Perfect Punter Week 39: Relaxation is key to this whole business

Italian Football / Perfect Punter / 05 May 2010 / Leave a Comment

Try to relax before placing a bet and you'll find you're better prepared for the whole thing

"And there are a million examples from the sporting world which prove that you need to find the balance between concentration and relaxation that ultimately breeds confidence."

The Perfect Punter recalls that confidence was the number one emotion punters felt when being on a good gambling run and looks at how it ties in with being relaxed and therefore better prepared for going into betting battle....

One of the first things that I did when I started this ill-advised journey was to survey a fairly large group of punters and ask them which three words bets summed them up when they were doing well, when they were gambling successfully. The surprise of the survey was that only one person used the word "lucky", and by far and away the most popular word, used by over 95% of respondents, was "confident". Nothing that I have done over the last nine months or so has disproved that. As well as painstaking research, confidence is, in my case, by far and away the biggest factor in a good punting life. The less positive you get, the more likely you are to start throwing money at improbable bets, to lose focus. If you think about it, chasing your losses is all about a lack of confidence. When the horses that you backed in the 3.10 and 4.30, both of which you'd researched and were confident about, don't win their races, then the bet that you have in the 5.10 is likely to be ill-researched, placed on a whim rather than with any confidence, and so will dig you further into a hole rather than drag you out of one. Unless you are lucky, but remember none of you think that luck is really a factor, so why rely on it?

I've thought about many of the factors that breed confidence, and that allow you to get into that state of mind as often as possible. I genuinely believe that there are plenty of holistic ways that will help, one of which as previously discussed is taking up something like yoga or pilates, which balances your mind, another would be burning lemon and lime essential oils, both of which are astonishingly stimulating and clear the mind. And yes, I know that the two examples above sound like complete bollocks, and that I'm running the risk of being laughed at, but plenty of sportspeople use these systems, and having tried them, there's a good reason. Try it behind closed doors and see if it works, no one need ever know.

The other aspect of life which breeds confidence, and which surprised me, is relaxation. I always thought that you'd need to be hunched over your computer, eyes flitting to and from a TV screen, to really be successful, that hawkishly trying to never miss a trick was somehow the way forward. But it's not. And there are a million examples from the sporting world which prove that you need to find the balance between concentration and relaxation that ultimately breeds confidence.

I was in Genoa on Sunday to watch Sampdoria try to carry on their Champions League push with a win over Livorno. Now, Livorno are a dreadful side, and were in disarray having been relegated the previous weekend, and the pre-match warm up was truly something to behold. Because the Livorno players, led by the once brilliant and now paunchy Cristiano Lucarelli, kicked the ball around like they couldn't care less.

They smiled, they waved at the Sampdoria fans (no Livorno supporters had made the trip) and they had the appearance of a team that would lose by a hefty margin. At the other end, the Samp team went through structured pre match routine: disciplined, organised and professional. So Samp were keyed up and primed, Livorno looked laid back and lazy. You'd think that our punting mindset should echo the former, and yet I came away from the game thinking that it's the second state of mind that we should be aiming for. Sampdoria won the game 2-0, but you could see the tension in their bodies, the pressure which forced them to make wrong decision after wrong decision, and they only grabbed the victory because of two moments of brilliance.

Livorno were the better side: relaxed and taking risks, inventive and devil may care.
Someone once told me that you're a better gambler when your stakes are smaller, and that fits into the Livorno model. Playing safe is normally the wrong thing to do when you're trading, or indeed playing in, a football match, and you're more likely to take a risk when there isn't as much money at stake. When stakes are large, the inclination is to try and "buy money", which is nearly always the wrong thing to do.

If playing with smaller stakes relaxes you, then try that for a while, and you'll be surprised at how confident a punter it makes you. And if you feel too keyed up when you sit down before an afternoon's racing, or an evening's football, then walk away and wait until your mood is right. The old golfing cliché goes that you should play like it means nothing when it means everything, and while that may seem a little melodramatic when talking about our adventures on Betfair, it's certainly worth remembering.

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