Despite the foundational assumption of mainstream economics that "people are rational," there is also the hypothesis of "bounded rationality" based on psychological research, which suggests that people do not always act rationally in economic activities and often make irrational decisions and hold irrational beliefs. Nobel laureates Simon (1978) and Kahemann (2002) have elucidated the limited rationality of humans and the series of irrational choices made in many uncertain situations.

This article explores bettors' irrational beliefs and thinking patterns in football matches. Preconceived ideas of bettors, such as firmly believing a team will win or lose, influenced them. Bettors often make attribution errors by attributing the success or failure of a team to a single factor while ignoring other important factors. Many bettors believe that the previous game's outcome will affect the result of the next game, but this idea is irrational. Bettors also believe in certain laws and curses, but these are just small laws based on limited data and unreliable..

Near Miss

Near Miss is a common irrational thinking among people who engage in gambling. Football is a complex team sport. Various factors, such as team composition, injuries, on-site command, substitutions, audience, weather, determine the final outcome. Often, underdogs are winning the game, but the average bettor has irrational thinking that they can judge the outcome of the game, thinking that the underdog's victory is due to unexpected and random factors.

Therefore, such underdogs do not change or weaken the betting motivation but rather increase the purchasing motivation. In fact, even with a large amount of data and time, people can only rely on their own brain's experience model to judge the results of football matches. However, the experience is unreliable, with few repetitive patterns to follow, making it difficult for people to make accurate judgments.

Armchair critics abound

After the results of a game are out, many people will engage in various rationalizations and analyses, attempting to identify factors such as strength, tactics, in-game leadership, weather, injuries, and so on that may have influenced the outcome. However, when these factors fail to explain the result, some people attribute it to mysterious or conspiratorial factors, such as gambling syndicates or geopolitics. These factors may inspire a gambler's intuition for their next bet, making them believe they have discovered some truth or pattern, but they often make mistakes.

In the book "Thinking, Fast, and Slow," Kahemann points out that people have two modes of decision-making. People with sufficient information, resources, intelligence, time, and space will use a rational, logical decision-making approach. However, players will adopt an intuitive heuristic thinking style when these conditions are lacking. Apart from the intuition of trained professionals, such as athletes or surgeons, many intuitions in everyday life are often prone to error. Therefore, the insights generated by the above armchair analysis are often incorrect.

Buy their team or the opposite team

Buy their team or the opposite team From a scientific perspective, this is an example of the availability heuristic. Psychological research shows that people either experience primary effect or recencey effect. Primary effect is when people remember the first impression or object they encounter. Recency effect is when they remember most recent impression or object

Bettors use available cues to make decisions. For example, if they like a certain big-name superstar or star player, they might think they will definitely win as long as he is on the team. On the other hand, some bettors may think the opposite. They believe gambling companies may manipulate that game results. As a result, they will buy the opposite team, so they can win money. This is a self-created rule, but it may not be applicable in some cases, such as when both teams have big-name superstars.

Increase your bet when you lose

Prospect theory refers to loss aversion, which means that bettors feel the loss of money more strongly than the joy of winning money. Therefore, when bettors lose money, they feel unbalanced and adopt more aggressive betting strategies to recover their losses. At the same time, when bettors anticipate losing money, they also tend to place riskier bets. Emotional factors of loss aversion rather than rational thinking influenced these behaviors. Such betting strategies are unsustainable in the long run because the probability of losing money is higher than winning.

Losing the game means winning the next half

The results of previous games do not influence the next game's outcome. It is an irrational probability belief. In reality, a rational model is that the probability tends toward 50% in a two-choice situation, known as the law of large numbers. It requires a sufficient number of experiments and data to achieve theoretical probability.

However, in reality, it is difficult to meet the conditions of the law of large numbers, making the bilateral probability equal to 50%. For example, although the probability of ten consecutive heads when flipping a coin is small, it is still possible. The probability belief in fans' minds is applied in a narrow and limited data environment, known as the law of small numbers. Therefore, predicting the outcome of the next game based on previous wins and losses is unreliable.

Gambler's Fallacy and Superstition

In sports, there are many so-called laws and superstitions, such as the rule that the host country will not lose in the opening game or the fate of the eliminated defending champion on the group stage. However, these laws and superstitions are only weakly connected within a limited range of data and are mistaken for certain rules. This kind of thinking and belief belongs to the fallacy of small numbers. As more data accumulates, these laws and superstitions may be proven wrong because they are only conclusions drawn from a very limited sample of data.

Overall, most bettors find it difficult to get rid of these irrational beliefs and thinking patterns, which are often seen in many football betting books or techniques.