Scientists from Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Beer Yaakov Mental Health Center have found that knowledge of a sport is not an added advantage in gambling.
Sports gambling or betting on games is rapidly growing in popularity. While this has become an easy way to make a quick buck, it can be extremely dangerous if it becomes a habit or an obsession. Psychologists have often referred to gambling as an "impulse control disorder."
There has been a huge misconception among people who have recently taken up sports gambling that having a sound knowledge of a sport can help predict a game and thus help win a bet. However, researchers from the Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Beer Yaakov Mental Health Center have found that knowledge of a sport is not an added advantage in sports gambling.
Professor Dannon and Dr. Ronen Huberfeld of the Beer Yaakov Mental Health Center have found, through their recently conducted study, that neither knowledge of the arcane details of the game nor prior betting experience is connected to successful betting outcomes.
In fact, the authors point out that the two most successful gamblers in the world have neither prior experience nor any knowledge of the sports they bet on. Dannon said sports gamblers play under the illusion of power, which is not related to real-life outcomes.
The authors based their study on soccer gambling, whose popularity is growing rapidly. The study was conducted on a group of people in three different categories. They included 53 professional sports gamblers, 34 soccer fans who were knowledgeable about soccer but had never gambled and finally, 78 non-gamblers with no prior knowledge of soccer at all.
Participants were asked to place bets on the final scores of the 16 second-round matches of the Champion's League, organized by the Union of European Football Associations. It was expected that the group that had sound knowledge of the game would do better. However, researchers found that their betting outcomes were the same as the other two groups.
"Casino gamblers are more appropriately characterized as obsessive because they have less belief in themselves, and know that they will lose sooner or later. But they gamble anyway because they feel they need to," Dannon said. "In contrast, sports gamblers believe that they can control the outcome. These different addiction profiles ultimately necessitate different treatment strategies."
