With the sound of trumpets and drums, starts the IPL season, another festival added in the list of Indian festivals. My team will win this time. No, mine will win! I think I should change my team as it never wins. With all these discussions, we welcome this festival of ours. But wait!! A hot discussion is going on behind the curtains…the sports betting.
So, what exactly is sports betting?
Old as time, it is basically an act or process in which we predict the outcome of a sport and then putting a wager on it. Doesn’t it sound so familiar to us? Remember playing in the school playground and making a deal of chocolate wafers by the one who loses the match? So, what was it all about, a sports betting informally, isn’t it? Now let’s discuss it on a professional level. It can be simply defined as taking or risking our money for an outcome which is just in our instinct. So, the big question that arises here is that, are we really going to win the bet? maybe or maybe not. So what prompts one to risk the money on this. Its all about the adrenaline rush that one gets while practicing all this, which makes one think that I will surely win this time.
What are you betting on?
Sports betting on betist is done on the basis of the performance of the players in a game. So, one can debate here that performance is a variable in sports. Like in cricket, in the last five matches a player is making decent runs but the next match he gets out in the first ball. Oh! All the money I bet on him and the team is gone now. So, we can understand that sports betting is not a cake walk, in fact it’s completely a dramatic round of roller coaster. Now the adrenaline rush and the addiction to this practice (or the malpractice?) makes sense.
The hard truths of the betting world
- 99% people lose money in long run betting on sports.
- Sports betting is not easy as it sounds, no get-rich-quick scheme.
- To profit here, one has to be mathematical, analytical and statistical.
- Your gut/instinct is not a strategy. (hard to digest the truth?)
Way forward
Though an illegal practice, our country has evolved this practice into a multi-billion-dollar industry so it’s a high time now to regulate this betting practice as proposed by the Lodha committee in 2016.
