Now that sports betting is legal and more accessible than ever before, it seems like a great time to address the elephant in the room. In this case, the elephant is not an elephant at all and is instead Fear of Sports Betting. This is different than in-person betting for a variety of reasons. You can read about many of those reasons by clicking this text that is a different colour than the rest of the text in this sentence. Sports betting is also different than elephants because it blends a mixture of increased pressure on your favourite teams and also exposes you to sports you had otherwise never heard of. Like this whole soccer fad people are talking about.
Parlaying Your Way to Fear of Sports Betting
Let’s explore the expression “the house always wins”. The “house” refers to the platform you are betting on while “wins” refers to what you will almost never do while betting. Many casinos rely on the use of cards, dice, and flashing lights to seduce you into a world of bankruptcy. However, sports betting focuses on your ability to think you understand sports. Whether it is on the professional or amateur level, there are a variety of ways to lose your money very quickly. You can bet on live games, future games, game winners, league champions, or in-game events called props. Props include things like coin flips, total number of points, or whether you can blame your loss on an individual athlete rather than their whole team. With so many ways to lose, it’s no wonder sports betting has become a popular trend amongst degenerates around the world. Myself very much included.
Fun fact: Gambling in itself can be an addiction. Another fun fact: I clearly have no idea what constitutes as a fun fact. Similar to online shopping, sports betting is often done as a form of online gambling. Thus making it a very easy way to click three buttons and lose your money without ever actually seeing it disappear. If you want a way to spend your hard-earned money on something worthwhile, might I suggest a Things I Fear book on Amazon? While several things in life are certain, there are no guarantees in sports betting, unfortunately. So if uncertainty is your thing, then you’ll love this activity!
Taking Fear of Sports Betting to Extra Innings
One nice thing about sports betting is it does expose you to a whole new slate of sports, teams, players, and even regionalized differences in popular sports themselves. For example: you may learn about the differences between Australian Rules (or Aussie Rules) Football which is very different than American Darts. On their own, they are essentially the same sport. However, when combined with sports gambling, they take on a very different form. When you find yourself researching the Estonian Soccer League (Meistriliiga) at 1 in the morning so you can place 5-team draw parlays, you need to evaluate some things in your life. Like why you aren’t betting on Nippon Professional Baseball instead. At least it’s better than doing anything at 3:15am though, right?
It’s also nice there are no comment sections when it comes to sports betting. Social Media is bad enough with negative comments on puppy videos. Could you imagine if you were allowed to see and talk to people based on the bets they just placed? Pete Rose really got away with a close one there.
In all seriousness though, if you do have a propensity towards gambling whereby this type of thing may not be right for you, don’t do sports betting. Having a gambling addiction is serious. Each platform does a really good job of providing support and methods to help curb behaviours which may otherwise lead to bad results. It’s kind of nice they are so forthcoming in these efforts because it’s really easy to get sucked in otherwise.
