Yesterday was another good day for me where I wagered $38,750 on my picks, and ended up cashing out $44,038.86! I’ll share with you my premium picks today in a bit. But first, I want to take today to explain to you the difference between true patterns and coincidental events when analyzing sports data.
Patterns consistently happen in sports and in life. But it’s not easy for the average person to separate a true pattern from a coincidence. Humans have a instinctive desire to spot causal relations in order to help them explain causes. When you can’t immediately see the cause, your mind tends to start postulating for one. If an event happens around us, we try to hypothesize what could be its agent. That’s normal. In fact, the finding of patterns has an associated evolutionary trait. I’ll explain that in a bit.
The tendency for us to always look for patterns stems from the belief that it is generally better for us to see a danger that isn’t there, than to miss out on one that is. Heuristics is how humans try to make sense of what’s around us. Predicting the future based on analysis of current patterns is how we’ve historically maximized our chances for survival, and we tend to carry this over when looking into sports data.
Here’s a real life example: Suppose that someone eats a certain type of mushroom and dies. Afterward, another person eats another similar mushroom and also dies. Now, whoever can spot that there is a pattern between mushrooms and death would be the first ones to start avoiding them and end up living. Those who can’t spot the pattern are severely penalized with their lives. Simply put: He who cannot recognize certain patterns are less likely to live. The expert pattern-finders survive and sustain the trait.
The problem is that patterns aren’t always obvious, and our brain can be fooled into believing that patterns can emerge in random events. This is especially true in sports where patterns form consistently, and it’s difficult to tell whether it’s really a true pattern or just a case of coincidence.
I’ll demonstrate it: Let’s take out a coin and flip it 10 times. If heads come up all 10 times in a row, your brain will likely realize a pattern and say: “This has to be a weighted coin!” But, it’s also completely possible that this was a totally fair coin, and you just somehow came into a statistically unlikely sequence of coincidences that led to a false recognition of a non-random pattern.
The problem is that there’s no way for you to tell which is really the case. At best, you can make an assumption. But until you carry out an external test such as weighing the coin yourself, you will never know if that was really a fair coin, or if you just stumbled on a series of coincidences.
Now, if you are to continue flipping the coin, then the certainty of your hypothesis will increase the more times you repeat the experiment. Getting heads (or tails) ten times in a row is a 1 in 1,000 probability occurrence if the coin is fair. Getting 20 in a row is a 1 in a million occurrence. 30 in a row? That’s a one in a billion occurrence.
The outcome of random events will trend toward a random distribution the more times an experiment repeats. The problem is that when you only have a few samples, it’s entirely possible for coincidences to appear as if they might be true patterns. What’s tricky here is that coincidental patterns are oftentimes indistinguishable from true patterns, especially when dealing with smaller sample sizes.
Example: Did a certain home team in baseball win 90% of its game when playing in late evening games because of a true pattern, or was that just a coincidental chain of events? That’s where you need someone who’s a master at recognizing patterns to help you make the right separation.
People tend to fixate on patterns after just a few samples of a process, and then jump too quickly toward a conclusion that may just be coincidental than underlying distribution. Let’s say you get 10 heads in a row when you flip a coin, but then the next 20 flips resulted in a fairly even distribution of heads and tails. That’s a strong case for the coin to likely be a fair coin. However, if you are to anchor yourself with an unequivocal belief that: “this coin came up heads ten times in a row once, so it has to be weighted!” You would likely be in error. What you’re doing here is privileging the results based on the weight of your first impression and the initial trials, over the total results across all trials.
This miscalculation in itself isn’t the worst instinct. A departure from one behavior to another is in some cases a change worth noting. Perhaps someone in the room had secretly switched out your weighted coin with a fair coin while you weren’t looking. There’s really no way to be 100% certain. What’s left is just varying probabilities and expectations based on models built from incomplete data.
So how do we balance it? What’s the best way to ride the line between appropriate skepticism indicating true changes and coincidental sequences? It’s difficult. Here’s where enlisting the help of an expert pattern recognition can truly help you differentiate the true signals from the noises when analyzing trends in sports.
I’m a master at recognizing patterns in sports. I have used this exact ability to help me win tens of millions of dollars from betting on sports over the years. Now, my next mission is to help you share into my success.
If I cannot help you win today, I’ll lose well over $25,000! I go out and bet hundreds of thousands a week on my own picks because I want you to be certain that I can’t actually win unless I also help you win, too.
In fact, I have now wagered more than a million dollars so far in the month of May! If I didn’t sincerely believe I’m going to win, you can be sure that I wouldn’t be doing this. Nobody could be crazy enough to bet a million dollars on sports in a month if they didn’t feel pretty certain that they’ll end up ahead at the end of the ride.
And as I continues to get hot, you’re going to see me accelerate harder. Back in the old days when the Mirage sportsbook would take any action I wanted, I wasn’t just betting a million dollars in a month. I was known to bet millions of dollars on just the weekends. I was the largest sports bettor in Nevada and possibly all of the United States at the time, and one of the winningest sports bettors ever.
Now, my next great mission to help you share into my success.
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To your success,
The Sports Betting Whale
