How to Manage Your Emotions In Betting
I just finished a competitive match of CSGO where I played rather well and my teammates sucked big time. We were leading 10-6 on Overpass and things looked very well until everyone started running around like headless chickens. Needless to say, we lost that match and I was furious.
Even though I consider myself a decent player, I immediately entered another competitive match and played rather badly. Why? I’ve let my emotions get the best of me.
The reason I am telling you this is to get you to remember how you felt in a similar situation. Don’t get me wrong — I love to win and I’m sure you can identify with that. But there is one thing, that’s so advanced, yet so simple, that can propel you to new horizons, should you learn it.
Enter emotion management.
OK, by now you’re probably curious why is this a part of an advanced eSports betting course. I feel you, it does sound a bit weird, but bear with me for a little bit.
Your reactions to the external events define your winning mindset. The emotions that you feel, define your reactions. Therefore, if you can manage your emotions you can manage your reactions, which allows you to fully leverage your attitude and achieve that winning mentality. In short, this approach simply lets you get an edge.
In this guide I will help you achieve that mental edge by covering:
- The origin of emotions in eSports
- The role emotions play in betting
- How to become aware of what you feel
- How to become a cold blooded betting pro
Ready to learn some mind blowing gaming psychology? Ready, set, go…
The Origin of Emotions in eSports
You will agree with me when I say that gamers are nervous. Honestly, I once almost had a heart attack playing a game of Dota (damn Techies, I hate him). The reason behind that is that video games are so immersive and competitive that we naturally start to identify with what happens on our computer screens.
All that rage, when broken down to individual elements, only brings us to the point that emotions are just natural psychological and physiological reactions to the things we are doing (i.e. playing a game or betting on a game).
Every single one of our emotions has a personal fingerprint. Finishing a game with 15-3 K/D makes us confident. When we are confident, our facial muscles are relaxed, heart rate is normal and we are sitting straight. Losing a game after a strenuous battle leaves us disappointed. Finally, playing an even game makes us anxious. Everything we feel has a fingerprint or a specified set of reactions that we naturally tend to develop.
If you haven’t read our very important guide that explains how to achieve the winning mindset, pop over to it and give it a read. If you have, read on.
Understanding how emotions are created in gaming is an important step in achieving the winning mindset in betting. The way this happens can be seen below:
Events set off our trained mindset, which in turn sets off our emotions and provokes a response. So why does this matter?
The Role of Emotions in Betting
In my opinion, if you truly understand something, you can leverage it to your advantage. The next step in becoming a full fledged betting Robocop is understanding how the things you feel affect your betting strategies.
For this purpose, we are going to stick with two sides: positive and negative emotions.
Positive emotions:
- Help you stay in the zone
- Make you calm
- Get you well-rested
- Boost your betting confidence
- Stop you from overthinking
- Let you live with your decisions
- Help you recover from losses quickly
- HELP YOU WIN!
On the other hand, negative emotions:
- Make your revenge bet and chase losses
- Add to your impulsiveness
- Makes you take losses really bad
- Promote over betting
- Make your retreat easily
- Makes you constantly anxious
- Promote self-doubt
- MAKE YOU LOSE MONEY!
Before you go on, try to identify what sets off your emotional reactions the most. Is it a suspense game or a high stakes bet? Is it both, equally?
Give it a bit of thought, and move on to the next chapter.
Now that we know the main do’s and don’ts, let’s go ahead and see how you can identify the state you’re in and get one step closer to becoming a ninja.
How to Become Aware of What You Feel
Each emotion provokes a fingerprint reaction. It’s easy to get lost in the world of trouble and replay scenarios in your head. It is a never ending circle. You take a big loss, you start thinking about it, it makes you feel sad and by the time you snap out of it, a whole week has gone by. A week of poorly made decisions.
But, there is a way to amplify positive emotions and reverse the negative ones. It is exceptionally useful in eSports betting, as the landscape is extremely quick and packed with betting opportunities. It’s called being in the moment.
Pick an object that you often have close to you (for example, a smartphone). Make a promise to yourself that you will revert from whatever you are doing once every 3 hours and just take a look at your smartphone for 15 seconds. We will call that a mental break.
While you are on your mental break, you need to ask yourself 3 questions:
- How am I feeling right now?
- How do I want to feel?
- What stops me from feeling the way I want to?
Practice this often. The end goal is to always get objective answers to the three questions above. In about a month, you won’t need your object with you and this whole process will start and finish in your mind. It is a life changing thing to learn and it has really helped me take my betting to the next level. It really helps you clear up your mind.
However, if you want to be great at eSports betting, this alone is not enough. The next chapter will teach you how to apply everything that we learned so far and achieve the mindset of a multi million dollar betting shark.
Becoming a Cold Blooded Betting Pro
This chapter is about learning how to feel like a winner. You may ask yourself, why have we struggled with a tutorial so long only to learn how to feel like winners?
Look, so far, you learned how emotions are created, what positive and negative emotions do in betting and how to become aware of how you’re feeling in each moment. Next up is to learn how to apply all that newly founded knowledge and achieve this.
Confidence is the main performance boosting drug there is, simply because it lets you fully execute your betting strategy and easily bounce back from losses. Achieving complete confidence in yourself and your betting strategy will make you find the best opportunities, utilize in-play, explore advanced options and take smart risks.
In its core, confidence will give you a belief that you will ultimately win more money than you’ll lose.
The first thing that you must realize is that confidence is a choice. When I lose a bet, I have a choice:
- I can choose to feel depressed, anxious and disappointed.
- Or I can be confident that eventually it will come through and thankful that I now know why I failed.
As I’ve said in one of the previous guides, winning mentality is — never a failure, always a lesson.
The key ways to develop confidence in eSports betting are:
- Become an expert in your field (CSGO, Dota 2, LoL, Overwatch, etc.)
Follow the matches, participate in the community, start a blog, and become an authority. Choose now to dedicate a couple of hours a week in developing your expertise for the game you want to bet on. Closely follow the latest news and try to predict things beforehand.
- Honestly enjoy the journey and be thankful for your new hobby
Enjoy the journey and the world will be your playground. Betting on eSports is the most fun form of betting there is. Just think about it, turnovers in matches are always possible, which makes eSports the golden destination for thrill seekers like you. However, you are a pact leader.
- Believe in the fact that you will eventually find a winning strategy
If you are following advice from our eSports betting academy, you will learn that we are very keen on measuring every betting effort. This will allow you to make mistakes and learn from them. Eventually, everything will fall into place and you’ll find a strategy that brings you consistent results.
- Prepare, prepare, prepare!
Preparation is possibly the most important contributor to a person’s betting confidence. Preparation can sometimes be boring and time intensive, but it’s very important that you embrace this mindset very early on. Study your bets and your confidence will skyrocket.
As a bonus resource, check out the top 4 websites to prepare CSGO bets. You’ll get the main idea and you can further use the same approach to all other games.
The bottom line…
The bottom line is that you have a choice. You can choose right now to follow my advice and feel good or you can choose to continue with the negative stuff and feel bad. Either way, the world will keep turning, Wings Gaming will keep winning and we will all keep betting on them. Choose to be a winner now and be a real Trooper!
