What Would You Tell Someone Starting Out Today? The Advice Nobody Gave You

[SharpEddie47]

My nephew asked me last month. He's twenty-three. He's seen me take betting seriously for twenty years, he knows I've been profitable, and he wanted to know how to start.

The specific question: what should I do first.

I gave him the analytical answer. Track everything from the first bet. Understand expected value before placing anything. Never bet more than one percent of your bankroll on any selection. Learn what closing line value is before you try to beat it.

He nodded at all of it.

Drove home and thought about whether that was actually what I wished someone had told me at twenty-three.

The analytical answer is correct. It's not the answer I wished I'd had.

What I wished someone had told me at twenty-three was this: the way this feels in the first six months is not the way it will feel in year ten. The wins in the first six months will feel like evidence that you're good at this. They are not evidence of anything except that six months is not a sample size. The losses in year three, when they come, will feel like a change from a previous state of winning. They are not. They are the natural distribution of outcomes around an edge that may or may not exist and that you cannot confirm exists at six months.

The thing you can do in the first six months that has genuine value: build the habit of tracking before you build the habit of betting. The record is worth more than the bets it documents.

What did everyone else tell their nephew, or wish someone had told them.

 

[FadeThePublic]

The thing nobody told me and that I had to find out expensively: the confidence you feel after your first profitable month is specifically uncorrelated with whether you have genuine edge.

Running hot and having edge feel identical. For a long time.

The person who runs hot for three months and the person who has genuine edge and runs at their expected rate for three months: they feel the same from the inside. They look the same to other people. They sometimes even look the same in the data because three months is not a sample size.

The dangerous moment isn't when you start losing. The dangerous moment is when you've been winning long enough to believe the winning is yours.

The belief arrives before the evidence supports it. Usually long before.

What I'd tell someone starting: assume you're running hot until the sample size says otherwise. The sample size required to say otherwise is larger than you think. Probably four to five times larger than you think.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Tell them to track everything.

Not as a betting thing. As a basic thing.

Keep a record of every bet before you worry about which bets to place.

Because in five years when you want to know if you actually have an edge.

You'll need five years of records.

And the records don't exist unless you started keeping them at the beginning.

The other thing.

Don't bet on your team when you're specifically invested in the result.

You already know this. You'll do it anyway.

But it's worth someone saying it out loud before you find out why.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

I'm three years in so I feel like I'm still close enough to the start to remember what I actually needed to hear versus what would have sounded right.

What would have actually helped: someone telling me that the fun of it is real and valid but it has a price and the price is specific. It's not just money. It's the way you watch sport changes. It's that you can't fully watch a game you have money on without also monitoring the bet. Those two experiences, watching the game and monitoring the bet, they run alongside each other and they contaminate each other a little.

I didn't know that going in. I knew I'd either win money or lose money. I didn't know I was also making a decision about the quality of the experience of watching sport.

I would have started differently if I'd known that.

I'm not sure I would have not started.

But differently.

 

[DublinDegen]

the thing nobody told me that would have mattered most...

and this is hard to say because it sounds like something you'd reject at twenty-three...

but: know what you're actually doing before you start...

not the mechanics of it... the mechanics are easy to learn...

but why you're doing it specifically... what the bet is filling or providing that something else isn't...

if the answer is entertainment or intellectual challenge or something that exists clearly in the real world... probably fine...

if the answer is harder to locate... if the bet is doing something for you that you can't quite name... that's information worth having before you start...

not because the answer to that question is "don't bet"...

but because the thing the bet is doing that you can't name is the thing that scales up rather than down when the betting gets harder...

i didn't know what i was actually doing until i was far enough in that stopping was a different kind of problem from not starting...

the advice i couldn't have heard at twenty-three because i didn't have the question yet...

 

[ThePuntingProf]

What I would tell someone starting out today is substantially different from what I would have said ten years ago and I want to be honest about why before I say what I'd actually tell them, because the shift in my answer reflects something about what I've understood through experience that I didn't understand analytically even though I understood the mathematics perfectly well throughout, which is that the relationship between the person and the activity changes over time in ways that the initial framing of the activity doesn't prepare you for, I started betting as an intellectual exercise and a practical application of probability theory and for many years that framing was accurate enough, the mathematics were interesting, the models were engaging problems, the money was a way of keeping score, what I didn't account for and what I would tell someone starting today is that the activity produces its own relationship with you regardless of how you frame it at the start, the frame you bring to it at the beginning is not necessarily the frame you'll be operating in at year fifteen or year twenty, what I would actually tell them is this: before you place your first bet, write down what you hope this will look like in ten years, what you hope to be spending on it, what you hope it does for you, what you hope it doesn't do to you, and then put that piece of paper somewhere you'll be able to find it, because the version of you that's been doing this for ten years needs to be able to read what the version that started hoped for, and the comparison between those two documents is more honest than any P&L statement.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

The thing I tell my players when they're about to make a decision they'll have to live with for a while: imagine the version of you that has to explain this decision five years from now and make sure that version of you can explain it clearly.

I'd tell someone starting betting the same thing. The bet that makes sense right now should also make sense to the version of you who's been tracking it for five years.

Most bets that go wrong make sense right now and don't survive the five-year test.

The specific thing I didn't understand starting out: there's a version of getting into this where you become someone slightly different over time. The difference is small enough that you don't notice it as it happens. You only notice it when you compare the current version to an earlier one.

I'm not saying that version is worse. I'm saying it's different in specific ways.

Knowing the ways in advance doesn't prevent them. But it might help you notice them when they arrive.

 

[Klaus]

The advice I would give is structural rather than philosophical.

Decide on a maximum percentage of disposable income before you start.

Not bankroll percentage. Disposable income percentage. The money you would spend on other entertainment and wouldn't miss.

Whatever that number is: halve it. That is your annual betting budget.

Before the first bet. Before the first win. Before the feeling of being good at this arrives.

The number that feels comfortable before you start is the right number.

The number that feels comfortable after six months of winning is not.

 

[oli_sussex]

Three things.

Track every bet before placing it, including the reasoning. Date, odds, stake, why.

Don't increase stakes during winning runs.

The sample size required to know if you have edge is larger than you currently think.

 

[FadeThePublic]

What Oli said in four sentences would have saved me roughly eighteen months of expensive miseducation if someone had said it to me clearly before I started.

The sample size one specifically. I thought a hundred bets was enough to know something meaningful. It isn't. It isn't close.

The belief that a hundred bets tells you something real is so widespread and so expensive for the people who hold it.

 

[SharpEddie47]

The sample size problem is the one most frequently underestimated and most expensive.

Five hundred bets at meaningful stakes before you have any reasonable basis to assess whether you have genuine edge.

Most people who try this seriously either stop before five hundred because of losses, or become convinced they have edge before five hundred because of wins.

Five hundred is the number you pass through on the way to making a strong analytical claim. Almost nobody waits.

 

[TaffyTipster]

What I'd add to Oli's three things.

Pick one sport.

One league if you can manage it.

Learn it deeply.

The person who bets on six sports because there's always something on: they never develop genuine knowledge of anything.

The person who bets only on the Premiership for two years and watches every match they have money on: they're building something.

Breadth feels like more opportunity.

Depth is where the actual edge lives.

 

[DublinDegen]

taffy's point about breadth feeling like opportunity and depth being where the edge is...

this is the one i would have benefited most from hearing...

because the thing that felt like engagement in the beginning was having something going on in every market...

the five-sport acca that kept you interested in matches from twelve different countries...

it felt like being embedded in football globally...

it was just more exposure to randomness with more ways to lose...

the depth i never built because i was always going wide...

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

The most important thing I'd tell someone starting today that I haven't seen in this thread yet: decide in advance what losing looks like.

Not the amount you might lose. The experience.

If I lose this much, this is what I'll do. If I have this many consecutive losses, this is how I'll respond. If the losses start affecting my mood at work, this is the line I've committed to.

Coaches do this. We call it a crisis plan. You build the crisis plan when there's no crisis, because the crisis state is the worst possible time to make decisions about how to respond to a crisis.

The bettor who only thinks about what winning looks like goes into the first serious losing run without a plan.

The losing run is when the most expensive decisions get made.

Build the plan before you need it.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

The crisis plan before the crisis.

I've never done this and my losing runs have always produced worse decisions than my winning runs.

Which is obviously the wrong direction.

The decisions should be equally good or the bad-run decisions should be more conservative.

Instead: bad run produces parlay with more legs, higher stakes on a lock, something that will definitely bring it back.

The crisis plan idea. Going to actually think about what mine would be.

 

[ThePuntingProf]

The crisis plan Tony describes is what Margaret and I called the agreement and we made them at the start of each football season rather than in response to a problem, the agreement covered three specific things which were the maximum loss before stopping for a defined period, the maximum stake on any single bet regardless of what the model suggested, and the specific person we would tell if either of those limits was breached, the third element was the one that made the first two real, because a limit you've set for yourself in private is a limit you can renegotiate with yourself in private when the pressure is high, a limit you've told someone else about is a different kind of limit, it has a social reality that the private version doesn't have, Margaret was the person I told and I was the person she told and we held each other to them imperfectly over the years but more than we would have held ourselves, the crisis plan without the external accountability is a private limit and private limits have a specific track record in situations of high pressure, the crisis plan with external accountability is something closer to a commitment and commitments hold differently than intentions.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Prof describing the thing he and Margaret had.

The third element being the one that makes the first two real.

Telling someone.

Bronwyn isn't the person I've told my limits to.

She probably should be.

The private version of the limit: renegotiated privately about four times a year.

The version you've told Bronwyn: different kind of thing.

 

[Klaus]

Have told my wife Petra the number.

Not because she asked. Because Prof's version of this principle, or something close to it, became clear to me in an earlier thread.

The limit I held privately for three years.

The same limit I've held for eight months since telling her.

Same number. Different kind of limit.

 

[DublinDegen]

the telling someone as the thing that makes the limit real...

this is what therapy provided in the absence of a person in my life who could hold the limit...

an external accountability structure when the internal one had stopped working...

the advice to someone starting out: build the external accountability before you need it, not after you've discovered you need it...

which requires admitting in advance that you might need it...

which is the admission that's hard to make at the beginning when everything feels manageable...

 

[SharpEddie47]

The full list this thread has produced.

Track everything before you worry about what to track. The record is worth more than the bets.

Assume you're running hot until the sample size, which is larger than you think, says otherwise.

Know what you're actually doing before you start. What the bet provides.

Decide what losing looks like before you lose.

Tell someone the limit. The private limit is a different thing from the told limit.

Pick one sport and learn it deeply.

Set the annual budget before the first win, not after.

None of this is the advice I gave my nephew. I gave him the analytical answer because the analytical answer is what I understand how to give.

The things in this list are harder to say to a twenty-three year old than expected value and bankroll management.

They're probably more important.