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Confession No. 1: This author is a sports bettor who is break-even at best lifetime (but, if being honest, almost certainly not).
Confession No. 2: I don’t really know why I bet what I do when I do. I just know it’s in my blood.
No doubt, the mind of the average person involved in a heavy dose of sports betting can be a dark and confused place, with the neurons all contorted from the latest bad beat or last night’s five-leg NBA parlay that fell one short of success. It would take a really dedicated researcher to want to explore the mysteries compelling bettors to risk hard-earned money, based on performances of young people they don’t know who may have their own twisted issues affecting their play.
Fortunately, such a researcher exists at the University of Memphis in the form of Jan Hanousek Jr., who analyzed data from 45 million bets made by 90,000 gamblers with a certain Czech sportsbook over a seven-year period. He was trying to answer the question of what keeps a sports bettor betting.
His main conclusion, as explained by Jeff Edelstein in a article this week: People are most likely to wager more when they’ve had recent success and can use house money. Sportsbooks must like the sound of that, as it means money keeps getting reinvested on wagers from which the operators can ultimately profit, by virtue of the 52.4% house advantage attached to the vig. There are very few people who can take their house money, make another bet with it, and reliably succeed as well as they did the first time.
We’re glad sportsbook operators can retain revenue in such a manner, obviously, as otherwise, would not exist. And we would not have a full staff broadly covering developments in the sports betting industry week in and week out, as the stories linked below show. (Personally, however, this bettor might just take a cue from Hanousek’s findings and invest his next round of winnings — if they ever come — in something like replacing furniture instead of automatically funneling it all right back into his favorite sportsbook.)
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