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If you’re an experienced sports bettor, you’ll know the thrill and adrenaline rush that come with winning a big haul. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of raking in a huge amount of cash (or even a moderate amount), knowing that your good decision-making and strategic planning contributed to your victory. Having said that, there’s always more you can do to maximise your earnings and elevate your sports betting skills beyond the level of the average bettor. Every day that you engage in sports betting, you should be honing your skills and looking out for what you can do better. Here are our tips on how you can take your sports betting to the next level.

Go for the right site

Not all casino gambling sites are created equal. Some will offer you preferential rates; others will favour beginners over returning customers; still others will balance their offers so that all customers are happy. It’s important to make sure you’ve found the right website when you gamble. Let’s say you’re an Irish gambler and you want to play on a good casino site. It’s even more important for you to find the right site because gambling laws in Ireland can be restrictive. In that instance, you would want new casino sites in Ireland reviewed by a reputable body that can tell you where you need to go. No matter where you are around the world, the right site is important, whether casino betting or sports betting.

Stop when you’re ahead

It might sound counter-intuitive, but one of the best ways to take your sports betting to the next level is simply to quit while you’re ahead. That way, you’ll minimise your losses and maximise your wins. Think about it: if you don’t allow yourself to slip into an all-too-possible loss streak, then you can keep the money you’ve won so far and you won’t risk losing it. If you allow yourself to get into patterns of thinking like “I’m on a roll, I should just keep going”, then the gambler’s fallacy problem dictates that you’ll eventually end up with less than you started with. It’s always possible to go on a losing streak, and there’s no guarantee when it will happen, so play it safe when necessary.

Learn teams or players inside and out

Anyone can identify a trend by looking at data that’s available to them. Is a particular tennis player on a hot streak? It makes sense to bet on them, then. Are you watching a certain football team lose over and over again? Avoid them until they pick up their streak. However, the story is rarely this simple. Sometimes, for example, a team is on a losing streak because they don’t have a star player available. Once that player becomes available again, their fortunes might pick up and you could lose out on some serious money if you don’t bet on them. It’s not all about the trends and data you’re seeing; analysis is incredibly important in sports betting too.

Develop a solid strategy and stick to it

Although you won’t necessarily need to develop a professional-grade strategy in order to take your sports betting to the next level, it’s still a good idea to have a strategy. This is what differentiates you from other people who simply engage with sports betting on an amateur level. In developing your betting model, there’s a lot of similarity between strategy development and statistics; you’ll be observing and analysing data, figuring out trends, and exploiting them in order to get more money in the bank. Your strategy won’t pay dividends until you test it out and make sure it works, so don’t be afraid to take a few test runs with it before you execute it on the real money stage, so to speak.

Don’t bet on every sport

You might be tempted to spread yourself around and bet on every sport you possibly can. This would be a mistake. It’s a good idea to specialise when you’re sports betting, because you’ll invariably have strengths that lie in certain areas and weaknesses that lie in others. While you can grow to understand any sport with enough time and effort, the fact remains that some people have natural strategic talent when it comes to certain things. If you find yourself betting successfully on football games over and over again, there’s really no need to overreach and start betting on basketball or other sports; simply incorporate football betting centrally into your strategy.

Maintain your cool

As a sports bettor, it’s very important not to become too overconfident at victory or to become completely downtrodden by defeat. You should feel energised when you win, but make sure to check yourself and don’t make rash decisions while on the victory high. Similarly, when you lose, it might make you want to give up entirely, but this is just as false a viewpoint as thinking you’re invincible when you win. It’s all about moderation and context; observe every decision you make, record it for posterity, then when it’s all over, play the decisions back and see which ones worked and which ones didn’t. You’ll quickly realise where the weaknesses are in your strategy if you stay cool.