As a natural introvert who values privacy, I’ve always focused intensely on my passions, which is why you rarely see me on social media. This reclusiveness allows me to channel my time and energy into what truly matters: sports betting. However, the flip side is that I sometimes struggle to support others facing the mental challenges of betting on sports. Such challenges are inevitable in betting, where mental resilience is constantly tested.
The human mind is adept at erasing painful memories, a likely survival mechanism. For instance, if women vividly recalled the agony of childbirth, few might choose to have a second child. Time heals, and we tend to forget hardships, basking in the comfort of good times.
In UFC Live Betting, we’re currently in a tough phase. Fortunately, we’re still grinding profits on Football and Prefight Bets, which is limiting the impact on our bankrolls; however, these difficult times are still mentally challenging.
With over two decades of sports betting experience, I can say that rough patches never get easier. In the middle of a downturn, it feels like it will never end. Yet, experience teaches that this pain is temporary, and consistency will eventually lead to an upswing. Often, the harsher the downturn, the more spectacular the recovery.
Since launching this website 10 years ago, I’ve observed a recurring pattern: where we make a profit most months, then hit a rough patch, lose about 30-40% of our community, then rebound and return to a long period of once again making profits most months. This cycle mirrors the financial markets, where people shy away from investments during downturns. Opportunities like Bitcoin and Amazon were overlooked in their early days, much like the current disinterest in cryptocurrencies, despite the upcoming Bitcoin halving.
We know that every previous Bitcoin Halving has seen the Crypto market go into an exponential bull cycle, yet most people aren’t interested in Crypto until it’s already made huge gains. How many of your friends are currently talking to you about Crypto? I’m guessing not many of them, but we know they’ll all be talking about Dogecoin when it prints a 10x sometime in the next year.
Human nature is predictable and most people only become interested in opportunities when most of the opportunity has already played out. We’ve all heard the famous quotes such as:
“Time in the market beats timing the market”and
“Buy when there’s blood on the streets”
We know that the longer a bad patch lasts, the closer we are to a significant breakthrough. Our profitability chart over the last eight years, shows clearly that every difficult period is followed by a big winning run.
We know from experience that the upswing that follows a downswing is always incredible, yet when you’re in the midst of such a slump, it feels endless. The pressure mounts, performance anxiety escalates, and confidence wanes to the point where every close decision feels like an inevitable loss. These feelings, familiar to me over the past 15 years, are tough to handle, but experience has taught me that they are only temporary.
So are you ready for the next leg up?
Through this blog, I aim to communicate with our community, share experience and help everyone through the inevitable good times and bad. Documenting this journey isn’t just for reflection; it’s to draw strength from past tough patches that we have overcome. I wish I would have documented how I feel in previous bad runs and the feeling of comfort and relief that I know comes when those periods pass. By looking to the past we can gain strength from knowing that this isn’t our first rodeo and we’ve overcome challenges such as this many times in the past.
A key advantage I have is that my fight research helps me distinguish between bad luck and poor betting choices, which enables me to focus on learning from mistakes rather than dwelling on unavoidable losses.
As I’ve always maintained, betting outcomes aren’t always predictable. Good bets can lose, bad bets can win. Like any form of gambling, sports betting involves luck and variance, highs and lows. It’s part of the game. Poker players can use tools like PokerTracker to assess whether losses stem from poor play or bad luck. The software will use the fixed probabilities of hands winning in Poker to tell the player what their true profit and loss should have been based on the probability they had of winning their hands. We can’t do that in Sports Betting, but we can complete a similar exercise by using our knowledge of the sport and fight research to take an objective view on how we should have performed over a set period of time.
Let’s analyze our bets since the beginning of this tough period which began last September. A special thanks to Dober for compiling this data.
I’ve color-coded wins in green and losses in red, categorizing each based on whether they were fortunate or unfortunate. My reasoning includes analysis of how fights played out versus expectations and judge’s scoring. While subjective, this provides an insight into our performance versus actual outcomes over these months.
| Event | Fight | Our Bet | Lucky or unlucky? | Reasoning |
| UFC FN: Gane vs Spivak | Edwards vs Cornolle | Edwards | Borderline unlucky | MMA media members voted 7-6 in favour of Edwards winning. |
| UFC FN: Gane vs Spivak | Loosa vs McKee | Loosa | ||
| UFC FN: Gane vs Spivak | Fiorot vs Namajunas | Fiorot | ||
| UFC 293: Adesanya vs Strickland | Mullarkey vs Makdessi | Makdessi | Very unlucky | MMA media members voted 12-2 in favour of Makdessi winning. |
| UFC 293: Adesanya vs Strickland | Adesanya vs Strickland | Strickland | ||
| UFC FN: Grasso vs Shevchenko | Holland vs Mullarkey | Holland | ||
| UFC FN: Grasso vs Shevchenko | Grasso vs Shevchenko | Shevchenko | Very unlucky | Grasso was gifted a bogus 10-8 scorecard to draw the fight. |
| UFC FN: Fiziev vs Gamrot | Collier vs Usman | Collier | Borderline unlucky | Fouls in this fight changed the dynamic of the matchup and gave Usman time to recover when it appeared he was starting to slow down. |
| UFC FN: Fiziev vs Gamrot | Argueta vs Johns | Johns | ||
| UFC FN: Dawson vs Green | Aldrich vs De La Rosa | De La Rosa | ||
| UFC FN: Dawson vs Green | Aori Qileng vs Johnny Munoz | Aoriqileng | ||
| UFC FN: Dawson vs Green | Belbita vs Kowalkiewicz | Kowalkiewicz | ||
| UFC FN: Barboza vs Yusuff | Rodriguez vs Saaiman | Rodriguez | ||
| UFC FN: Barboza vs Yusuff | Araujo vs Maia | Araujo | ||
| UFC FN: Barboza vs Yusuff | Barboza vs Yusuff | Yusuff | ||
| UFC 294: Makhachev vs Volkanovski | Naimov vs Wood | Wood | Unlucky | Naimov committed multiple fouls in the fight, which went unpunished and gave him extra time to recover. He was gassed out of his mind in round 3 and unable to defend himself, but breaks earlier in the fight enabled him to survive until the end. Without committing those fouls, he would have lost a very high percentage of the time. |
| UFC FN: Almeida vs Lewis | Gomes vs Hill | Hill | ||
| UFC 295: Prochazka vs Pereira | Pereira vs Prochazka | Prochazka | ||
| UFC FN: Allen vs Craig | Brito vs Pearce | Pearce | Very unlucky | Pearce was up 2 rounds heading into round 3 when Brito snatched a hail mary, low probability submission out of nowhere. |
| UFC 295: Dariush vs Tsarukyan | Brady vs Gastelum | Gastelum | ||
| UFC FN: Gutierrez vs Song | Muniz vs Park | Park | Very unlucky | MMA media members voted 10-4 in favour of Park winning. |
| UFC FN: Gutierrez vs Song | Alencar vs Dos Santos | Dos Santos | Very unlucky | MMA media members voted 9-1 in favour of Dos Santos winning. |
| UFC 296: Covington vs Edwards | Aldana vs Rosa | Rosa | ||
| UFC 296: Covington vs Edwards | Jacoby vs Menifield | Jacoby | Borderline unlucky | Jacoby was 2 minutes away from winning a decision when he was flash KO’d in round 3. Only 10% of fights end in round 3, if you split that in half giving each fighter a 5% chance of getting a finish in the 3rd round, it’s reasonable for us to cap this bet as having a 95% chance of winning, especially when you take into consideration the fact that Menifield was tired and tired fighters are less likely to be able to deliver KO power deep into a fight. |
| UFC FN: Ankalaev vs Walker | Bautista vs Simon | Bautista | ||
| UFC 297: Du Plessis vs Strickland | Sidey vs Tavares | Sidey | Very unlucky | MMA media members voted 21-0 in favour of Sidey winning. |
| UFC 297: Du Plessis vs Strickland | Armfield vs Katona | Katona | Borderline unlucky | MMA media members voted 9-4 in favour of Armfield winning the fight. |
| UFC 297: Du Plessis vs Strickland | Du Plessis vs Strickland | Strickland | Borderline unlucky | MMA media members voted 13-10 in favour of Du Plessis winning the fight. |
Now that we’ve reviewed our bets since September, we must categorize them to forecast what our true profit/loss during this period should have been.
First, let’s identify our winning bets. These are the ones clear of ambiguity. Let me know if you agree in the comments.
I’ve marked these wins as Loosa, Fiorot, Strickland, Johns, Bautista, Aoriqileng, Kowalkiewicz, Rodriguez, Araujo, and Hill.
Next lets categorize our clear losses over the same period These are Holland, De La Rosa, Yusuff, Prochzka, Gastelum and Rosa.Analyzing our straightforward wins and losses, our record stands at 10-6. While this isn’t our best, it’s not too bad either.
Next, let’s examine bets where bad luck played a significant role – like poor judging or referee mistakes. Please let me know in the comments below if you feel differently about any of them: Makdessi, Shevchenko, Wood, Pearce, Park, Dos Santos and Sidey Then, there are the borderline cases. Opinions may vary on these, as they often involve decisions where people are divided on who won the fight or fight dynamics where the level of predictability behind that dynamic can be debated. Edwards, Collier, Jacoby, Katona, Strickland
This category also has different scales of bad luck. For example the majority of people scored the fight for Joselyne Edwards, so that bet would be perceived as far more unlucky than a loss on Jake Collier who may have still lost the fight, had fouls not changed the dynamic of the matchup early on.
Having categorized our bets, we must deduce a reasonable profit/loss since September, focusing on performance rather than luck.
With a clean 10-6 record, let’s assess the ‘very unlucky’ category. I feel it is reasonable for us to grade Makdessi, Shevchenko, Dos Santos, Sidey, and Park as wins, given that the majority of MMA media scored these fights in favour of the fighters that we bet. This adjusts our record to 15-6. Wood and Pearce’s losses are improbable, but we know that hail mary submissions and poor refereeing is apart of the sport, therefore I feel it’s more fair to grade these bets as going 1-1, which would lead to a 16-7 record.
It is worth noting that I would analyse in a different way what a truer reflection of our profit / loss would be if we had “clean” wins that mirrored the improbable nature of losses on fighters like Wood and Pearce. For example: For the purposes of this analysis, I think it’s fair to grade those bets as 1-1, since we don’t have any “clean” wins that experienced a similar level of improbable outcomes that we were able to profit from. Ideally what we’d like to see is 2 improbable “clean” wins that went in our favour to offset the 2 improbable losses on Wood and Pearce. Since we don’t have this, for the purposes of this analysis, I feel it’s reasonable to grade those bets as 1-1, to give us a truer reflection of our level of performance since September.
For the ‘borderline unlucky’ bets, splitting them evenly seems the most sensible way to analyse them. This would result in a 2-3 record for those bets, more reflective of our true performance.
I feel it makes sense to take this approach, since there is a varying level of bad luck within this category of bets. For example most people scored the fight between Joselyne Edwards and Nora Cornolle for Edwards, therefore our loss on Edwards was quite unlucky, whereas Collier may have still gone on to lose to Usman despite the fouls and referee having a big influence on the outcome of the matchup. By splitting this category of bets in half to a record of 2-3, I feel we’re getting a truer reflection of our level of performance than the 0-5 record we actually suffered on these bets.
Taking all of our analysis into account, our record since September would now stand at 18-10, for a 64% win rate, compared to our actual record during this time of 10-17 (37% win rate). Interestingly, our usual win rate hovers around 67%, indicating that bad luck significantly impacted our results over the last few months.
This exercise isn’t about pinpoint accuracy; it’s about giving us an overall picture and general understanding of whether we are performing badly or whether bad luck and factors outside of our control are having an impact on our overall profitability. While my recent performance has slightly dipped with occasional bad bets on fighters such as Kelvin Gastelum, I do take pride in the stats showing that I’ve maintained a strong level of performance amidst the pressures and performance anxieties that come with a downswing. There is no doubt that I’ve made some avoidable mistakes in our ‘clean’ losses and these mistakes are a direct result of the pressure of the bad patch effecting my decision making.
Even though the pressure and performance anxiety that comes with a downswing has led me to make more mistakes than I usually would when times are good, I am really proud of my ability to still perform at a level which should have produced a true win rate of 64% since September. This shows that even during the toughest times and most extreme pressures, we are resilient enough to still perform well in the face of a difficult betting environment. This gives me a lot of confidence that 2024 is going to be another great year for us and I’m really looking forward to seeing what we can achieve when this bad luck burns itself out. Our bounce back, as always, is going to be spectacular!
I hope this analysis provides insight and sparks discussion. I aim to use this platform for sharing thoughts, documenting our journey, and regularly evaluating our performance. Please share your views on our recent months in the comments below.
