Sports Betting Tips: Pumped Up Punt of the Week 14 July 2018

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• Author: James Beeson
  Jul 13, 2018 02:17 PM
• AAP

The Hot Hand Fallacy

This week we explore a common error every day punters often make due to their weight of investment in the market.

This is an error which influences bookies' pricing due to the expected investment on one particular side of the ledger.

Collingwood V West Coast 

Collingwood have come up much too short here in betting at $1.45. This is understandably so and can be directly attributed to the 'winning streak' bias applied by mug punters when a team strings together wins on end (also known as “hot hand bias”).

The same principle can be applied to the game of roulette where mug punters believe in such theories as the “trend is your friend” or conversely betting the other side of the hot run with a view that “it has to come up soon”.

Both theories are of course flawed and in the roulette example, the odds of red or black coming up on the next spin are in fact equal. 

The same fallacy is evident in sporting teams which have gone on a winning streak that can often cause them to be over-bet by the less informed mug punter.

The most meaningful data which should be driving price can become secondary to these types of punters, as cognitive bias of thought kicks in and factors which should carry less weight are applied incorrectly to betting selection decision making.

Collingwood represent an excellent example of “hot hand” bias at play this week.

The Pies take on West Coast following a picket fence of seven straight wins.

However more data driven punters will place hardly any weight on this winning streak, instead choosing to analyse more relevant points of adjustment for key player outs.

Collingwood are missing both Alex Fasolo and Adam Treloar, which is likely to be underrated by many, the longer the winning streak continues. 

Conversely, other key attacking metrics may be overrated as Collingwood's hot run artificially inflates player ratings and team supremacy over a short period. 

This is seen when new players perform well such as Josh Daicos (8 games) without having built a long sample of performance history. 

Don’t be a victim of the “Hot Hand” fallacy and bet against the public mug money in this one (you will be taking a much better value price the other side).