What's the Best Bet You Ever Placed That Had Nothing To Do With Your Usual Method?

That’s actually a pretty relatable story. Even people with strict systems sometimes get influenced by something random like a conversation or gut feeling. It happens more than most bettors admit.


The interesting part is when it works out, it sticks in your head forever.


Speaking of betting events, I saw the Big Adventures tournament is about to finish and they’ll pick the final winner live on stream. The prize is a Maldives trip and the draw is from the Top 100 players.


I didn’t make it that far but I’m curious to see who wins.
 
MadMarket
That's the trade I've made consciously.

Some real signal excluded to keep all the false signal out.

Whether that's the right trade I genuinely don't know.
 
My answer to this question spans thirty years and I find it difficult to isolate a single instance but there is one that stands out clearly, 2003, a match I had no analytical basis to bet on, a competition I rarely followed, Margaret had been watching a particular player for weeks purely because she found him interesting as an athlete, not as a betting proposition, she said one evening that she thought he was the kind of player who only existed fully in the largest moments and that the upcoming match was the largest of his career to that point, I had nothing systematic to add to this observation, it was entirely her read on a human being, I bet on his team to win, they won and he was the decisive factor, the reason I remember it so clearly is not the money but the conversation afterward, Margaret said she hadn't meant it as a tip, she'd just been thinking out loud about what made certain athletes different, I had converted her observation about human greatness into a financial transaction without telling her, she found this both funny and slightly troubling, I think she was right to find it troubling, we were already doing something to sport that we hadn't fully reckoned with.
 
"I had converted her observation about human greatness into a financial transaction without telling her."

Prof that's going to stay with me.
 
"She'd just been thinking out loud about what made certain athletes different."

And you turned it into a bet.

That's the thing betting does without you noticing. Converts everything.
 
Prof that story contains the whole problem in miniature.

Someone experiencing sport purely. Someone else extracting financial value from that pure experience.

And the person extracting the value loves the person having the pure experience.
 
And Margaret found it troubling even then.

Before the years accumulated. Before the costs were visible.

She saw something in the transaction that was worth being troubled by.
 
"we were already doing something to sport that we hadn't fully reckoned with"...

still haven't reckoned with it...

any of us...
 
The thread started as a question about methodology departures.

Became something else.
 
So what's the actual answer to the question.

Do these bets mean gut instinct is sometimes valid?

Or did we all just get lucky once and remember it because it was a good story?
 
Both probably.

Some of them were real signal we couldn't quantify.

Some were luck wearing the costume of insight.

We can't tell which was which because we only remember the ones that won.
 
Nobody in this thread shared the gut bet that lost.

Including me.

I have those too.
 
Yeah.

The ones we shared today are the ones that confirmed the instinct.

The graveyard of ignored hunches and wrong feelings is considerably larger.
 
my gut has been wrong so many times it should be inadmissible...

but cheltenham 2018 with the moon horse in the pub...

that one was real...

whatever else is true...

that one was real...
 
Yeah Conor.

Some of them are real.

Good thread Fade.
 
The best bet outside your method is usually the one that reveals what your method is actually missing.

Whether you can do anything useful with that information is another question.
 
Oli ending it correctly.

The revelation is real. The application is almost impossible.

Which is probably why we all went back to our methods the next day.
 

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