What the Spreadsheet Says vs What You Feel - Which Wins When They Disagree?

[SharpEddie47]

I've been doing this for twenty years and tracking every bet for fifteen of them. The spreadsheet doesn't lie. My record on bets where I followed the model output with no reservations: positive CLV, positive P&L over meaningful sample.

My record on bets where I had a specific reservation before placing but placed anyway: noticeably worse. Not catastrophically worse. Measurably worse.

What I haven't published, and what this thread is about: my override rate.

The times I identified a qualifying selection, the model said bet, and I didn't. Or the reverse: the model said no qualifying edge and I bet something anyway.

I went back through five seasons of records specifically flagging these two categories.

Override rate: approximately 12%. One in eight decisions involved some form of deviation from what the model was telling me to do.

The P&L on the overrides: slightly negative overall. The intuition that felt like information was producing marginally worse results than the model.

Here's the thing that keeps me honest. The 12% doesn't feel like 12%. It feels like maybe 3 or 4%. The overrides in my memory are the ones that worked out. The ones that didn't are harder to recall with the same clarity.

My honest question for this forum: what's everyone's actual override rate. Not what you think it is. What the record shows.

Because I suspect most people who describe themselves as systematic have a higher override rate than their self-description implies, and they don't know it because they're not tracking the overrides the same way they're tracking the selections.

 

[Klaus]

The override rate question is the correct question and I've tracked it specifically.

Bundesliga model, fourteen seasons of data. Pre-committed decision rule: if the model output meets the threshold, bet. If it doesn't, don't.

My documented override rate: 8.3%.

The 8.3% breaks down as follows.

Approximately 5% are "failure to bet" overrides. The model qualifies a selection but I find a reason not to place. Usually this is a specific piece of late information that the model hasn't incorporated yet. Sometimes this is justified. Often it is not.

The remaining 3.3% are "bet without qualification" overrides. The model doesn't produce a qualifying output but I place something anyway.

The P&L on the second category is specifically and consistently negative across all fourteen seasons.

The P&L on the first category is genuinely mixed. Sometimes I correctly identified information the model missed. Sometimes I talked myself out of a good bet using a plausible story.

The honest conclusion: I am less systematic than the framework I've built implies. The framework is more systematic than I am.

 

[FadeThePublic]

The override question cuts differently for a contrarian approach.

My methodology is inherently intuitive at the selection stage. I'm not running a model that produces quantified outputs. I'm making a judgment that public money has distorted this specific line beyond what the actual probability warrants.

That judgment is systematic in its logic but not systematic in its execution. Every application requires a qualitative assessment.

Which means I can't cleanly separate "what the model says" from "what I feel" the way Eddie and Klaus can. They're more integrated in my process than they are in theirs.

What I can say honestly: there are bets I know at the moment of placing that I'm placing partly because I want to be contrarian rather than because the specific evidence for this specific game is strong. The contrarian feeling and the contrarian analysis look identical in the account summary but they're different things.

My suspicion about my own override rate: higher than Eddie's. Because the gut feeling that I'm fading something correctly and the genuine identification of public distortion can be hard to distinguish from the inside.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Don't have a spreadsheet.

Been meaning to build one for years.

Never done it.

Which means this question is genuinely impossible for me to answer.

I can't tell you my override rate because I have nothing to override from.

The "feeling" and the "decision" are the same thing in my process.

When I back Wales I feel like they'll win and then I back them.

There's no intermediate step where a model disagrees with the feeling and I have to choose.

The uncomfortable version of this: maybe everything I call analysis is just feeling with a post-hoc justification attached.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

I definitely override my own rules constantly.

Like I have a thing where I tell myself I won't add more than four legs to a parlay because the math gets too bad.

And then I find a fifth leg that feels right and I add it anyway.

The fifth leg specifically is almost never the one that wins the parlay. It's almost always the leg that kills it.

So I know this about myself. I've watched it happen enough times to know the pattern.

And then Sunday comes around and there's a fifth leg and it feels right and I add it.

The gap between knowing the pattern and not repeating the pattern: that gap is basically my entire betting history.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

The coaching equivalent is watching film on yourself.

Great coaches can watch film on their own team with the same cold analytical eye they use for opponents. Most coaches struggle with this. You've made the calls. You've invested in the players. The emotional attachment to your decisions makes honest evaluation harder.

I've tried to bring that cold-film-study approach to reviewing my own betting decisions. I mark every selection before the game with a confidence level and the specific reasoning.

After the fact I go back and look at the ones I placed that didn't meet my stated criteria, and the ones I passed that did.

The pattern: I'm significantly more likely to override toward placing a bet than toward passing one. The urgency to act is stronger than the discipline to abstain.

My son asked me once what I was doing on my phone before a game. I told him I was checking something about the game. He asked if it made the game more fun. I said yes without thinking about it.

It wasn't the honest answer. It made the game feel more important. Whether that's the same as more fun I've been thinking about since.

 

[DublinDegen]

the spreadsheet never existed so this is a different question for me...

but the feeling vs. the decision is something i understand from a different angle...

the feeling that told me to bet was always present... it was the decision part that was absent...

there was no moment where i thought "the analysis says this but my gut says that"...

there was just the feeling and then the bet...

the override in my case wasn't overriding a model... it was the feeling overriding the basic awareness that i shouldn't be betting at all...

which happens before the selection decision... not during it...

the thing that needed overriding was never the model output...

it was the question of whether placing any bet in that moment was the right thing...

that question lost every time for a long time...

 

[SharpEddie47]

Conor identifying something important that the framework discussion tends to obscure.

For someone with a genuine model: the question is whether you follow it or deviate.

For someone in a compulsive relationship with betting: the model question is moot because the prior question, should I bet at all right now, is the one that's being overridden.

Two completely different types of override. My 12% is about analytical discipline. Conor's isn't.

The same word covers very different things.