Skills you need to be a successful online gambler
What makes a successful online gambler? Is it someone who makes informed betting decisions? Someone who plays often and has considerable experience? Someone who wins more than they lose? Or is it simply someone who enjoys gambling, regardless of the outcome?
No matter how you define success when gambling online, there’s no doubt that to be successful in any area of gaming takes skill. What are those various skills, and how do you develop them? Let’s take a look.
1. Be committed. Yes gambling should always be first and foremost a fun pastime. But no matter what your various other hobbies and interests, it’s important that you commit to them and spend time on them in order for the experience to be as valuable as possible. It’s the same with gambling online. Commit time to it, commit to becoming good at a small selection of games in order to improve your decision-making abilities, and you’ll find that the more time you spend playing, the better player you’ll become.
2. Improve your memory. Being able to memorise cards and plays can be hugely helpful in games like Blackjack and Video Poker, however this is usually more beneficial in land-based play. When gambling online, being able to memorise and easily recall strategies can help you make different or more advanced types of plays and hopefully generate successful outcomes for yourself at the same time. Start helping your memory out by committing lists to memory, reciting poems, memorising dates or new people’s names – anything you can do to challenge yourself and improve your recall. It’s important to stay sharp mentally as you get older anyway – improving your gambling skills at the same time is an added bonus!
3. Work on your maths. You don’t have to be an award-winning mathematician to win at online gambling, but having a good grasp of mental arithmetic will always help you to become a better player. Knowing probabilities and statistics like the house edge, Return to Player (RTP) and game odds can help you calculate the risk involved with a particular game, work out whether it’s worth placing a bet, and make an estimate as to how much money you can expect to win back over time. Remember that since games are based on luck, you won’t be able to accurately predict an outcome, and figures like house edge and payback percentages are estimates, not guarantees, so you can’t use them to predict projected payouts with 100% accuracy. What you can do, however, is use your maths skills to help you avoid making costly mistakes, and losing more than you can afford. And that’s always a valuable skill to have!
4. Develop your focus. It’s easy to stay alert and focused when you start a gambling session, but when you’ve been sitting for hours playing Poker or slots for example, you could find yourself making poor decisions due to mental fatigue or other distractions. While it is important to step away from a session in order to clear your mind, in some circumstances, such as tournaments, this isn’t possible. In order to improve your ability to focus, try meditating every day and see if it helps you to ignore outside interferences and concentrate on the task at hand. Alternatively, if you come to the realisation that you’re the type of person who’s simply not able to maintain your focus for hours at a time, it might be best to avoid these types of situations in order to keep your bankroll as healthy as possible!
5. Be organized. It might sound dull and unnecessary, but in fact being an organised gambler can help you be a hugely successful one as well. Making a note of your wins and losses as well as your gambling history can help you to notice any patterns, such as games you do particularly well at, and can help you to make more profitable decisions. It’s also always advisable to keep a record of your gambling spend should you need this information going forward, so having a journal on hand can be a very helpful tool. Yes, you might find it annoying at first to have to keep such a detailed record of your game play without being able to just jump in and start placing your bets, but the more organised you are, the quicker the process will become. All it takes is a few minutes, and your gambling could improve drastically – so it’s more than worth it in the end.
6. Manage your finances. This goes hand in hand with being organised, and is one of the most important skills you’ll ever need to develop as a successful gambler – sound money management. In order to gamble, you need to spend money, so the more you’re able to keep track of that money and how much is in your account at all times, the longer you’ll be able to stay in the game. To start with, you’ll need to allocate a certain amount towards your gambling every month, just as you would any other expense in your household budget. You’ll then need to set limits for yourself bearing that amount in mind – how much you’re able to spend in a certain session, how much you’ll be able to bet on a certain game, and so on.
Once you’ve put these limits in place, you’ll need to exert your willpower and stick to them, no matter how badly you may want to use money allocated elsewhere. The more you’re able to manage your bankroll, the more you’ll be able to gamble in the long-term – so it’s in your own best interests to gamble as responsibly as possible.
As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into being a successful gambler, but there’s a lot to be gained from developing these and other skills in order to improve your game at the same time. Try some of these tips and tricks for yourself and see if you notice.
Happy Spinning 🙂