Have you ever wondered why is it that the opening odds for an upcoming new season in a popular sport like basketball or football, are always in favor of the winner of the previous season? And why is it that sportsbooks after the end of one season, tend to ‘establish’ the reigning champions as the absolute favorites all the way up to the end of the new season or even as the absolute outright winners?
There are two main issues that explain this.
First, by the time one season ends, bookmakers, including the best sportsbooks listed at https://bettingphilippines.online/, set the opening odds for the next season. In the absence of further information or things happening during the season break (such as transfers etc), the opening odds are largely influenced by the performance of the teams in the previous season.
So, bookmakers tend to give lower odds to those teams that have performed better, reached the playoffs and the one that has won the competition. The opening odds, therefore, are profoundly affected by what has happened in the previous season. And this is only natural, given that sportsbooks -all other things being equal- make a lot out of the previous season’s records.
The second reason is not so different from the previous one, only now the bookmakers try to leverage to their own benefit the tendency of bettors to overreact due to what is called recency bias.
In a few words, bettors are often subject to one very common bias, the recency bias, which implies that they tend to overweight what has recently happened, while ignoring more long-term outcomes. In sports betting this bias translates for example in a bettor who is prone to placing a wager on a team’s outright victory in the next season, just because this team has won the competition the previous season.
Or that a team which has a remarkable performance in the last games, will also have a good performance in the future, no matter if this team’s success has been largely due to their opponents’ -for example – incapability or this team has never shown any signs of good performance in the past. So, with the recency bias, one will judge this team’s potential by taking into consideration recent evidence only and recent success.
The recency bias makes it easier for us to understand why some bettors will not take into account a team’s long standing quality, but they will consider only their past few performances when placing a bet on backing them.
Now, let’s go back to bookmakers. They tend to set the winners of the ending season as the absolute favorites, with extremely low odds so as to leverage this bias from the other side. Confused? Let’s make things clear.
When bookmakers expect that bettors will -due to the recency bias – go all the way to back the reigning champion (or the team that has performed good lately), then they can use this knowledge in order to “direct” bets towards one way or another in some way. If they want to have a larger amount of bets on a given bet side, then they can easily rely on the recency bias to attract punters’ interest and eventually achieve their objective.
The recency bias is a bias which can get punters into trouble because it negatively impacts their objective evaluation, their betting abilities as well as their forecasting skills. So, you should really pay attention to this bias as it can get in the way of your betting strategy.
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