The Bet You Placed and Deliberately Didn't Watch - And What That Reveals

[SharpEddie47]

An experiment I ran three years ago that produced uncomfortable results.

NFL Sunday. Four bets placed. Deliberate decision: I would not watch any of the games. Phone away except for a single score check at final whistle.

The reasoning: I wanted to know if my emotional experience of outcomes differed when I hadn't watched the process.

The result financially: two wins, two losses. Slightly negative. Within variance.

The result psychologically: the wins felt less satisfying. The losses felt less painful.

Everything was reduced by approximately the same proportion.

Which produced a question I've been sitting with since.

If the wins feel less satisfying when I don't watch, what am I paying for when I watch.

The edge I identify generates the financial return. The watching generates the emotional experience.

The emotional experience is the product I'm actually consuming alongside the financial product.

And I'm paying for it in the same currency as the financial product: the marginal variance that anxiety-driven decisions create when I'm watching something I have money on.

Has anyone else deliberately not watched and found out something they didn't expect to find out.

 

[Klaus]

The protocol of closing the stream on losing positions was discussed in the live losing thread.

The extension of that: matches where the model has produced a high-confidence output but the selection requires a long wait.

Deliberately not watching in these cases.

The finding: the outcome registers clearly at final result. The emotional response is present but compressed.

The absence of the live watching experience removes the sustained tension of the ninety minutes.

The result is the same. The experience of the result is smaller.

This was initially concerning. The reduced emotional experience felt like disengagement from something that should matter.

Examined it more carefully. Concluded the disengagement from the live experience is closer to the correct relationship with the outcome than the sustained tension I experience when watching.

The live watching produces a quality of engagement that isn't required by the bet and isn't helpful to the decision-making.

The deliberate non-watching is more aligned with the analytical approach than the watching is.

The watching is for something other than the betting.

 

[FadeThePublic]

Deliberately didn't watch a specific bet three years ago for a different reason.

The game involved a team I'd previously been a fan of. Strong residual emotional connection.

Put money on their opponent. Couldn't watch both the game as a former fan and the bet as a dispassionate analyst.

Chose the bet. Didn't watch.

Found myself in an intermediate state. Not watching the game but aware of the progress. Checking the score every twenty minutes.

Not watching and not not watching. A middle state with the worst of both.

The score check without the context is its own anxiety. You see 0-1 without knowing what the match has looked like. Whether it was deserved. Whether the shape is sustainable.

The deliberate non-watching revealed that I needed either full commitment to the live experience or complete separation from the result until it settled.

The middle state of occasional score checking produced something worse than either extreme.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Tried not watching a Wales match with money on once.

About forty seconds of actual not watching.

Then I was watching.

The bet existing while Wales play is not something I can be in a separate room from.

The Wales connection is too direct. The bet and the fandom and the hope are all the same thing in the same place. They can't be separated by going to the kitchen.

The deliberate non-watching experiment revealed this: for some bets the watching isn't separate from the betting.

They're the same activity. You don't bet and then watch. You watch and the bet is part of how you watch.

Separating them in those cases isn't possible.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

My last leg of a parlay.

Four legs down. One to go. A match I don't care about between two teams I barely follow.

On paper: this is the easiest bet to not watch. I have no emotional connection to either team. It's just a market.

In practice: I've watched more of these generic fifth-leg matches than any match involving teams I actually follow.

The money created the investment that team loyalty never could.

I've watched forty-five minutes of a Wolves versus Brentwood match I would ordinarily have had zero awareness of, purely because my parlay depended on it.

The deliberate non-watching experiment would reveal this: the bet creates the emotional investment. Not the sport. Not the teams. The money.

Any match becomes a match I need to watch the moment I have money on it.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

The coaching situation forced me into an accidental non-watching experiment.

A game I had a significant bet on happened to coincide with a film session I couldn't reschedule. Parents of players. Three-hour commitment. Phone silent.

Came out and checked the score.

Won.

The specific revelation: I'd spent three hours in a completely different mental state from my normal bet-watching.

The film session was absorbing. I was genuinely present.

When I saw the winning result I felt something but it was smaller than normal.

And then I thought: I was fully present for three hours of work I found engaging.

The normal bet-watching produces three hours of presence divided between the work of watching and the anxiety of the bet.

The accidental non-watching produced three hours of genuine presence somewhere useful.

The result was the same.

I only had one of the two experiences.

 

[DublinDegen]

cannot deliberately not watch...

have tried...

the bet running without me watching it is its own specific anxiety...

it's not that watching is essential to enjoying the bet...

it's that not watching while knowing the bet is live is intolerable...

the information about what's happening is somewhere and i don't have it...

that specific gap between what i know and what's happening is the thing i can't bear...

checked the score in the live losing thread...

always checking...

the deliberate non-watch reveals that the checking compulsion is primary...

i wasn't watching because i enjoyed it...

i was watching because not watching while knowing something is happening is impossible for me...

 

[FadeThePublic]

Conor identifying the specific thing the experiment reveals for the compulsive checker.

The watching isn't the product for Conor. The monitoring is.

The sustained awareness of what's happening, moment to moment, is the need.

The bet creates a live event. The live event requires monitoring. The monitoring requires watching.

The deliberate non-watching experiment doesn't reveal a more relaxed relationship with the outcome.

It reveals that the relationship is specifically with the information flow, not with the entertainment.

The experiment has different meanings depending on what was driving the watching.

 

[oli_sussex]

At the exchange professional traders deliberately don't watch matches in real time when executing specific strategies.

The strategy: identify a market condition that will occur at a predictable point in the match without needing to watch the match itself.

Price a set piece specialist's scoring probability. The team will receive a corner late in a close match. The in-play price will adjust. Act at that specific moment.

You don't need to watch the match to execute this. You need to monitor the specific trigger condition.

The deliberate non-watching was a professional strategy for reducing the emotional noise that live watching produced.

The traders who were emotionally detached from the live experience made better in-play decisions than those who watched and felt the match as sporting content.

The watching was identified as an impairment to decision quality.

The deliberate non-watching was the technical solution.

 

[SharpEddie47]

Oli's professional context makes the experiment's implication explicit.

For the exchange trader: watching is a liability. The emotional content of watching impairs the decision quality that the trading requires.

For the analytical bettor: watching after the bet is placed changes nothing about the outcome but does change the emotional experience.

The question is whether the emotional experience of watching justifies the decisions it influences.

During the live watching experience: impulses arise. Cash out temptation. The urge to hedge. The urge to add to the position.

These impulses are created by watching.

The deliberate non-watching eliminates these impulses along with the experience they ride in on.

The financial implication: the decisions driven by live watching are almost universally worse than the pre-match decision.

The deliberate non-watching is the mechanical solution to a behavioral problem.

The question is whether the solution removes something you actually wanted from the experience.