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.

 

[ThePuntingProf]

The tension between the quantitative model and the qualitative judgment has occupied me for thirty years and I want to be precise about what I think is actually happening when this conflict arises because I think most people who discuss it are imprecise in a way that matters, the model doesn't have feelings and the feelings don't have a model, what actually happens is that you have two separate cognitive systems operating simultaneously and the question is which one gets to make the final call, the deliberate analytical system that has produced a specific output through careful reasoning and the fast intuitive system that produces a felt sense of confidence or unease independently of any explicit reasoning, the research on this from Kahneman and others is quite clear that both systems have genuine information value in specific domains and neither is universally superior, the expert who ignores their intuition is losing signal from pattern recognition that operates below conscious awareness, the expert who ignores their model is losing the benefits of careful explicit reasoning that is not subject to the biases of the intuitive system, Margaret understood this better than I did in a specific way, she trusted her pattern recognition about specific matches in a way that was not reducible to explicit reasoning, and she was right often enough that I learned to weight her felt sense as genuine information rather than noise, the problem is that distinguishing genuine expert intuition, which represents compressed pattern recognition, from wishful thinking, which represents the desired outcome masquerading as a probability assessment, requires a calibration that takes years to develop and that most bettors, including myself at various points in my career, do not have, so the honest answer to which wins is that it depends on whether your intuition is genuinely expert intuition, which is rare and hard to verify, or whether it's wishful thinking wearing the costume of expert judgment, which is common and feels identical from the inside.

 

[oli_sussex]

Override rate should be tracked separately from selection rate.

If you're not tracking your overrides you don't know your actual methodology. You only know your intended methodology.

These are frequently different.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Oli with four sentences that just called out everyone who thinks they're systematic.

Including me.

Especially me.

 

[Klaus]

The "intended methodology versus actual methodology" framing is the most precise version of what this thread is examining.

The gap between them is the override rate.

Most bettors know their intended methodology well. They've thought about it, articulated it, discussed it on forums like this one.

Fewer bettors know their actual methodology, which is the record of what they actually did, including the deviations.

I spent years believing my actual methodology and my intended methodology were essentially the same thing.

The data showed the gap was 8.3%.

That was uncomfortable to find. It was also more useful than any amount of self-description.

 

[FadeThePublic]

The self-description problem applies to my approach specifically and I want to be direct about it.

"Fade the public" is a systematic-sounding description of an approach that contains significant unquantified judgment at every step.

Which markets have sufficient public distortion to warrant a contrarian position? Judgment.

Is this specific line movement sharp money or public adjustment? Judgment.

Is the public distortion large enough to overcome the house edge? Judgment.

At every decision point: judgment that feels systematic but isn't formally quantified.

My CLV is positive over a meaningful sample. The approach works. But "the spreadsheet says" and "what I feel" are less clearly separated in my process than they are in Eddie's or Klaus's.

The systematic-sounding label is partly a description of the approach and partly a story I tell that makes the felt sense of contrarianism feel more rigorous than it is.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

Fade being honest about the label and the reality is the thing worth holding onto here.

Every serious bettor has a label for their approach. The label implies more systematic execution than the actual record usually supports.

Value bettor. Contrarian. Model-based. Situational.

These describe the intended methodology accurately.

They describe the actual methodology partially.

The gap between the description and the reality is exactly what the override rate measures when you bother to track it.

Most people don't bother because the gap is uncomfortable.