Fantasy sports are a sociable and socially acceptable way to gamble that sports fans all over the world enjoy, but what would you do if you really wanted to win? If your life depended on your ability to win a fantasy league among a few friends, how could you make the best bets? This article seeks to answer that question.
Table of Contents
1. Do Your Research And Bet Sober
This is serious. Your life depends on this fantasy league. Of course, watching sports and drinking go hand-in-hand. Baseball fans know the siren song of vendors chanting brands in the summer. The sun is boiling, and a light beer would be so good. After drinking your light beer, you’re even more thirsty because alcohol dehydrates you. If you want to dehydrate yourself with alcohol, then go ahead, but don’t make any important decisions in your current state! Save it for the next morning. Gambling on sports and watching sports are two disparate things. A bet made under the influence can lead to anything from a shaved head to your untimely demise, as we’ve discussed.
Conduct research with a clear mind. Gambling’s hard enough with 52 cards, so there’s no reason to complicate the process with alcohol. To win lots of money and to prolong your life, you need to master fantasy sports like they’re your job.
2. Don’t Approach The Game as a Fan
While deciding which sport or team on which to bet, consider why you’re gambling: Are you doing it for fun, or are you doing it to earn cold hard cash? If you’re doing it for fun, then that’s perfectly fine and beyond the scope of this article. If not, then that’s fine too, but you ought to commit one way or another. If you’re torn, you won’t enjoy the process and you won’t perform well. According to a Chinese proverb, “To chase two hares is to lose both.” Pick your battles wisely, especially when your life depends on it.
Most importantly, offer no allegiance to your home team and display no animosity toward a rival team. A good gambler from New York needs to forget about the Yankees as well as the Red Socks. Betting on your “favorite” players or teams is certainly intuitive if you’re gambling for fun. Betting on your favorites is less about making money and more about curiosity as to how effective your favorites are. If you want to make money, you need to abandon emotionally-charged decisions in favor of genuine research across many players and teams. A good first step in terms of being an effective fantasy player might be to avoid betting on your home team, no matter what, anticipating that you won’t be able to root out your own bias. Probability presents the same values no matter how big a fan you are.
3. Begin Your Fantasy Career With Small Bets
Small bets will largely exclude paying with your life. This makes for good practice! Small bets allow you to familiarize yourself without any pressure. When you’re looking to employ a successful strategy, nothing beats hands-on practice. Betting is a use-it-or-lose-it ability. The singular pressure is that you have to be consistent. No matter what sports you’re following, as long as you bet consistently and you compare teams constantly, you’ll have a much better chance of winning your life-or-death fantasy league.
A series of small bets may not appear to be as uniquely exciting as large bets, but large bets will get you nowhere when you invariably lose due to inexperience. Without entertaining small bets, you’ll definitely burn out. They’re just part of the process. Your preliminary bets should be no more than 1% of your bankroll, and you should adamantly refuse to bet money you can’t lose. Small bets are the only path to large bets.
4. Master One Sport
While no sport is necessarily better for fantasy leagues than others, mastering at least one fantasy league is much better than being mediocre at a bunch of them. If you find yourself on a losing streak among your small bets, a good way of regrouping would be to focus more closely on one sport. Mastering one type of fantasy league can also be effective for newcomers regardless of losing streaks.
Otherwise, the sport you choose doesn’t make a difference. As long as you devote enough time to research and you have a solid understanding of probability, you have the capacity to succeed in any fantasy league. For strategy’s sake, the most important thing about being a jack of all trades is that you’ll be a master of none, and that won’t do in terms of saving your life.
Now, go out there and win money through fantasy sports. Just remember that wizards and dragons aren’t allowed.
