Sports betting and superstitions: the biases behind the rituals

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Superstitions have no effect on how a game turns out, since the players can’t see what you’re wearing or tell if you left the room in the fourth quarter. A lucky routine can be part of the fun. The mental shortcuts behind many superstitions, like the gambler’s fallacy, can lead to worse bets, though, and a simple record of your bets is the best way to catch them.

Common betting superstitions

Plenty of bettors have one, even if they’d only half admit it. Here are some familiar ones:

  • Lucky clothes: the jersey or cap that gets worn every game day, sometimes unwashed, for as long as the wins keep coming.
  • Watching or not watching: some bettors won’t watch a game they’ve bet on because things seem to go wrong when they do, while others won’t leave the couch until it’s over.
  • The remote: switching the TV off, changing the channel or muting the sound at a tense moment, in the hope that it helps.
  • Same seat, same snack: repeating whatever you did the last time a bet came in.
  • The jinx: calling a bet a “lock,” or posting a winning ticket before the final whistle, is supposed to bring bad luck. On some betting forums it’s treated as a serious offense.
  • The reverse jinx: predicting out loud that your own team will lose, so that it won’t.

Casino players have their own, like blowing on dice or sticking with a favorite slot machine.

Why rituals feel like they work

Memory is part of it. You remember the night the lucky jersey came through much more clearly than the nights it didn’t.

The other part is wanting some control over something you can’t control. In a 1975 experiment by the psychologist Ellen Langer, people who picked their own lottery ticket set a higher price to give it up than people who were handed one, even though every ticket had the same chance of winning. Langer called this the illusion of control.

Sports betting involves real choices, from the team to the stake, so it’s easy to start feeling that everything around the bet matters too. A ritual feels like one more thing you can do to help.

The gambler’s fallacy

The gambler’s fallacy is the belief that something that hasn’t happened in a while is “due.” The best-known example comes from the Monte Carlo Casino in 1913, when a roulette ball landed on black 26 times in a row. Gamblers reportedly lost millions of francs betting on red, sure the streak had to end.

Each spin is independent. On a single-zero wheel, 18 of the 37 pockets are red, so every spin has about a 48.6% chance of red, whatever happened before.

In sports betting it sounds like “they’ve failed to cover five straight, so they’re due.” Games aren’t spins of a wheel, so a streak can reflect something real, like an injury or a change in the rotation. The sportsbook sees the same streak and sets the line with it in mind, so the streak on its own isn’t a reason to bet either way. Our look at streaking NFL teams covers this in more detail.

The hot-hand belief

The hot-hand belief runs the other way: a streak will keep going. A famous 1985 study of basketball shooting by the psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky concluded that the hot hand was a myth. In 2018, the economists Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo showed that the study’s method had a statistical bias, and that correcting for it reversed the original conclusion. With the bias fixed, the same data point toward a real hot hand in shooting.

Your own hot streak as a bettor is another matter. A 2014 study by Juemin Xu and Nigel Harvey looked at 565,915 sports bets placed by 776 online gamblers in 2010. People who had just won were more likely to win their next bet, and people who had just lost were more likely to lose again.

The reason was the bets they chose. After a win, gamblers picked safer odds, which win more often and pay less. After a loss, they picked riskier odds, which lose more often. The researchers traced this to the gambler’s fallacy: winners expected their luck to run out, and losers expected theirs to turn.

It’s worth checking your own habits here. If you tend to bet bigger or reach for longer odds after a bad day, a bet log will show it.

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is the habit of noticing what supports your view and skimming past what doesn’t. Once you like a bet, it’s easy to read the preview that agrees with you and wave off the injury news that doesn’t.

It affects memory too. If you’re sure you “always win on Sunday nights,” check whether your record agrees. One simple habit helps: before you place a bet, write down the strongest case for the other side.

Why a bet log beats a ritual

A bet log is the practical replacement for a ritual. For every bet, note the date, the sport, what you bet, the odds, the stake and the result. If you can, also note the line just before the game starts, so you can see whether you tend to get better numbers than the final price.

After a few months, it will show you:

  • Your real win rate, and whether it clears break-even, which is 52.38% at -110 (110 ÷ 210).
  • Which kinds of bets make money and which lose it.
  • Whether your stakes creep up after losses.
  • Whether your “lucky” day really is luckier than the rest.

Give it time, because small samples mislead. Someone betting at random, with a true 50% chance on every bet, finishes at 55% or better over 40 bets about 32% of the time, and over 100 bets about 18% of the time.

Say your log shows 60 wins and 50 losses at -110, betting to win $100 each time. That’s 54.5%, and you’re $500 up (60 × $100 minus 50 × $110). It’s a good result, but a coin-flipper would do at least that well about one time in five over 110 bets. Our guide to 55 percent winners explains what a realistic long-run record looks like.

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