Betting trends can sound persuasive while saying very little about the next game. Learn why trend data misleads and what evidence deserves more weight.
Back to VideosIf I told you the Washington Commanders were 9-1 against the spread over their last 10 games when they were at home against West Coast teams, would that be enough to get you to bet them against the Rams? If you said yes, pull up a chair. We need to talk. Hi, I'm Jack from Unabated, where we provide software tools and education to help people find and place sharper bets. But for more than 20 years, I've been a professional gambler. I find ways to extract money from sports books and casinos by seeing through false narratives and trends. And I can help you do the same.
Trends are everywhere in sports betting, but snappy observations on Twitter like this pitcher is 6-1 against the spread when the wind is blowing in aren't as sharp as they sound. And they can sound smart. I get it. But they're a fast track to torching your bankroll. Today, I'm breaking down five reasons betting trends are a trap, and furthermore, how you can avoid falling into them. Have you ever seen those electronic tote boards at the roulette table that show you what numbers recently hit? And have you ever noticed how players get obsessed with them? Listen to the crowd and you'll hear people say things like, "The last four were red, black is due." Or even numbers are hot, odd is cold.
1 7 0. We're going to hit like six numbers. But here's the thing. If you could see every number that came up over the last 24 hours, you'd see what's on that tote board is just a small blip in the big picture. The wheel doesn't have a memory. And every time the dealer spins the ball in, it's an independent event where the odds are a little less than 50/50 it comes black or red.
But roulette isn't sports betting, you may say. Isn't there such a thing as a player or a team getting hot in sports? And while that's true, people who push trends as the answer to betting are usually pedalling the same few tricks. At the beginning of the 2023 season, Colorado Avalanche right-winger Logan Okconor scored three short-handed goals in three straight games.
But did that mean he had figured out the secret to shorthanders? Okconor had scored 45 goals in seven seasons, and he didn't score another short-handed goal the rest of the season. In fact, he only scored 10 more times in the ABS next 77 games that year. But if you started betting shots or points props on Okconor because he had a hot start to the season, well, you paid for an expensive lesson. People are often quick to spot trends when something unusual happens, like a burst of short-handed goals.
But small sample sizes will get you into trouble when you're betting. They offer a distorted picture of an event's true probabilities. But it's not just the small sample size that can get you. On April 30th, 2002, the A's lost to the Yankees 8-2, and that's when things unraveled for Oakland.
They dropped 15 of 20 to fall to 20 and 26 on the year, which left people writing off their playoff chances. But the A's were a very good team. They'd won 102 games the season before. And thanks to a 20game winning streak in August and September, they finished with 103 wins. If you looked at the trends from May and you bet the A's like they were a sub 500 squad, you would have paid for it in June. Cherry-picking start and end dates fool you into thinking an event is more likely than it really is because it seems so improbable that long streaks would happen unless there was some underlying reason for it.
And it's not even your fault, as we'll see in a minute. That's how the human brain is wired. But it ties into the third reason trends can be harmful.
If a quarterback throws for 300 yards in five straight games, that's pretty good. But what if three of those games were against the worst defensive teams in the league and two of them were against teams who had significant injuries to the roster? Trends don't always offer enough context to tell you the whole story. And if you don't fully know what's driving a trend, it's often easy to draw the wrong conclusion. Our 300yard quarterback might be a great player, but he could also be an average QB who caught the right set of circumstances at the right time to make him look like a better player than he really is. I'm fond of saying you don't know what you don't know.
And in this case, you have incomplete information that the rest of the market might be factoring in. You're blinded by this great trend you've been fed. But understanding the right underlying metrics can help steer you away from trouble. Having an objective, eyes open, numbers-based view of the sport you're betting will keep you grounded and keep you away from one of the biggest traps Pixellers set for uninformed customers. Have you ever seen those touts that want to tell you about how many points a player has scored on the road on Fridays during oddnumbered months when the barometric pressure is between 29.85 and 29.87 in of mercury?
And did a tout drilling down to that data make it sound like you were listening to someone who might have found the secret formula? Well, touts love to pick and choose the boundaries of trends, and it's an easy trap to fall into because it makes them seem like they're the only ones who have found some kind of hidden path to betting riches. Before you buy into any trend line like this, ask yourself if there's a quantifiable underlying reason that it might be happening. And if there is, great. Maybe there's something worthwhile there.
But if there isn't, that tout is taking advantage of basic human nature. It's a trick that relies on apoofenia. That's the brain's tendency to find patterns in unrelated things. And that trick is so tied to our field that there's a specific type of apopenia known as the gamblers's fallacy. As humans, we're wired for finding patterns.
And really, it's probably something that served us well as a species, even since the caveman times, but it's also the same thing that makes you see faces or shapes in clouds. Those animal-shaped clouds are about as useful for bedding as these phony trends. From November 12th to the 22nd, Kyrie Irving went under his points total in five straight games. And if you bet him to go under in his next two, you lost twice. That same month, Nas Reed of the Timberwolves went over in five straight.
But if you kept betting his over, you would have lost nine of the next 11. In fact, if you bet on a player's points over or under after every fiveame streak this past NBA season, you'd have lost $3500 in 441 bets using just a $100 unit. And that's just from one sport and one season. Those kinds of trends are a dime of dozen and they usually don't tell you anything useful. But sometimes there are trends that seem so obvious they've got to be true. A classic one is the NFL teams starting 0 and3 don't make the playoffs. And it's true. Since 2002, 110 teams have started 0 and3 or worse. And only the 2018 Texans made the playoffs.
But only five of those 110 even finished with a winning record. It's true that teams that start 0 and3 have almost no shot at making the playoffs. But it's not because they've dug too deep a hole. It's because teams that start 0 and3 are almost always just plain bad. They came by those three losses honestly. But are trends ever useful? Well, there's one trend that might actually be helpful. Trends can sometimes help you uncover situations where something else fundamental has changed and the books are slow to react to it. And again, this requires due diligence.
Once you spot the trend, imagine though that a third of the way through the season, a rookie forward goes over his points prop six games in a row. And once you start poking deeper, you see that the rookie's playing time has been creeping up from 8 minutes per game to 12. That may signal a fundamental shift in the way a team uses its personnel, and it could be something actionable. If the books haven't adjusted his prop line upward to account for it, there may be a few bets that you can find after spotting the trend.
But you have to be sure about the underlying cause behind the trend, and that becomes an edge you can exploit with it. You see trends only help you organize the recent past. Don't fall into the trap of trying to use them to predict the future.
