Skills From Outside Betting That Actually Transferred

[FadeThePublic]

Everybody talks about what betting taught them. Here's the question nobody asks: what did you bring from OUTSIDE betting that you can actually point to on a bet? Not "I'm analytical." (That's a LinkedIn sentence.) A specific thing from a job or a hobby, and the specific bet it changed.
Mine's logging. Developers log everything because when the thing crashes at 3am, the state at the moment of the crash is gone unless you wrote it down first. So I record the line, the timestamp, the public percentages and a screenshot at the moment I bet. Not after. When that reverse line movement spot turned out to be one book changing its limits, I could only check because the morning screenshot was sitting in my log.
Vegas knows. The log knows too.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Prove dead.
That's the one.
Before you touch a wire you test it's dead.
But you don't trust the tester.
So it's three steps. Test the tester on something you know is live. Test the circuit. Test the tester again.
Prove, test, prove.
Because a tester can fail and not tell you.
Do it with the price now.
Check the price on Betfair. Check it on a second site. Check the first one again before you click.
Prices move mun.
Gethin drilled it into me.
Never lost a bet to a stale price since.
Lost plenty to Wales mind.

 

[SharpEddie47]

Two skills, one from each of my former professions. The first is reconciliation. An accountant does not trust a ledger until it agrees with an independent source. At every month end I reconcile my sheet to the actual balance at each book. In fifteen years that has surfaced 14 discrepancies. Nine were my own errors, mostly mis-keyed odds. Five were settlement errors by the books, and three of those five went against me, including a push that was graded as a loss. No one will tell you about those. They are only visible if you hold a second record.
The second is from poker. I played semi-professionally for five years, and poker gives you something betting rarely does early: a real downswing, delivered fast. Mine was 31 buy-ins. It is the reason a 1% unit does not frighten me, and the reason I do not believe anyone who says a long losing run "cannot happen." It happens, and it is survivable if you sized correctly before it began.
Neither skill is glamorous. Both are the reason I know my verified +4.1% means what I say it means.
Trust the process, not your gut.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

As a coach, the one that transferred is the game plan. We script the first fifteen plays on Thursday. Not because they'll all work. Because the first quarter is when everyone's adrenaline is highest and the worst decisions get made, so you make them in advance, calm, at a desk. Then there are if/thens. If we're down two scores at the half, we go to this. If our starting corner goes out, we do that. Nobody decides anything new at 7:30 on a Friday night.
That's what I do with in-play now. Before the game I write the triggers. If the line moves a point and a half against me, I don't add. If my guy gets hurt, I'm out, no averaging down. I can't decide those during the game because during the game I'm a different person.
I think what a coach really has is a lot of practice at not trusting himself at kickoff.

 

[oli_sussex]

Kill switch. Trading systems halt automatically at a loss limit. Mine halts all betting at 3% down in a day, enforced by a script.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

Okay so mine is marketing lol. My job is literally getting people to click. And I only realized in this forum that I've been getting clicked on the whole time
Like the countdown timers. "Boost ends in 4:32." I make those. I know the number is made up. "Was +150, now +200" is anchoring and I put it on slides at work. "Over 1,800 bettors have backed this" is social proof, and I used that one on an actual client last month!!
I think it transferred in the sense that I can now SEE it. I'm not sure it transferred in the sense that I stopped clicking. Does that count?

 

[Klaus]

From corporate finance: sensitivity analysis.
Every forecast I produce at work has a base case, a downside case and a stress case. A number that is valid only in the base case is not a number I present.
I apply this to each selection. I ask whether the bet retains positive expected value if the probability is overstated by three points, which is approximately what the calibration check found at the top of the range. Selections that fail are reduced to half stake.
Last season, 6 of 38 selections failed. They returned minus 3.1%. The 32 that passed returned +6.2%.
Small sample. I report the direction.

 

[ThePuntingProf]

Mine is the habit of reading the question, one must consider that for twenty-eight years I set and marked examination papers in which a single word, not or only or at least, reversed the meaning of an entire problem, and a great part of my teaching was the unglamorous business of training students to find that word before they began to write, I find that bookmakers' settlement terms have exactly the same structure, the clause that matters is usually one short phrase, in the event of, or provided that, and it is almost never the clause the customer has read, I keep the terms of each of my three accounts in a folder and I read them again whenever they change, which they do with surprising frequency, I recall a bet on a named player to score first, in which the player was in the squad but not in the starting eleven, and my three accounts treated it three different ways, one voided it, one let it stand, and one lost it outright, I had read all three in advance and placed the punt with the account whose terms favoured the case, a colleague who had not read his lost forty pounds on the same selection, I do not claim this is skill in the way that a model is skill, but it is the most reliable money I have ever made, and it required no mathematics whatever.

 

[DublinDegen]

sales... did it for years and still do... and one thing transferred and its a good one... i can hear no... in sales you get ghosted nine times out of ten and you learn not to take it personally... a lost bet doesnt sting me the way it stings some of you... i can lose four hundred euro and be fine in ten minutes...
which sounds like a skill... but then i worked out the other half... in sales the next call costs nothing and the odds dont get worse... in betting the next bet costs money and the odds are already against me... same persistence... completely different arithmetic...
so it transferred... thats the problem with it...

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

Wait what's a tester lol? Like for electricity? And you test it on something that's LIVE? Isn't that dangerous

 

[TaffyTipster]

Proving unit mun.
Small box. Goes on a known live source.
If it lights, the tester works.
Then you go to the dead circuit and it stays dark.
Then you go back to the live one and check it still lights.
If it doesn't, the dark was the tester dying.
Welcome to the trade.

 

[FadeThePublic]

Tony, that's test-driven development. You define what passes before you write anything. (I've been calling it "having a plan" like an amateur.)

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

I'll take that. Coaches were doing it before you were writing code, though.

 

[SharpEddie47]

Prof, I keep a column for settlement terms per book. It is an accountant's habit, and it has twice kept me from a loss that was not mine to take.
Trust the process, not your gut.

 

[FadeThePublic]

Oli, what happens at 3%? Genuinely. Can you override it?

 

[oli_sussex]

I once wanted to. I found I had removed the override. Past me anticipated it.

 

[Klaus]

A persistence skill with negative expected value per attempt is a liability. The skill transferred. The arithmetic did not.

 

[DublinDegen]

yeah... thats the line...

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

Okay I tried Klaus's three point thing on a 4 leg parlay and I think it gets way worse?? Like if every leg is three points overstated the whole thing looks like it's falling apart lol

 

[SharpEddie47]

Correct. Overstate each leg by three points and a four-leg parlay is overstated by roughly a fifth. That is the arithmetic of the tax.