Sports Betting Plan and Journal – Your Personal Sports Betting Bible

One simple phrase comes to mind immediately with discussion of this topic.

Fail to plan – plan to fail – Simple, concise, and easy to understand.  Right?

Wrong.  If professional sports betting were that simple it would be effortless.  We would all be living in a tropical oasis, enjoying our leisure time, and counting our millions in our bank accounts.  Due to the sports betting psychology and emotional interaction sports bettors have with not only their market analysis, but also the fluctuation of their account balance or the swing in actual betting equity, the concept of ‘fail to plan – plan to fail’ troubles the average sports bettor.

A sports betting plan will be of upmost importance in your sports betting career. 

But what exactly does a sports betting plan entail?  Well this is where the beauty of understanding various sports betting strategies and sports betting psychological influences really helps.  As you continue to read the articles provided to you on SportChalk, there will be extensive discussion on what is commonly referred to as your ‘betting edge’.  This will form the core of your sports betting plan, because without this your chance of long-term success reduces substantially.

Your personalised sports betting plan will entail keeping a diary or a journal of all the sports bets you place.  By filling out the criteria on this plan, and then cross-referencing it to some of the sports betting strategies you will learn, this will form the basis of your sports betting history.  You will notice how well it will instill discipline into your sports betting regime.

It will keep track of all your previous sports bets.

It will log all the certain criteria which have been met that have allowed you to place the bet.

And most importantly, especially for those who are still fresh to sports betting it will give you the power to review your bets and determine where you are going wrong and where you are going right.  This is hugely important because as you develop as a sports bettor you will need to focus on your strengths, and even more importantly on your weaknesses.

So if after 20 logged bets, you notice that on a certain sports betting strategy or sport you have lost 5 out of 5 times, this will give you the knowledge to be even more diligent and attentive when analysing such information and placing those types of sports bets.

A sports betting plan can be done on an excel spreadsheet or a hard copy A4 type binder. 

You do not need to follow the recommended sports betting journal outline precisely but it does contain all the relevant headings which will need to be filled out with each and every executed sports bet.  There will be some who will want to clutter the journal with more headings and information, but again we like to keep things simple and concise, and just derive the most essential information needed from our sports betting history.

These are the headings in specific order from left to right of the page which we encourage you to also use in your sports betting journal.

• Date – This is when the bet was entered.
• Sport – Which sport we are betting on.
• Event – The names of the two rivals.
• Selection – The team or player on which our bet is placed.
• Back/Lay – Whether we are backing or laying a particular bet.
• Odds – The price of the odds received.
• Bet Size (Risk) – Dollar amount of the bet, or for a lay the amount at risk.
• Win/Loss – ‘W’ for a win, ‘L’ for a loss.
• Profit/Loss – The dollar amount gained or lost on the bet.
• Betting Criteria – A small section noting the reasons behind the selection/bet.

Here is an example from an excel spreadsheet:

These are the essential elements of our sports betting plan. 

You may not understand the extreme importance of your betting journal at this stage of the course, but do believe that after a handful of bets it will almost become like a ‘sports betting bible’ to your development and something you will continually refer to at a later date.

It is necessary to outline some of the common things which will be picked up automatically by historical analysis of your previous sports bets.  You will probably come back to this section also and cross-reference to actually see if some of your faults are discussed below.  Please do not get angered because we will all fall into certain traps when it comes to sports betting.  But the sooner we realise certain elements, the sooner we progress to a consistently profitable level.

After time, the analysis of your sports betting journal should outline such important information as per below:

• Whether you are betting too frequently.
• Whether you are using excess betting sizes and are over-exposing yourself to certain bets.
• Whether you have been adjusting your bet size spontaneously.  I.e. your stake in dollar terms is different amongst various bets.
• Whether you are being too greedy when entering bets, and looking for too much juice or higher odds.
• Whether you are adjusting existing bets more frequently while the game is in-play.
• Identify which sports, players, types of bets, and selection criteria have been working for you, and more importantly which criteria may need extra focus and attention to sharpen your betting prowess and define your ‘betting edge’.

All this information is critical.  If you use it to your advantage it creates a positive feedback loop for the user.  But only if you learn from your mistakes.  Our genetic build-up and psychological state makes it far easier to continue in life with our repetitive behavioural patterns and processes.  This means we are more than likely to continue making mistakes and not learning from them.  This is why it is extremely important to be aware of what we are doing, understand why we are doing it, and then to rectify the problem through a more disciplined and thorough approach.

Be patient and stringent with your self-observation.  Successful people in all walks of life are winners because ultimately they recognise their faults, and work to improve them.  Trust me when I say your sports betting career will allow you to recognise a side of your character that you never really discovered.  When you are truly at one with yourself, everything will fall into place, and the illusive path to financial freedom and sports betting success will be all that much closer.  Putting in place an appropriate sport betting plan and journal will bring you closer to realising your dreams of becoming a professional sports bettor and achieving the ample triumphs and rewards that go with it.

‘Sports Betting Plan and Keeping a Journal’ is just one small part of the huge sports betting education content offered on the SportChalk website.

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