10:52 PM
John Ray
If you have ever purchased a sports betting ticket, you will understand why pro football has got to be the most fiendish invention ever created. It doesn’t matter if you are up-to-date with all the stats or if you receive the most valuable tips, because there is a very fine line between winning and losing, and you are never guaranteed a win even if it is a sure thing to happen.A good example is last season’s NFL wildcard weekend between the defending champions New Orleans Saints versus the horrid Seattle Seahawks (8-9). If you asked anybody that time, they all agreed it was a sure thing, and statistics show that the Seahawks are the first team to come into the playoffs with a record below .500.
So if the fabled “sure thing” in sports existed, this definitely had to be it.
However, Seattle scored a late fourth quarter touchdown, putting them up by 11 points. This effectively ruined the bet, and essentially destroyed the mythical “sure thing” in sports gambling.
This is the lure of sports betting. When you come close to winning, you get sucked into the black hole of betting the week after. Betting on football each week can’t be called an addiction, but it may be habit-forming. That’s why I decided to stop wasting my money away on gambling and start putting money into fantasy betting!
Fantasy betting on football involves some of the same principles as traditional sports gambling. Instead of placing your bets on which teams will win each week, you draft a team of players you expect will perform well. You get to select the players you want in your lineup and those in your bench. You then match your fictional team against someone else’s lineup on a weekly basis throughout the entire football season.
If your players do well, you should win games, amass a respectable win-loss record, make the playoffs and earn your payoff by taking the league championship. If you make a huge mistake in your lineup one week, it’s not going to cost you any money in the short term. I am not saying you won’t get screwed over in fantasy betting by the unpredictable nature of sports—because you will—but at least when it happens you’ve got some very specific targets to vent your frustrations on: the players who failed you and the opponent who beat you.
Fantasy football can be played for free because you’re not required to put any money down to join an online league. However, when your money does become involved, think of it as a long term investment—made over the course of an entire season—requiring you to make weekly “micro-gambles” on the stats players will put up every week.
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