kind.

Not of the win. Of the exit.

 

[Klaus]

Have experienced contempt for a specific category.

Systematic bettors who claim long-term profitability without sufficient sample size or documentation.

The person who has bet seriously for two years and presents conclusions as though they are established.

I have fourteen years of documented data and considerable uncertainty about what it proves.

Someone with two years of data and complete confidence produces in me something between contempt and alarm.

The contempt is partly professional. Partly self-protective.

If their confidence is justified mine is excessive caution.

If their confidence is unjustified they will learn this eventually in the way that is most expensive.

Both possibilities produce the contempt. Which suggests the contempt is not really about them.

 

[oli_sussex]

At the exchange the contempt was institutional.

Retail winners were treated with a specific kind of suspicion.

Not because winning was contemptible. Because sustained winning without identifiable methodology was suspicious.

The working assumption: either lucky and temporary or cheating.

The genuine sharp who had found a real edge was respected.

The person who had run hot and didn't know why was contemptible specifically because they didn't know why.

The ignorance of their own success was the contemptible part.

I absorbed this culture completely.

It has made me unable to take any claimed winning record seriously without documentation.

Which is sometimes appropriate and sometimes just a learned contempt looking for a target.

 

[DublinDegen]

felt contempt for a winning bettor once and it took me years to understand what it actually was...

bloke i knew from the shops... consistent winner... not flashy about it... just consistently came out ahead...

felt something toward him that i told myself was skepticism...

he must be cheating... or getting tips... or the books hadn't limited him yet...

spent real mental energy constructing reasons why his winning wasn't legitimate...

eventually understood what i was doing...

if he could win consistently and i couldn't the difference was him not the luck...

i didn't want that to be true...

so i made him a fraud in my head...

contempt was easier than the alternative...

the alternative being that some people can do this and some can't and i'm one who can't...

 

[FadeThePublic]

Conor's version is the most honest one in the thread.

The contempt as protection against an unbearable conclusion about yourself.

If the winner is illegitimate you don't have to examine why they're winning and you're not.

 

[SharpEddie47]

And the people I feel contempt for are usually the ones whose wins are hardest to dismiss.

The obvious lucky parlay guy is annoying but manageable.

The quiet consistent winner with no visible methodology is genuinely threatening.

Because I can't explain them.

And things I can't explain make me uncomfortable in ways that apparently express as contempt.

 

[TaffyTipster]

The unexplainable winner is the one that gets under your skin.

You can always find a reason why the parlay winner doesn't count.

The person who just quietly keeps winning with no system you can identify.

That one you can't dismiss.

So it sits there.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

There's a coaching version of this.

The coach who wins with lesser talent. Who keeps winning despite doing things your coaching education says shouldn't work.

You can respect it intellectually while feeling something else underneath.

Because if their way works it implies your way isn't the only legitimate way.

The contempt for the inexplicable winner is about methodology being a source of identity.

If their win is valid without the methodology the methodology means less.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

I'm realizing I feel contempt in both directions.

For the lucky winner who doesn't know why they won.

And sometimes for the serious methodical bettor who makes it sound like work.

Like sometimes when Eddie describes his process my honest first reaction is "that sounds exhausting and joyless."

That's a kind of contempt too isn't it.

 

[SharpEddie47]

Princess yes it is and thank you for saying it.

I've felt the inverse from people like you.

The implicit message that the methodology is somehow missing the point. That treating it seriously is treating it wrong.

The contempt runs in multiple directions.

The casual bettor contemptuous of the serious one.

The serious one contemptuous of the casual one.

Everyone protecting their particular relationship with it from the implied criticism of everyone else's.

 

[FadeThePublic]

What this thread is actually about.

Contempt as a defense mechanism.

Whatever your relationship with betting is, there are other relationships that implicitly challenge it.

The lucky winner challenges the methodology.

The methodical bettor challenges the casual approach.

The person who quit successfully challenges everyone still going.

The contempt is directed outward but it's doing defensive work inward.

 

[Klaus]

Correct analysis.

The targets of contempt map precisely onto the anxieties about one's own approach.

I feel contempt for underdocumented confidence because my confidence is entirely predicated on documentation.

If documentation is unnecessary my foundation is unnecessary.

The contempt is structural self-defense.

 

[oli_sussex]

Good framing.

The contempt reveals the anxiety.

Find what someone in this community is contemptuous of and you've found what they're most uncertain about in themselves.

 

[DublinDegen]

that's uncomfortable but probably right...

my contempt for the consistent winner was about not being able to imagine being one...

if i'd been capable of it i'd have just tried to learn from him...

instead i made him a cheat...

much easier...

 

[ThePuntingProf]

I have felt contempt once with genuine clarity and examining it now I am not proud of it, a colleague at the university many years ago mentioned casually that he had won a significant amount on a football match, he had placed one bet, a large one, on a match he knew nothing about, the bet was essentially random, he won, he described it with the confidence of someone who had discovered something, Margaret said later that he seemed pleased with himself and I said something dismissive about luck being mistaken for skill, she looked at me and said that I had been talking about that man for twenty minutes and he had never thought about me once, I understood immediately what she meant, the contempt was consuming my evening, his win had cost him nothing and cost me something I couldn't name, Margaret was right that the disproportion was the problem, he had a lucky win, I had a grievance, he slept well, I stayed up thinking about the unfairness of it, the contempt said nothing about him and rather a lot about me.

 

[TaffyTipster]

"He had a lucky win. I had a grievance."

Prof Margaret again.