Gambling year in review: Basically, ignore my advice :)

I’ve had a bad one, that’s for sure. I rounded out the year with 3 consecutive bad picks including being very wrong about the Super Bowl. I thought that San Francisco was a much better team than Kansas City but well, that’s just the way Super Bowls go sometimes. I recall years ago when my team the Carolina Panthers, went undefeated the entire year and ended up just picking a horrible time of year to forget how to play the sport. They were dominated by the Denver Broncos in that Super Bowl and they were heavy favorites to win the game. The entire sports betting world was quite stunned when that happened and there was even talk about Cam Newton – Carolina’s QB at the time – intentionally throwing the game. I don’t think there is any truth to that, but this is just something that happens every single time that a heavy favorite ends up losing.

The Super Bowl is just one example of how I have been wrong, particularly in NFL bets this year though. I was incorrect about nearly 75% of my picks and that number would have been a lot worse had it not been for the fact that Carolina was a truly terrible team this season and they failed to cover the spread in every single game except one. You may recall when I was saying that to bet against Carolina in every game was a “lock” and I was correct about that in all but one of their games. They finished the season with a single victory in the entire season. They might be one of the worst NFL teams of all time.

As far as the playoffs were concerned, while I was correct about who would win most of the time, I was wrong about the spreads. The biggest failures on my part to correctly see the future was the Tampa Bay vs Philly game and the Kansas City vs Baltimore game. I believe that halfway through the season that most people though that the Super Bowl was going to be between the Baltimore Ravens and the Philadelphia Eagles but we didn’t even get close to that as Philly was eliminated in the very first round of the playoffs. I was just fine with this happening though because the two teams in the NFL that I dislike the most are Philly and Baltimore respectively.

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As far as UFC was concerned, I was wrong on more of my bets than not. My biggest prediction failure was the Colby Covington vs. Leon Edwards fight back in December. Nothing that I predicted in that bout came true and now I have kind of given up on pretending to be able to choose who will win in UFC fights. I am going to stop betting on that for the time being because basically, if you want to make money on UFC betting, just listen to what I think is going to happen and bet on the opposite of that.

For me personally, this has not resulted in a big loss of money because I am not a serious better nor am I a gambling addict. I usually will bet a maximum of $20 per game or fight and most of the time it is significantly less than that. I just bet a little bit of “walkin round” money to make the game or fight a bit more interesting for me as an audience member.

Now that NFL season is over, my enthusiasm for sports betting will be drastically diminished because I am not really a fan of baseball and that is just around the corner. I’ll probably temporarily retire my gambling boots until the fall of 2024.