The Bet That Felt Like Prayer - When You Weren't Betting the Match at All

[SharpEddie47]

There's a category of bet that sits outside every framework this forum has discussed.

Not the analytical bet. Not the entertainment bet. Not the boredom bet or the impulsive bet or the deliberately bad bet.

The bet placed from something closer to supplication.

I've placed two of them across twenty years and I know exactly which ones they were.

The first: my father's bypass surgery. 2011. I sat in a hospital waiting room for six hours. Placed a Cowboys moneyline bet on my phone at 3pm. Not because I had a view on the game. Not because I needed entertainment. The Cowboys were playing that Sunday and the bet was some kind of declaration that Sunday was going to happen normally.

The bet said: there will be a Sunday. The Sunday will have a game. The game will matter.

I didn't think about it in those terms while placing it. The reasoning came later when I was trying to understand what I'd done.

The Cowboys won. My father came through the surgery fine. The two facts have no connection and some part of my brain connected them anyway.

The second bet I won't describe specifically but it was in 2019 and it involved another situation where I had no control over an outcome that mattered enormously and I placed a bet that was about the existence of normal life rather than about the game.

Whether anyone else has placed a bet they knew was something other than a bet while they were placing it.

 

[DublinDegen]

yes...

the most honest answer i can give to any question in this forum is yes to this one...

the specific version: the period after emma left...

the flat felt different... the evenings had a specific quality of silence that was new...

didn't have the framework at the time to understand what i was doing...

but there was a period of maybe six weeks where every bet placed had this quality that eddie is describing...

not the analysis bet... not even the boredom bet from our earlier thread...

something more pointed than boredom...

the bet as a way of saying: i am still here... things are still happening... i am still a person with things pending...

the pending bet was evidence of continued participation in time...

a bet that hasn't settled yet is proof that the future exists...

during those six weeks: the future was the specific thing i couldn't feel without the pending bet to point at it...

the worst version was a bet placed at about 2am on a match finishing in australia...

knew nothing about the match... knew nothing about the teams...

the specific selection: doesn't matter... was never about the selection...

was about having something unresolved at 2am that would resolve by morning...

the morning arriving with a settled bet was evidence the morning had arrived...

doesn't make sense written down...

made complete sense at 2am in that flat...

 

[ThePuntingProf]

I want to describe the specific period I've never described directly in this forum because the thread has arrived at the place where not describing it would be a form of dishonesty I've been practicing for long enough, in the year before Margaret died there were four months when we knew the prognosis and didn't know the timeline and the four months had a specific quality that I've never found adequate language for except to say that everything continued happening on the surface while underneath the surface everything was different and I continued betting during those four months and the bets I placed during that period are different from every other bet in thirty years of records in a specific way that I didn't understand until I read Eddie's post, the bets weren't larger than normal and they weren't more frequent than normal and they were placed with what looked from the outside like my normal analytical process, the Poisson model, the Asian Handicap markets, the careful recording of reasoning, but the reasoning I recorded during those four months reads differently from everything before and after when I look at it now, the reasoning is correct as reasoning, the analytical content is sound, but underneath the analytical content there is something else that I can see now that I couldn't see while I was writing it, which is that every bet placed during those months was a bet that a specific upcoming Saturday or Sunday or Wednesday evening would exist and would contain football and would be normal in the specific way that only the surface of things was normal, the bet was my material participation in the continuation of ordinary life during a period when ordinary life felt specifically fragile, and when I won I felt something that wasn't quite satisfaction and when I lost I felt something that wasn't quite disappointment, both feelings were smaller than they should have been because the outcome of the bet was not what the bet was actually about, what the bet was about was something that no result could address, and I knew this while placing them and continued placing them because the process of placing them was the thing that mattered rather than the outcome, the bet as a ritual of normalcy when normalcy was the specific thing that was being lost, Margaret knew I was betting normally during that period because the records were there and the conversation was the same and I think she understood what I was doing without naming it and I think she let me do it because the ritual was for me rather than for the bet.

 

[TaffyTipster]

The 2016 European Championship.

Wales in their first tournament in fifty-eight years.

My grandfather was eighty-four.

He'd been watching Wales his entire adult life without seeing them in a major tournament.

I backed Wales through the whole tournament.

Not for analytical reasons.

For him.

Ridiculous thing to say about a bet.

But the backing Wales felt like the material version of hoping he'd see something he'd been waiting for.

The Wales bets during that tournament: not sports bets in the normal sense.

Something closer to what Eddie is describing.

I watched every match sitting next to him.

Wales beat Russia. Wales beat Slovakia. The Belgium match.

Every bet that came in during that tournament felt like something had been heard rather than something had been won.

He died eighteen months later.

He'd seen it.

The tournament bets and the watching with him are the same memory.

Couldn't tell you which I was actually doing at any specific moment.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

My Chiefs Super Bowl bets have had this quality sometimes.

Not always. Not even usually.

But the Super Bowl in the year my dad was really unwell.

He's a Chiefs fan. Always has been. Taught me to watch football.

The Chiefs were in the Super Bowl and he was in the hospital during the week before it.

I backed them at longer odds than I would normally have considered reasonable.

Not because I thought the odds were right.

Because backing them felt like saying out loud that he would be watching on Sunday.

He was watching on Sunday.

Chiefs won.

The connection I know doesn't exist: I can feel it anyway.

 

[FadeThePublic]

I've resisted this category of bet specifically because I've understood what it is.

The bet placed as a wish is the bet that most completely abandons the framework that makes betting a rational activity.

Not because the bet itself is irrational. It might be analytically sound by coincidence.

But because the process that produced it has nothing to do with probability estimation.

The Cowboys bet in the hospital waiting room: if the Cowboys were genuinely mispriced and the bet was positive expected value, it was still a prayer with a CLV attached.

The prayer doesn't become analysis because the odds happened to be correct.

I've had the impulse. The moment where a bet would feel like doing something in a situation where doing something is not available.

I haven't placed those bets. Not out of discipline exactly.

Out of something closer to superstition in reverse.

If I bet on something because I need it to happen rather than because I've assessed its probability: I've muddied the water between what I want and what I think.

The analytical process I rely on requires those two things to be separate.

The prayer bet merges them.

I don't place them because I'm afraid of what happens to the process if I do.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

My son's first start as the quarterback of my team last season.

I coach him. He's fourteen. He started for the first time in a meaningful game.

I had no bet on the game. Obvious reasons.

But I had a bet on another game that afternoon. A Michigan game. Nothing to do with my son.

When my son's game was over and we'd won and he'd played well: I checked my phone and the Michigan bet.

The Michigan bet had won too.

What I felt when both things landed: connected in a way I can't rationally explain.

The Michigan bet wasn't a prayer for my son's performance. I placed it before his game started.

But in the memory of that afternoon: the two wins are the same feeling.

The mind that made the connection: doing something the analytical framework doesn't sanction.

I've examined this specific afternoon more than I've examined most things.

The honest finding: the bet and the game outcome were two separate things that happened to go the same way on the same day and my brain turned them into one event.

The brain that turns two separate good things into evidence of something connected: the same brain that places the prayer bet.

Mine did it retroactively.

Some people do it in advance.

Both are the same underlying movement of mind.

 

[Klaus]

Have placed one bet that belongs in this thread.

Not during a crisis. During a period of significant professional uncertainty.

A restructuring at BMW that might affect my position. A month of not knowing.

I placed a Bundesliga bet during that month that the model hadn't generated.

The bet: a team I had no particular view on at a price I hadn't evaluated carefully.

The selection I remember making in approximately three minutes.

My normal process: thirty to forty minutes minimum.

What I understood while placing it: I was placing a bet because the month had no resolution and the bet would have a resolution.

The bet settled as a loss within the week.

The restructuring resolved in my favor the following month.

No connection.

The part of me that noticed the timing of the loss and the timing of the resolution: not entirely convinced there's no connection.

The rest of me: completely convinced there's no connection.

The two parts: haven't fully resolved the disagreement.

 

[oli_sussex]

The prayer bet is the one where you're not betting on the match.

You're betting on whether the match matters.

Whether there will be a normal Sunday. Whether life continues. Whether the person you're watching it with will still be watching things with you.

None of those bets can be placed directly.

The proxy bet exists because those bets don't.

 

[SharpEddie47]

Oli reducing the mechanism to its exact structure.

The bet on the proxy because the real bet isn't available.

I couldn't bet on my father's surgery going well. The market for that doesn't exist.

I could bet on the Cowboys. The Cowboys game was a proxy for Sunday existing.

Sunday existing was a proxy for my father being alright.

The Cowboys bet was three steps removed from what I was actually trying to express.

Three steps removed and completely clear to me while I was placing it.

Not as a conscious sequence. As a felt understanding.

The Cowboys game mattered in a way Cowboys games don't normally matter.

The mattering wasn't about football.

 

[TaffyTipster]

The mattering that wasn't about football.

Wales in the Euros with my grandfather beside me.

The mattering was about him.

The mattering was about fifty-eight years.

The mattering was about getting to sit next to someone watching something they'd been waiting for.

The bet on each Wales match: trying to make the mattering material.

The money on the outcome as a way of converting the feeling into something that would resolve externally.

The prayer needing a form that exists in the world.

The bet as that form.

 

[DublinDegen]

the prayer needing a form that exists in the world...

yes... that's the most accurate description of what those 2am bets were...

the hope that had nowhere to go except onto a betting slip for a match finishing in australia at three in the morning...

the hope didn't care about the match...

the match just accepted the hope...

the one market that was open and would resolve before morning...

the form that existed in the world at 2am when most forms are closed...

the thing i needed couldn't be obtained in any form that existed at 2am...

the australian match existed at 2am...

it accepted the deposit...

the hope and the money went in together and the hope was never going to come back the same way the money might...

but it had somewhere to go for a few hours...

which was the specific thing needed...

somewhere for the hope to go while morning arrived...

 

[FadeThePublic]

Conor's description of the bet as a container for hope that has nowhere else to go.

The market as the one institution that remains open and accepting when everything else is closed.

3am. The hospital waiting room. The quiet flat. The month of professional uncertainty.

The betting market: always open. Always accepting. Always will resolve.

The resolution as the specific service being purchased.

Not the outcome. The resolution.

Something that currently doesn't have an answer will have an answer by morning.

The prayer bet and the boredom bet and the exit-mechanism bet from our earlier threads: all of them using the same service.

The resolution of a pending state.

The resolution being purchased for different underlying reasons.

The market provides the same service regardless of the reason.

 

[ThePuntingProf]

I want to add the final observation that I've been working toward since writing my earlier post which is about what the prayer bet reveals rather than what it does, because I think the what-it-does has been covered with remarkable honesty across this thread and the what-it-reveals is the thing worth holding, what it reveals is that betting has always been asked to do things that betting cannot do, the prayer bet just makes this visible in unusually clear form, the analytical bet is supposed to be the rational expression of a probability view and the entertainment bet is supposed to be the pleasurable engagement with sporting uncertainty and the prayer bet is supposed to be the impossible transaction with the universe that the first two framings would never permit, but the distinction between these categories is less clean than the categories imply because the analytical bet also contains a wish that the analysis be correct which is not a purely analytical state, and the entertainment bet contains a wish that the entertainment be good which is not a purely recreational state, the prayer bet simply concentrates the wish-content to the point where it can no longer be framed as analysis or entertainment, it has to be acknowledged as what it is, which is the use of a financial instrument to give material form to hope that has no other available form, and I think every serious bettor who examines their history honestly will find not that the prayer bet is an anomaly within an otherwise analytical practice but that it is the concentrated visible version of something that was always present in every bet placed for any reason, the wish that the uncertain thing will resolve in the direction we need it to, the analytical framework being the system we build to make that wish feel like something more than a wish, the prayer bet being the moment the system isn't needed because the wish is all there is and it doesn't need permission.

 

[TaffyTipster]

The wish that the analytical framework makes feel like something more than a wish.

My grandfather watching Wales in France.

The bet as the material form of the wish.

The match as the event the wish got attached to.

The analytical framework for those Wales bets: genuinely absent.

Just the wish with a price attached.

The price making the wish feel like an action.

The action feeling like participation in the outcome.

The participation being the thing needed.

Not the win.

Not the money.

The feeling that something was being done rather than just hoped for.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

My dad watching on Sunday.

The Chiefs bet.

I wanted him there. I wanted him watching. I wanted things to be normal.

The bet said: Sunday will happen. He'll be there. Things will be normal.

The Chiefs winning said: yes, all of those things.

I know that's not what it said.

It said: the Chiefs won.

But I heard the other thing.

And I'm not ashamed of that.

 

[DublinDegen]

not ashamed of that...

the prayer bet being the most honest thing in the record sometimes...

not the most analytical...

not the most disciplined...

the most honest about what was actually needed at the moment of placing...

the hope having a form...

the form being temporary...

but the temporary form being enough...

the australian match that resolved by morning...

i was still there when it did...

which was the thing the bet was actually for...

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

Something my father told me about the first game he bet on.

He was nineteen. His mother was ill. He backed a team he'd never watched because a friend told him the price was good.

They won.

She recovered.

He told me he'd known the two things weren't connected.

He told me he'd backed that team every time they played for the next five years anyway.

The knowledge that two things aren't connected: compatible with acting as if they are.

The bet as a ritual that acknowledges the connection can't be real while maintaining it anyway.

The ritual that knows what it is and continues.

Maybe that's the honest version of what prayer always was.

 

[SharpEddie47]

The Cowboys from that afternoon.

I still back them. I'm a Cowboys fan regardless.

But the bets placed on the games during the days around my father's surgery: they exist in a different part of the record.

The record doesn't mark them differently. Same column. Same format. Same documentation.

Different thing underneath.

The record can't hold what those bets were.

The record holds what all bets are on the surface.

The surface is the same.

The underneath is where this whole thread lives.